Roughing It

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Roughing It


We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen
ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our foolish, long-legged
hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Oliphant got to admitting him
to the bed, between himself and Mr. Ballou, hugging the dog's warm back
to his breast and finding great comfort in it. But in the night the pup
would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man's back and
shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and
snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in
excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the chase and
in his sleep tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his ear. The old
gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when
he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not
a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so
meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions." We turned
the dog out.

It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for
after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper
of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking,
song-singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still
solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that
seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury.

It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or
country-bred. We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless
ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us
the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the
thought of "camping out."

Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles
(through the Great American Desert), and ten miles beyond--fifty in all
--in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or rest. To stretch
out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after pushing a
wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the
moment it almost seems cheap at the price.

We camped two days in the neighborhood of the "Sink of the Humboldt."
We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not
answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either. It left a
taste in the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the
stomach that was very uncomfortable. We put molasses in it, but that
helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the
prominent taste and so it was unfit for drinking.

The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet
invented. It was really viler to the taste than the unameliorated water
itself. Mr. Ballou, being the architect and builder of the beverage felt
constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little
sips, making shift to praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out
the remainder, and said frankly it was "too technical for him."

But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient, and then,
with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to interrupt it, we
entered into our rest.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt river a little
way. People accustomed to the monster mile-wide Mississippi, grow
accustomed to associating the term "river" with a high degree of watery
grandeur. Consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they
stand on the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that a "river"
in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the Erie
canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times
as deep. One of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can
contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is
overheated, and then drink it dry.

On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and
entered Unionville, Humboldt county, in the midst of a driving
snow-storm. Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole.
Six of the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the
other five faced them. The rest of the landscape was made up of bleak
mountain walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the
canyon that the village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a
crevice. It was always daylight on the mountain tops a long time before
the darkness lifted and revealed Unionville.

We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it
with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which
the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture
and interrupt our sleep. It was very cold weather and fuel was scarce.
Indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs; and when
we could catch a laden Indian it was well--and when we could not (which
was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it.

I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying
all about the ground. I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the
mountain summits. I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me
that I might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I
betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon myself. Yet I was as
perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything, that I was
going to gather up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two, silver
enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy--and so my fancy was already
busy with plans for spending this money. The first opportunity that
offered, I sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on
the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they seemed
to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, I fled
away as guiltily as a thief might have done and never halted till I was
far beyond sight and call. Then I began my search with a feverish
excitement that was brimful of expectation--almost of certainty.
I crawled about the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone, blowing
the dust from them or rubbing them on my clothes, and then peering at
them with anxious hope. Presently I found a bright fragment and my heart
bounded! I hid behind a boulder and polished it and scrutinized it with
a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more pronounced than absolute
certainty itself could have afforded. The more I examined the fragment
the more I was convinced that I had found the door to fortune. I marked
the spot and carried away my specimen. Up and down the rugged mountain
side I searched, with always increasing interest and always augmenting
gratitude that I had come to Humboldt and come in time. Of all the
experiences of my life, this secret search among the hidden treasures of
silver-land was the nearest to unmarred ecstasy. It was a delirious
revel.

By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining
yellow scales, and my breath almost forsook me! A gold mine, and in my
simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver! I was so excited that
I half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me. Then a fear
came upon me that people might be observing me and would guess my secret.
Moved by this thought, I made a circuit of the place, and ascended a
knoll to reconnoiter. Solitude. No creature was near. Then I returned
to my mine, fortifying myself against possible disappointment, but my
fears were groundless--the shining scales were still there. I set about
scooping them out, and for an hour I toiled down the windings of the
stream and robbed its bed. But at last the descending sun warned me to
give up the quest, and I turned homeward laden with wealth. As I walked
along I could not help smiling at the thought of my being so excited over
my fragment of silver when a nobler metal was almost under my nose. In
this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation that once or
twice I was on the point of throwing it away.

The boys were as hungry as usual, but I could eat nothing. Neither could
I talk. I was full of dreams and far away. Their conversation
interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat, and annoyed me a little, too.
I despised the sordid and commonplace things they talked about. But as
they proceeded, it began to amuse me. It grew to be rare fun to hear
them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible
privations and distresses when a gold mine, all our own, lay within sight
of the cabin and I could point it out at any moment. Smothered hilarity
began to oppress me, presently. It was hard to resist the impulse to
burst out with exultation and reveal everything; but I did resist. I
said within myself that I would filter the great news through my lips
calmly and be serene as a summer morning while I watched its effect in
their faces. I said:

"Where have you all been?"

"Prospecting."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? What do you think of the country?"

"Can't tell, yet," said Mr. Ballou, who was an old gold miner, and had
likewise had considerable experience among the silver mines.

"Well, haven't you formed any sort of opinion?"

"Yes, a sort of a one. It's fair enough here, may be, but overrated.
Seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce, though.

"That Sheba may be rich enough, but we don't own it; and besides, the rock
is so full of base metals that all the science in the world can't work
it. We'll not starve, here, but we'll not get rich, I'm afraid."

"So you think the prospect is pretty poor?"

"No name for it!"

"Well, we'd better go back, hadn't we?"

"Oh, not yet--of course not. We'll try it a riffle, first."

"Suppose, now--this is merely a supposition, you know--suppose you could
find a ledge that would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a ton
--would that satisfy you?"

"Try us once!" from the whole party.

"Or suppose--merely a supposition, of course--suppose you were to find a
ledge that would yield two thousand dollars a ton--would that satisfy
you?"

"Here--what do you mean? What are you coming at? Is there some mystery
behind all this?"

"Never mind. I am not saying anything. You know perfectly well there
are no rich mines here--of course you do. Because you have been around
and examined for yourselves. Anybody would know that, that had been
around. But just for the sake of argument, suppose--in a kind of general
way--suppose some person were to tell you that two-thousand-dollar ledges
were simply contemptible--contemptible, understand--and that right yonder
in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure
silver--oceans of it--enough to make you all rich in twenty-four hours!
Come!"

"I should say he was as crazy as a loon!" said old Ballou, but wild with
excitement, nevertheless.

"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything--I haven't been around, you
know, and of course don't know anything--but all I ask of you is to cast
your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I
tossed my treasure before them.

There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over
it under the candle-light. Then old Ballou said:

"Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and
nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!"

So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy
castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.

Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."

Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my
treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned
then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull,
unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration
of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of
the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of
mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.




CHAPTER XXIX.

True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough. We went
out "prospecting" with Mr. Ballou. We climbed the mountain sides, and
clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop
with exhaustion, but found no silver--nor yet any gold. Day after day we
did this. Now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the
declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we found one or
two listless men still burrowing. But there was no appearance of silver.
These holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive
them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day tap the hidden
ledge where the silver was. Some day! It seemed far enough away, and
very hopeless and dreary. Day after day we toiled, and climbed and
searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the
promiseless toil. At last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock
which projected from the earth high upon the mountain. Mr. Ballou broke
off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long and attentively
with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this
rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver.
Contained it! I had thought that at least it would be caked on the
outside of it like a kind of veneering. He still broke off pieces and
critically examined them, now and then wetting the piece with his tongue
and applying the glass. At last he exclaimed:

"We've got it!"

We were full of anxiety in a moment. The rock was clean and white, where
it was broken, and across it ran a ragged thread of blue. He said that
that little thread had silver in it, mixed with base metal, such as lead
and antimony, and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of
gold visible. After a great deal of effort we managed to discern some
little fine yellow specks, and judged that a couple of tons of them
massed together might make a gold dollar, possibly. We were not
jubilant, but Mr. Ballou said there were worse ledges in the world than
that. He saved what he called the "richest" piece of the rock, in order
to determine its value by the process called the "fire-assay." Then we
named the mine "Monarch of the Mountains" (modesty of nomenclature is not
a prominent feature in the mines), and Mr. Ballou wrote out and stuck up
the following "notice," preserving a copy to be entered upon the books in
the mining recorder's office in the town.

"NOTICE."

"We the undersigned claim three claims, of three hundred feet each
(and one for discovery), on this silver-bearing quartz lead or lode,
extending north and south from this notice, with all its dips,
spurs, and angles, variations and sinuosities, together with fifty
feet of ground on either side for working the same."

We put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made.
But when we talked the matter all over with Mr. Ballou, we felt depressed
and dubious. He said that this surface quartz was not all there was of
our mine; but that the wall or ledge of rock called the "Monarch of the
Mountains," extended down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the earth
--he illustrated by saying it was like a curb-stone, and maintained a
nearly uniform thickness-say twenty feet--away down into the bowels of
the earth, and was perfectly distinct from the casing rock on each side
of it; and that it kept to itself, and maintained its distinctive
character always, no matter how deep it extended into the earth or how
far it stretched itself through and across the hills and valleys. He
said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long, for all we knew; and
that wherever we bored into it above ground or below, we would find gold
and silver in it, but no gold or silver in the meaner rock it was cased
between. And he said that down in the great depths of the ledge was its
richness, and the deeper it went the richer it grew. Therefore, instead
of working here on the surface, we must either bore down into the rock
with a shaft till we came to where it was rich--say a hundred feet or so
--or else we must go down into the valley and bore a long tunnel into the
mountain side and tap the ledge far under the earth. To do either was
plainly the labor of months; for we could blast and bore only a few feet
a day--some five or six. But this was not all. He said that after we
got the ore out it must be hauled in wagons to a distant silver-mill,
ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious and costly process. Our
fortune seemed a century away!

But we went to work. We decided to sink a shaft. So, for a week we
climbed the mountain, laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels,
cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and main.
At first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks and
threw it out with shovels, and the hole progressed very well. But the
rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into
play. But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder.

That was the weariest work! One of us held the iron drill in its place
and another would strike with an eight-pound sledge--it was like driving
nails on a large scale. In the course of an hour or two the drill would
reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in
diameter. We would put in a charge of powder, insert half a yard of
fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and
run. When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air,
we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz
jolted out. Nothing more. One week of this satisfied me. I resigned.
Clagget and Oliphant followed. Our shaft was only twelve feet deep. We
decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted.

So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which
time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and
judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge.
I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer.
We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted. We wanted a ledge that
was already "developed." There were none in the camp.

We dropped the "Monarch" for the time being.

Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly
growing excitement about our Humboldt mines. We fell victims to the
epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more "feet." We prospected
and took up new claims, put "notices" on them and gave them grandiloquent
names. We traded some of our "feet" for "feet" in other people's claims.
In a little while we owned largely in the "Gray Eagle," the "Columbiana,"
the "Branch Mint," the "Maria Jane," the "Universe," the
"Root-Hog-or-Die," the "Samson and Delilah," the "Treasure Trove," the
"Golconda," the "Sultana," the "Boomerang," the "Great Republic," the
"Grand Mogul," and fifty other "mines" that had never been molested by a
shovel or scratched with a pick. We had not less than thirty thousand
"feet" apiece in the "richest mines on earth" as the frenzied cant
phrased it--and were in debt to the butcher. We were stark mad with
excitement--drunk with happiness--smothered under mountains of
prospective wealth--arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions
who knew not our marvellous canyon--but our credit was not good at the
grocer's.

It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a beggars'
revel. There was nothing doing in the district--no mining--no milling
--no productive effort--no income--and not enough money in the entire camp
to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger
would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires.
Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and
swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil--rocks. Nothing but
rocks. Every man's pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was
littered with them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves.




CHAPTER XXX.

I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand
"feet" in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they
believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars--and as
often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in
the world. Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his
"specimens" ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly
back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part
with just a few feet in the "Golden Age," or the "Sarah Jane," or some
other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a "square meal"
with, as the phrase went. And you were never to reveal that he had made
you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship
for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a
piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as
if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in
his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an
eyeglass to it, and exclaim:

"Look at that! Right there in that red dirt! See it? See the specks of
gold? And the streak of silver? That's from the Uncle Abe. There's a
hundred thousand tons like that in sight! Right in sight, mind you!
And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the
richest thing in the world! Look at the assay! I don't want you to
believe me--look at the assay!"

Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the
portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold
in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton.


I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of
rock and get it assayed! Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert,
was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it--and
yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton
of rubbish it came from!

On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy.
On the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondents were
frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton!

And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a
quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the
way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents
received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and
other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses
incurred? Everybody's head was full of such "calculations" as those
--such raving insanity, rather. Few people took work into their
calculations--or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures
of other people.

We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again. Why? Because we judged
that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining--which
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!

Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased "feet" from
various Esmeralda stragglers. We had expected immediate returns of
bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant "assessments"
instead--demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines. These
assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into
the matter personally. Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to Carson and
thence to Esmeralda. I bought a horse and started, in company with
Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff, a Prussian--not the party
who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched
foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which
never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation
among human beings. We rode through a snow-storm for two or three days,
and arrived at "Honey Lake Smith's," a sort of isolated inn on the Carson
river. It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the
midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds
its melancholy way. Close to the house were the Overland stage stables,
built of sun-dried bricks. There was not another building within several
leagues of the place. Towards sunset about twenty hay-wagons arrived and
camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper--a very,
very rough set. There were one or two Overland stage drivers there,
also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers; consequently the house
was well crowded.

We walked out, after supper, and visited a small Indian camp in the
vicinity. The Indians were in a great hurry about something, and were
packing up and getting away as fast as they could. In their broken
English they said, "By'm-by, heap water!" and by the help of signs made
us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming. The weather was
perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season. There was about a
foot of water in the insignificant river--or maybe two feet; the stream
was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely
higher than a man's head.