THE LAST BLAST.
The medium could see the oil and was carefully observing the progress of the tunnel. Joe was getting closer and closer to the vast reservoir every day. At last it seemed to Joe that he must be almost on the point of breaking through into it. Just ahead of him the medium could see the great lake of oil—an oleaginous ocean. Joe, at work away up there all alone on the steep slope of the mountain began cogitating on the situation and became frightened. It seemed altogether too big a thing—too great an abundance of oil. Then, too, he began to think of the consequences to the town, and the innocent and unsuspecting inhabitants thereof. There he was, blasting and banging away on the mountain-side, with a mere shell of granite—perhaps not ten inches thick—between himself and the great lake. He pondered upon the matter until at last he became afraid to continue, and decided the blast he was then putting in, should be his last. He feared even that might break through the shell of rock and set on fire the great lake of oil. In imagination he already saw this vast tank of oil pouring down the side of the mountain, overwhelming and destroying the city.
In this emergency the spirits were again consulted. They declared that a large iron pipe must be procured and laid from the tunnel down into the town, when the oil might be tapped and its flow controlled. The spirits also asserted that the time for forming a company had now arrived and advised that certain persons be let into the secret. Joe having hitherto been “going it alone.”
The persons to whom the secret of the existence of the great subterranean reservoir of oil was made known were nearly all spiritualists. The “Mount Davidson Oil Company” was formed, and all concerned kept very quiet about the matter in hand.
All was now in readiness for tapping the oil so soon as the pipe could be procured and laid. In order that they might not lack the pipe, the medium—who was at the head of the company and was managing the whole business—proceeded to levy an assessment of $5 per share on the capital stock. That assessment exploded the whole arrangement. Every shareholder turned tail and “got out of the wilderness.” To this day that lake of oil remains untapped, and—as it is not likely that the spirits would lie about the small matter of a few million hogshead of coal-oil—Mount Davidson stands to-day the greatest natural reservoir of oil in the known world.
Patrick McLaughlin, who, with Peter O’Riley, made the discovery of silver in the Ophir mine, was alive at last accounts (in 1875) and was at work at the Green mine, San Bernardino county, California. He was doing the cooking for some half-dozen men, employed at the mine named. He sold his interest in the Ophir mine for $3,500 and probably received considerable sums for shares owned by him in other mines on the Comstock range, all of which he doubtless lost in speculations of various kinds—speculations undertaken with a view to securing millions. Few of those who were original locators anywhere along the Comstock lode received large prices for their claims, and in a few years all were again as poor as before the silver was found. Those who bought and continued to buy at what seemed like enormous figures were they who have made the most money out of the mines.
The first winter after the discovery of silver: 1859-60, was one of the severest the country has known. As I have already stated, there were very few buildings in Virginia City that were worthy of the name. The majority of the inhabitants lived in mere shanties and in underground caves and dens—a tribe of troglodytes.
BOUND FOR WASHOE.
