But they had not figured out the logistics or calculated the expense of hauling logs over the mountains to Virginia City. Even more seriously, Sam accidentally set fire to his three-hundred-acre claim, “a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and from one to five feet through at the butt.” He was cooking dinner on the shore of the lake over a campfire that ignited “a dense growth of dry manzanita chaparral six or eight feet high,” he wrote in Roughing It, and the “ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire touched them off as if they were gunpowder.” Within moments “the roaring and popping and cracking was something terrific,” and within “half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame!” Or as he wrote his mother after he returned to Carson City, “The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard-bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. . . . The mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us,) rendered the scene very impressive.” The next morning he and Kinney “looked like lava men, covered as we were with ashes, and begrimed with smoke.” Significantly, they had chosen acreage wooded in yellow pine, the same species of tree that timbered the cursed Clemens property in Tennessee, and then he burned down the forest as if in unconscious retaliation for all the trouble the family land had caused. A month after the conflagration, Sam was undaunted, however. He wrote his family that Nevada was “just the country for Cousin Jim,” his mother’s dreamy relative. “I don’t believe it would take him six months to make $100,000 here, if he had $3,000 dollars to commence with.”28
By and by he was “smitten with the silver fever” and “fought the mines with a spade & shovel for a year or more.” Prospectors “were leaving for the mountains every day,” he wrote in Roughing It, and “I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest.” He was captivated, as Frank Norris remarks in his novel McTeague (1899), by the “miner’s idea of wealth easily gained and quickly spent.” In mid-December 1861, a week or two after the first territorial legislature adjourned, he and three friends left Carson for Unionville, seat of Humboldt County, Nevada, to prospect in the Buena Vista mining district about two hundred miles to the northeast. Some newspapers had reported “indications” in the ore of seven thousand dollars of precious metal to the ton, and Humboldt was rumored to be the richest silver strike since the discovery of the Comstock. Sam was accompanied by Billy Clagett, a lawyer whom he had known in Keokuk, Iowa, in the mid-1850s; Gus Oliver, a newly appointed Humboldt County probate judge, deputy clerk of a county district court, and model for the character of Oliphant in Roughing It; and Cornbury Tillou, a Carson City blacksmith. According to one of a trio of letters Sam wrote at the time for the Keokuk Gate City, they escaped the worst of the deprivations the local population suffered that winter by hauling to the diggings eighteen hundred pounds of supplies, including “bacon, flour, beans, blasting powder, picks and shovels,” as well as a few “luxuries,” such as fourteen decks of cards and a cribbage board; copies of Isaac Watts’s hymns, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, and Lowell Mason’s Carmina Sacra; or, Boston Collection of Church Music; and a keg of lager beer. They also carried ten pounds of killikinick, a smoking compound “composed of equal parts of tobacco stems, chopped straw, ‘old soldiers,’ fine shavings, oak leaves, dog-fennel, corn-shucks, sun-flower petals, outside leaves of the cabbage plant, and any refuse of any description whatever that costs nothing and will burn.” The journey to Unionville across desert and plain in the dead of winter took eleven days, plus two days of rest along the way. Interviewed by Albert Bigelow Paine years later, Oliver remembered an incident en route otherwise unrecorded. After crossing Forty Mile Desert during the night, the men were awakened the next morning “by a band of Paiute warriors.” Relieved they had not been attacked as they slept, they shared their flour and sugar with the Indians “for we were grateful.”29
They finally arrived in Unionville around December 20. While Sam claimed in Roughing It that the town “consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole,” in fact it mostly contained canvas tents, a few dozen adobe and stone buildings, and a population of about three hundred. With thirteen tunnels and sixty-five shafts, the region seemed on the cusp of a boom. Sam also exaggerated the length of time he spent there. He may have been in Unionville so briefly, as little as a week or two, that he quit before he turned a shovel of dirt, though he apparently begged or bought as many shares in the local mines as possible, perhaps in as many as fifteen of them. He had realized, or so he claimed later, that the easiest way to wealth was not to dig in the dirt but to speculate in mining stock: the “real secret of success in silver mining” was “not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining!” He also helped Clagett, Oliver, and Tillou build a rude cabin during his residence in the region. Eight years later, he bragged in a letter to the Society of California Pioneers that he “went to the Humboldt District when it was new. I became largely interested in the ‘Alba Nueva,’ & other claims with gorgeous names, & was rich again—in prospect. I owned a vast mining property. I would not have sold out for less than $400,000, at that time—but I will now.”30
Back in Keokuk, Mollie was unimpressed by Orion’s and Sam’s reports of their paper wealth. “I am not in the least elated with the many gold mines you are all in possession of—but I will wait patiently til I get there then I will see what it all will amount to,” she wrote Orion. She remembered “too well our Tennisee [sic] visions” to get her hopes too high. Her reservations were echoed on a different frequency by the Humboldt correspondent of the Marysville Appeal, who joked that if “every foot of mineral ground” in the district could “be sold for a dollar, this community would be the richest in the world, as every man owns from three to forty thousand feet” of mining stock. Ironically, Sam reiterated the point in Roughing It. He and his partners owned “not less than thirty thousand ‘feet’ apiece in the ‘richest mines on earth’” but “were in debt to the butcher” and “our credit was not good at the grocer’s.”31
Moreover, the climate was foul. The weather must have reminded Sam of his two weeks in the Marion Rangers, except that this time the winter downpours were freezing. His visit to the Humboldt district, his initial trip to the mines, coincided almost exactly with the Great Flood of 1862 throughout the West, when the Sacramento River froze and two feet of snow fell in the Carson Valley in a single day. (The coldest winter he ever spent was a winter in Nevada?) The early January rains were so harsh that five or six adobe houses in Humboldt City melted into mud and collapsed. The natives reported that it was the severest cold snap in tribal memory. It was impossible to work the shafts, and to add insult to injury food became scarce. By early spring 1862 flour cost twenty-four cents a pound, barley twenty-five, and bacon forty-five, “with very little to be had” in the local stores, which had already sold out of butter, syrup, sugar, coffee, candles, blasting powder, and fuses.32 Sam and his companions escaped the worst of the deprivations only because they had hauled supplies to camp, but it is little wonder that he soon soured on his prospects in Humboldt.
In early January Sam fled Unionville for Carson City on horseback, accompanied on his journey back to the capital by the miners Hugo Pfersdorff and John Onstine. Unfortunately, the miserable weather complicated their trip. The men were marooned by high water for over a week at Honey Lake Smith’s, a trading post and stagecoach station on the Carson River, “a season of island captivity” Sam chronicled in chapters 30–31 of Roughing It. After eight days, “life in the inn had become next to insupportable by reason of the dirt, drunkenness, fighting, etc.,” so Sam and his companions finally escaped across the swollen river in a canoe. On January 29, after most of a month on the road, they finally reached Carson City. In later years Sam insisted that “his nervous sy
stem had been shattered by lying in a crowded room for a week with the small of his back against a red-hot stovepipe” during the flood.33
At this juncture in the narrative of Roughing It, significantly, Sam inserted two fictionalized episodes—the Great Landslide Case and the “Lost in the Snow” tall tale—that are weather related. In the former, a ranch is washed down a mountain and covers another ranch. The landslide in Washoe Valley, Nevada, in January 1862 was real enough. As Sam wrote the San Francisco Morning Call in August 1863, “Two years ago, during the season of avalanches, Tom Rust’s ranch slid down from the mountain side and pretty nearly covered up a ranch belonging to Dick Sides.” Sam invented a trial that settled the legal dispute between the contending landowners with a verdict in favor of the defendant Sides. In the latter episode, three men modeled after Sam, Pfersdorff (Ollendorff), and the blacksmith Tillou (Ballou) wander all night in a blizzard, pledging to reform their sinful ways before they die, only to discover they are only feet from shelter when the weather clears.34
The next two months are mostly a blank in the record. In early April 1862 Sam left Carson for the Esmeralda diggings, about a hundred miles to the southeast, accompanied by his friend Tom Nye. In Aurora he joined Raish Phillips and Robert Howland, who was, as Sam remembered him, “a slender, good-natured, amiable, gentle, kindly little skeleton of a man, with a sweet blue eye that would win your heart when it smiled upon you.” Howland had also traveled to Nevada in the entourage of Governor Nye, who would soon appoint him Esmeralda County sheriff. In February 1862, two months before Sam arrived at the camp, shares in the Antelope Mine on Silver Hill were selling for $225 per foot, and in April the ore from the mine was yielding $242 of metal per ton. “I mean to make or break here within the next 2 or 3 months,” Sam declared to Orion the same month. “I shall never look upon Ma’s face again, or Pamela’s, or get married,” he insisted, “until I am a rich man.” In July, twenty-nine tons of ore from the Pride of Utah Mine yielded 1,368 ounces of gold, and forty-four tons of rock from the Wide West Mine returned about $250 per ton. The population of Aurora swelled to nearly two thousand, and the town boasted twelve or fourteen quartz mills, eleven billiard saloons, three banks, four livery stables, a bathhouse, a barbershop, a bowling alley, and a brewery scattered along a main street about three quarters of a mile long.
While Sam lived there, as in Humboldt, the residents of the town suffered from near famine because of its inaccessibility even by pack train: it was perched on the side of mountain at an elevation of about 7,500 feet. When he arrived, barley sold for sixteen cents a pound and flour for twenty-six cents a pound—not the hundred dollars a barrel Sam later claimed that it cost, but expensive enough. A month later, according to the Esmeralda correspondent of the San Francisco Alta California, the store shelves contained “no butter, sugar, rice, coffee, syrup, pork or bacon.” By May 23, three pounds of beans cost a dollar, and there was no flour available for sale nor “enough supplies there to last the people ten days.” By early June the town was “bare of everything but whisky, cigars, tobacco, and some clothing.” Any flour that was available sold for thirty-two dollars per hundred pounds. Sam reported in May the residents of Aurora “lived on barley, beans and beef”—and “none but the aristocracy had beans, for dessert.” The situation was dire: the Esmeralda correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin warned that “we need grub and grub we must have or starve.” Bob Howland and Sam lived on short rations, but to mislead their neighbors into believing they dined sumptuously Sam dumped a gunny sack full of empty tin cans and liquor bottles outside their cabin door35—proving that he well understood the concepts of conspicuous consumption and honorific waste almost forty years before Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class.
Within a month of his arrival in Aurora Sam was convinced that he would soon make his fortune there. In his naïveté, as he later explained in his “Roughing It” lecture, he had thought “that silver mining was nice, easy business, and that of course silver lay around loose on the hillsides, and that all you had to do was to pick it up, and you could tell it from any other substance on account of its brightness and its white metallic look.” With the remainder of his nest egg and money Orion mailed him, Sam bought on margin hundreds of feet in at least sixteen and as many as thirty different mines worth some five thousand dollars on paper, though it is impossible now to know exactly how much he invested or how much his investments were actually worth. He was most optimistic about two claims, the Monitor and the Flyaway. On May 9 he organized the Clemens Gold and Silver Mining Company with three partners—Howland, Phillips, and Calvin Higbie, a civil engineer by training and an experienced miner whom Sam had met through Orion’s agency. Two days later Sam began a letter to his brother in Carson City that betrays all the symptoms of the bonanza virus. “I have struck my tent in Esmeralda,” he announced. In fact, he and Higbie literally lived “in a cotton-domestic lean-to at the base of a mountain. It was very cramped quarters, with barely room for us and the stove—wretched quarters indeed.” Still, Sam was convinced he would soon strike it rich. “I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral certainty”—the type of brash overconfidence that he would exhibit his entire life. He and his partners owned one-eighth, or eight hundred feet, of the Monitor Ledge and “money can’t buy a foot of it; because I know it to contain our fortune. The ledge is 6 feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold & silver in it.” He and Higbie “had a silver-mining claim under the edge of a hill half a mile away . . . and we used to go there every morning carrying with us our luncheon, and remain all day picking and blasting in our shaft, hoping, despairing, hoping again, and gradually but surely running out of funds.” He also owned “one-half of a segregated claim” in the Flyaway with Phillips. “If all spare change [could] be devoted to working” these two mines, he predicted, “12 months, or 24 at furthest will find all our earthly wishes satisfied, so far as money is concerned.” He pleaded with Orion to “send me whatever you can spare conveniently—I want it to work the Flyaway with. My fourth of that claim only cost me $50, (which isn’t paid yet, though,) and I suppose I could sell it here in town for ten times that amount today, but I shall probably hold onto it till the cows come home.” He was willing to work the Monitor with his own hands, he asserted, though Higbie remembered that “he never did any manual labor.” Phillips had reduced a pound of its ore with a blowpipe “and got about ten or twelve cents in gold and silver,” a small sample he extrapolated in his excitement to immeasurable riches. “Don’t ask” if more of the ore “has been assayed,” Sam admonished Orion, “for it hasn’t. It don’t need it. It is amply able to speak for itself.” The ledge was “six feet wide on top, and traversed through and through with veins whose color proclaims their worth. What the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in the Flyaway and the invincible bomb-proof Monitor?” He had staked his whole pile on these two mines, and “If they win, we are all right—if they lose, I am busted.”36
His delirium lasted less than a week. Early in the morning of May 16 his claim in the Monitor was jumped by some unemployed miners armed with revolvers. According to the “d——d laws of this forever d——d country,” he griped to his brother, “nothing but the District Court (and there ain’t any) can touch the matter, unless it assumes the shape of an infernal humbug which they call ‘forcible entry and detainer,’ and in order to bring that about, you must compel the jumpers to use personal violence toward you!” Sam climbed down into the hole and demanded possession, but the jumpers replied that “I might stay in it as long as I pleased, and work but they would do the same. I asked one of our company to take my place in the hole, while I went to consult a lawyer,” who “said it was no go. They must offer some ‘force’” before they could be evicted.37
Despite the trouble at the Monitor, Sam asserted in Roughing It that as a miner in Aurora in late June 1862 he was a millionaire for ten days. He fudged the facts, as usual. As James M. Cox concludes “from all availab
le evidence,” the “episode has no foundation in fact.” Higbie ostensibly discovered a blind lead, a crossvein of ore not visible from the surface, a spur of the Wide West Mine on Last Chance Hill. He filed a claim on June 20 and included Sam’s name on the location notice. Anticipating millions from the strike, the partners spent the next night fantasizing about the future, much as Tom and Huck dream of wealth during their treasure hunt in Tom Sawyer. Whereas Tom planned to “buy a new drum, and a sure’nough sword, and a red necktie and a bull pup, and get married,” however, Sam dreamed of “a marble mansion several stories high with ample grounds, fine horses and carriage,” a “pack of hounds,” and “a steam yacht he could steer himself.” But as Sam told the story in Roughing It, because neither he nor Higbie worked the claim for the next ten days as required by law—Sam was summoned a few miles from the camp to the Walker River home of his bedridden friend John Nye and Higbie left Aurora on a wild goose chase to search for the fabled Whiteman cement mine—their claim was “relocated” or voided on June 30. “Higbie had depended on me, as I had on him, and both of us had on the foreman,” Sam explained, but he could always boast “that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days.”38
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