CHAPTER XIX.

VIRGINIA CITY.

“Guess the governor‘s consid‘rable skeert.”

“You bet, he‘s mad.”

My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table seemed to end the talk; but I had not been out West for nothing, so explaining that I was only four hours in Virginia City, I inquired what had occurred to fill the governor of Nevada with vexation and alarm.

“D‘you tell now! only four hours in this great young city. Wall, guess it‘s a bully business. You see, some time back the governor pardoned a road agent after the citizens had voted him a rope. Yes, sir! But that ain‘t all: yesterday, cuss me if he didn‘t refuse ter pardon one of the boys who had jess shot another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself some pumpkins.” I duly expressed my horror, and my informant went on: “Wall, guess the citizens paid him off purty slick. They jess sent him a short thick bit of rope with a label ‘For his Excellency.’ You bet ef he ain‘t mad--you bet! Pass us those molasses, mister.”

I was not disappointed: I had not come to Nevada for nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since I first heard their fame in New York, had been with me a passion, but the deed thus told me in the dining-room of the “Empire” Hotel was worthy a place in the annals of “Washoe.” Under its former name, the chief town of Nevada was ranked not only the highest, but the “cussedest” town in the States, its citizens expecting a “dead man for breakfast” every day, and its streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above the sea. Its twofold fame is leaving it: the Coloradan villages of North Empire and Black Hawk are nine or ten thousand feet above sea level, and Austin, and Virginia City in Montana beat it in playful pistoling and vice. Nevertheless, in the point of “pure cussedness” old Washoe still stands well, as my first introduction to its ways will show. All the talk of Nevada reformation applies only to the surface signs: when a miner tells you that Washoe is turning pious, and that he intends shortly to “vamose,” he means that, unlike Austin, which is still in its first state of mule-stealing and monté, Virginia City has passed through the second period--that of “vigilance committees” and “historic trees”--and is entering the third, the stage of churches and “city officers,” or police.

The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of the municipality tells us that the “permanent population” consists of those who reside more than a month within the city. At this moment the miners are pouring into Washoe from north and south and east, from Montana, from Arizona, and from Utah, coming to the gayeties of the largest mining city to spend their money during the fierce short winter. When I saw Virginia City, it was worse than Austin.

Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking-shop, a gaming-hell, or worse. With no one to make beds, to mend clothes, to cook food--with no house, no home--men are almost certain to drink and gamble. The Washoe bar-rooms are the most brilliant in the States: as we drove in from Austin at 3 A.M., there was blaze enough for us to see from the frozen street the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Heenan, and the other Californian celebrities with which the bar-rooms were adorned.

Although “petticoats,” even Chinese, are scarce, dancing was going on in every house; but there is a rule in miners’ balls that prevents all difficulties arising from an over-supply of men: every one who has a patch on the rear portion of his breeches does duty for a lady in the dance, and as gentlemen are forced by the custom of the place to treat their partners at the bar, patches are popular.

Up to eleven in the morning hardly a man was to be seen: a community that sits up all night, begins its work in the afternoon. For hours I had the blazing hills called streets to myself for meditating ground; but it did not need hours to bring me to think that a Vermonter‘s description of the climate of the mountains was not a bad one when he said: “You rise at eight, and shiver in your cloak till nine, when you lay it aside, and walk freely in your woolens. At twelve you come in for your gauze coat and your Panama; at two you are in a hammock cursing the heat, but at four you venture out again, and by five are in your woolens. At six you begin to shake with cold, and shiver on till bedtime, which you make darned early.” Even at this great height, the thermometer in the afternoon touches 80° Fahr. in the shade, while from sunset to sunrise there is a bitter frost. So it is throughout the plateau. When morning after morning we reached a ranch, and rushed out of the freezing ambulance through the still colder outer air to the fragrant cedar fire, there to roll with pain at the thawing of our joints, it was hard to bear it in mind that by eight o‘clock we should be shutting out the sun, and by noon melting even in the deepest shade.

As I sat at dinner in a miner‘s restaurant, my opposite neighbor, finding that I was not long from England, informed me he was “the independent editor of the _Nevada Union Gazette_,” and went on to ask: “And how might you have left literatooral pursoots? How air Tennyson and Thomas T. Carlyle?” I assured him that to the best of my belief they were fairly well, to which his reply was: “Guess them ther men ken sling ink, they ken.” When we parted, he gave me a copy of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival editor “a walking whisky-bottle” and “a Fenian imp.” The latter phrase reminded me that, of the two or three dozen American editors that I had met, this New Englander was the first who was “native born.” Stenhouse, in Salt Lake City, is an Englishman, so is Stanton, of Denver, and the whole of the remainder of the band were Irishmen. As for the earlier assertion in the “editorial,” it was not a wild one, seeing that Virginia City has five hundred whisky-shops for a population of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Virginia City, in a farewell speech to the inhabitants that should have been published in his works: “I never, gentlemen, was in a city where I was treated so _well_, nor, I will add, so _often_.” Through every open door the diggers can be seen tossing the whisky down their throats with a scowl of resolve, as though they were committing suicide--which, indeed, except in the point of speed, is probably the case.

The _Union Gazette_ was not the only paper that I had given me to read that morning. Not a bridge over a “crick,” not even a blacked pair of boots, made me so thoroughly aware that I had in a measure returned to civilization as did the gift of an _Alta Californian_ containing a report of a debate in the English Parliament upon the Bank Charter Act. The speeches were appropriate to my feelings; I had just returned not only to civilization, but to the European inconveniences of gold and silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks circulate indifferently, with a double set of prices always marked and asked; in Nevada and California, greenbacks are as invisible as gold in New York or Kansas. Nothing can persuade the Californians that the adoption by the Eastern States of an inconvertible paper system is anything but the result of a conspiracy against the Pacific States--one in which they at least are determined to have no share. Strongly Unionist in feeling as were California, Oregon, and Nevada during the rebellion, to have forced greenbacks upon them would have been almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In the severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce; but paper money they believe to be downright robbery, and the invention of the devil.

To me the reaching gold once more was far from pleasant, for the advantages of paper money to the traveler are enormous; it is light, it wears no holes in your pockets, it reveals its presence by no untimely clinking; when you jump from a coach, every thief within a mile is not at once aware that you have ten dollars in your right-hand pocket. The Nevadans say that forgeries are so common that their neighbors in Colorado have been forced to agree that any decent imitation shall be taken as good, it being too difficult to examine into each case. For my part, though in rapid travel a good deal of paper passed through my hands in change, my only loss by forgery was one half-dollar note; my loss by wear and tear the same.

In spite of the gold currency, prices are higher in Nevada than in Denver. A shave is half a dollar--gold; in Washoe and in Atchison, but a paper quarter. A boot-blacking is fifty cents in gold, instead of ten cents paper, as in Chicago or St. Louis.

During the war, when fluctuations in the value of the paper were great and sudden, prices changed from day to day. Hotel proprietors in the West received their guests at breakfast, it is said, with “Glorious news; we‘ve whipped at ----. Gold‘s 180; board‘s down half a dollar.” While I was in the country, gold fluctuated between 140 and 163, but prices remained unaltered.

Paper money is of some use to a young country in making the rate of wages appear enormous, and so attracting immigration. If a Cork bog-trotter is told that he can get two dollars a day for his work in America, but only one in Canada, no economic considerations interfere to prevent him rushing to the nominally higher rate. Whether the workingmen of America have been gainers by the inflation of the currency, or the reverse, it is hard to say. It has been stated in the Senate that wages have risen sixty per cent., and prices ninety per cent.; but “prices” is a term of great width. The men themselves believe that they have not been losers, and no argument can be so strong as that.

My first afternoon upon Mount Davidson I spent underground in the Gould and Curry Mine, the wealthiest and largest of those that have tapped the famous Comstock Lode. In this single vein of silver lies the prosperity not only of the city, but of Nevada State; its discovery will have hastened the completion of the overland railway itself by several years. It is owing to the enormous yield of this one lode that the United States now stands second only to Mexico as a silver-producing land. In one year Nevada has given the world as much silver as there came from the mines of all Peru.

The rise of Nevada has been sudden. I was shown in Virginia City a building block of land that _rents_ for ten times what it _cost_ four years ago. Nothing short of solid silver by the yard would have brought twenty thousand men to live upon the summit of Mount Davidson. It is easy here to understand the mad rush and madder speculation that took place at the time of the discovery. Every valley in the Washoe Range was “prospected,” and pronounced paved with silver; every mountain was a solid mass. “Cities” were laid out, and town lots sold, wherever room was afforded by a flat piece of ground. The publication of the Californian newspapers was suspended, as writers, editors, proprietors, and devils, all had gone with the rush. San Francisco went clean mad, and London and Paris were not far behind. Of the hundred “cities” founded, but one was built; of the thousand claims registered, but a hundred were taken up and worked; of the companies formed, but half a dozen ever paid a dividend, except that obtained from the sale of their plant. The silver of which the whole base of Mount Davidson is composed has not been traced in the surrounding hills, though they are covered with a forest of posts, marking the limits of forgotten “claims:”

“James Thompson, 130 feet N.E. by N.”

“Ezra Williams, 130 feet due E.;”

and so for miles. The Gould and Curry Company, on the other hand, is said to have once paid a larger half-yearly dividend than the sum of the original capital, and its shares have been quoted at 1000 per cent. Such are the differences of a hundred yards.

One of the oddities of mining life is, that the gold-diggers profess a sublime contempt for silver-miners and their trade. A Coloradan going West was asked in Nevada if in his country they could beat the Comstock lode. “Dear, no!” he said. “The boys with us are plaguy discouraged jess at present.” The Nevadans were down upon the word. “Discouraged, air they!” “Why, yes! They‘ve jess found they‘ve got ter dig through three feet of solid silver ’fore ever they come ter gold.”

Some of the Nevada companies have curious titles. “The Union Lumber Association” is not bad; but “The Segregated Belcher Mining Enterprise of Gold Hill District, Storey County, Nevada State,” is far before it as an advertising name.

In a real “coach” at last--a coach with windows and a roof--drawn by six “mustangs,” we dashed down Mount Davidson upon a real road, engineered with grades and bridges--my first since Junction City. Through the Devil‘s Gate we burst out upon a chaotic country. For a hundred miles the eye ranged over humps and bumps of every size, from stones to mountains, but no level ground, no field, no house, no tree, no green. Not even the Sahara so thoroughly deserves the name of “desert.” In Egypt there is the oasis, in Arabia here and there a date and a sweet-water well; here there is nothing, not even earth. The ground is soda, and the water and air are full of salt.

This road is notorious for the depredations of the “road agents,” as white highwaymen are politely called, red or yellow robbers being still “darned thieves.” At Desert Wells, the coach had been robbed, a week before I passed, by men who had first tied up the ranchmen, and taken their places to receive the driver and passengers when they arrived. The prime object with the robbers is the treasury box of “dust,” but they generally “go through” the passengers, by way of pastime, after their more regular work is done. As to firing, they have a rule--a simple one. If a passenger shoots, every man is killed. It need not be said that the armed driver and armed guard never shoot; they know their business far too well.

Close here we came on hot and cold springs in close conjunction, flowing almost from the same “sink-hole”--the original twofold springs, I hinted to our driver, that Poseidon planted in the Atlantic isle. He said that “some one of that name” had a ranch near Carson, so I “concluded” to drop Poseidon, lest I should say something that might offend.

From Desert Wells the alkali grew worse and worse, but began to be alleviated at the ranches by irrigation of the throat with delicious Californian wine. The plain was strewn with erratic boulders, and here and there I noticed sharp sand-cones, like those of the Elk Mountain country in Utah.

At last we dashed into the “city” named after the notorious Kit Carson, of which an old inhabitant has lately said: “This here city is growing plaguy mean--there was only one man shot all yesterday.” There was what is here styled an “altercation” a day or two ago. The sheriff tried to arrest a man in broad daylight in the single street which Carson boasts. The result was that each fired several shots at the other, and that both were badly hurt.

The half-deserted mining village and wholly ruined Mormon settlement stand grimly on the bare rock, surrounded by weird-looking depressions of the earth, the far-famed “sinks,” the very bottom of the plateau, and goal of all the plateau streams--in summer dry, and spread with sheets of salt; in winter filled with brine. The Sierra Nevada rises like a wall from the salt pools, with a fringe of giant, leafless trees hanging stiffly from its heights--my first forest since I left the Missouri bottoms. The trees made me feel that I was really across the continent, within reach at least of the fogs of the Pacific--on “the other side;” that there was still rough, cold work to be done was clear from the great snow-fields that showed through the pines with that threatening blackness that the purest of snows wear in the evening when they face the east.

As I gazed upon the tremendous battlements of the Sierra, I not only ceased to marvel that for three hundred years traffic had gone round by Panama rather than through these frightful obstacles, but even wondered that they should be surmounted now. In this hideous valley it was that the California immigrants wintered in 1848, and killed their Indian guides for food. For three months more the strongest of them lived upon the bodies of those who died, incapable in their weakness of making good their foothold upon the slippery snows of the Sierra. After awhile, some were cannibals by choice; but the story is not one that can be told.

Galloping up the gentle grades of Johnson‘s Pass, we began the ascent of the last of fifteen great mountain ranges crossed or flanked since I had left Great Salt Lake City. The thought recalled a passage of arms that had occurred at Denver between Dixon and Governor Gilpin. In his grand enthusiastic way, the governor, pointing to the Cordillera, said: “Five hundred snowy ranges lie between this and San Francisco.” “Peaks,” said Dixon. “Ranges!” thundered Gilpin; “I‘ve seen them.”

Of the fifteen greater ranges to the westward of Salt Lake, eight at least are named from the rivers they contain, or are wholly nameless. Trade has preceded survey; the country is not yet thoroughly explored. The six paper maps by which I traveled--the best and latest--differed in essential points. The position and length of the Great Salt Lake itself are not yet accurately known; the height of Mount Hood has been made anything between nine thousand and twenty thousand feet; the southern boundary line of Nevada State passes through untrodden wilds. A rectification of the limits of California and Nevada was attempted no great time ago, and the head-waters of some stream which formed a starting-point had been found to be erroneously laid down. At the flourishing young city of Aurora, in Esmeralda County, a court of California was sitting. A mounted messenger rode up at great pace, and, throwing his bridle round the stump, dashed in breathlessly, shouting, “What‘s this here court?” Being told that it was a Californian court, he said, “Wall, thet‘s all wrong: this here‘s Nevada. We‘ve been and rectified this boundary, an’ California‘s a good ten mile off here.” “Wall, Mr. Judge, I move this court adjourn,” said the plaintiff‘s counsel. “How can a court adjourn thet‘s not a court?” replied the judge. “Guess I‘ll go.” And off he went. So, if the court of Aurora _was_ a court, it must be sitting now.

The coaching on this line is beyond comparison the best the world can show. Drawn by six half-bred mustangs, driven by whips of the fame of the Hank Monk “who drove Greeley,” the mails and passengers have been conveyed from Virginia City to the rail at Placerville, 154 miles, in 15 hours and 20 minutes, including a stoppage of half an hour for supper, and sixteen shorter stays to change horses. In this distance, the Sierra Nevada has to be traversed in a rapid rise of three thousand feet, a fall of a thousand feet, another rise of the same, and then a descent of five thousand feet on the Californian side.

Before the road was made, the passage was one of extraordinary difficulty. A wagon once started, they say, from Folsom, bearing “Carson or bust” in large letters upon the tilt. After ten days, it returned lamely enough, with four of the twelve oxen gone, and bearing the label “Busted.”

When we were nearing Hank Monk‘s “piece,” I became impatient to see the hero of the famous ride. What was my disgust when the driver of the earlier portion of the road appeared again upon the box in charge of six magnificent iron-grays. The peremptory cry of “All aboard” brought me without remonstrance to the coach, but I took care to get upon the box, although, as we were starting before the break of day, the frost was terrible. To my relief, when I inquired after Hank, the driver said that he was at a ball at a timber ranch in the forest “six mile on.” At early light we reached the spot--the summit of the more eastern of the twin ranges of the Sierra. Out came Hank, amid the cheers of the half dozen men and women of the timber ranch who formed the “ball,” wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and took the reins without a word. For miles he drove steadily and moodily along. I knew these drivers top well to venture upon speaking first when they were in the sulks; at last, however, I lost all patience, and silently offered him a cigar. He took it without thanking me, but after a few minutes said: “Thet last driver, how did he drive?” I made some shuffling answer, when he cut in: “Drove as ef he were skeert; and so he was. Look at them mustangs. Yoo--ou!” As he yelled, the horses started at what out here they style “the run;” and when, after ten minutes, he pulled up, we must have done three miles, round most violent and narrow turns, with only the bare precipice at the side, and a fall of often a hundred feet to the stream at the bottom of the ravine--the Simplon without its wall. Dropping into the talking mood, he asked me the usual questions as to my business, and whither I was bound. When I told him I thought of visiting Australia, he said, “D‘you tell now! Jess give my love--at Bendigo--to Gumption Dick.” Not another word about Australia or Gumption Dick could I draw from him. I asked at Bendigo for Dick; but not even the officer in command of the police had ever heard of Hank Monk‘s friend.

The sun rose as we dashed through the grand landscapes of Lake Tahoe. On we went, through gloomy snow-drifts and still sadder forests of gigantic pines nearly three hundred feet in height, and down the canyon of the American River from the second range. Suddenly we left the snows, and burst through the pine woods into an open scene. From gloom there was a change to light; from somber green to glowing red and gold. The trees, no longer hung with icicles, were draped with Spanish moss. In ten yards we had come from winter into summer. Alkali was left behind forever; we were in El Dorado, on the Pacific shores--in sunny, dreamy California.