"That didn't keep the rest from comin'. They fair stormed the Pass. In March there was a thaw, an' the flood o' men broke through.
"It was a bad crowd. Aside from decent prospectors and miners, there was a pack o' gamblers, saloon-keepers, 'bad men,' fake speculators, an' all the rest o' the human buzzards that follow on the heels of a rush. They remembered the first days o' the forty-niners, an' every bad egg in Californy wanted to be the first to murder an' to rob. In three weeks, the silent an' deserted slopes o' Mount Davidson was peppered wi' tents. Virginia City had been started an' had become a roarin' town.
"That wasn't a minin' camp, it was a hell-hole. I've seen tough joints in my day, but Virginia City beat all. It wasn't jest the miners lost their heads, but experts, geologists, an' all, went plumb crazy. 'Twasn't much wonder. That black rock was jest one continooal bonanza. A gold mine was a fool to it.
"The ore in one of the shafts—the Potosi Chimney, it was called—was rangin' steadily over a hundred dollars a ton silver, an' that shaft alone was bringin' up 650 tons a day. Three prospectors tapped the big lode at another point, near Esmeralda, worked a week an' took six thousand dollars apiece for their claims. The man who bought first rights on Esmeralda, sold them before the end or that summer, for a quarter of a million. An' yet McLaughlin an' O'Riley havin' given up their claims to Comstock, got nothin' out of it. As for Comstock, he filed a false claim of ownership which the courts wouldn' give him, an' he went down an' out.
"The Gould & Curry mine, one o' the richest, was bought from its finders for an old horse, a bottle o' lightnin'-rod whisky, three blankets, an' two thousand dollars in cash. After four millions had been taken out of it, an Eastern syndicate come along an' bought it for seven millions o' dollars—an' they made money out of it, at that! Six years after the openin' o' the Gould & Curry, there was 57 miles o' tunnels, all in rich ore, an' the owners had to work it like a coal mine, leavin' great pillars o' silver to prop up the roof!
"A telegraph line was run through an' that made Virginia City ten times worse. It weren't a town o' miners, rightly, not like a gold placer camp. Silver ore needs capital to work it, an' Virginia City become a town o' loose fish, speculators, crooked brokers, an' suckers. One man sold the Eureka mine to eight different people at the same time, an' he'd never even seen the place an' didn't own a claim in it. He pocketed eighty thousand dollars in eight days an' was strung up to the limb of a pine-tree the ninth!
"There was some good work done, though. Durin' 1861 an' 1862 road-makers was busy, though laborers was gettin' fancy prices. But the engineers kep' at it, an' afore the winter o' '62, there was a wide road where two eight-mule coaches could cross each other at full gallop without slacking the traces. Tolls were high, so high that the road-makers got all their money back in the first year. Crack coaches with relays made the trail from Sacramento to Virginia City in twelve hours, instead of six weeks, like it was first. Hold-ups were frequent an' plenty, but a 'road agent' didn't last long where every one carried a gun.
"Then come the 'year o' nabobs,' that was '63. The Comstock Lode put out over $26,000,000 in silver bullion alone, half-a-million dollars o' silver every week in the year. By that time there was forty big minin' plants operatin' wi' steam machinery. There weren't no place for a small man any more, unless he wanted to do minin' on days' wages, an' mighty few o' the early prospectors ever got any o' the later wealth o' the Comstock. Father, he wouldn't touch silver, nohow, but he made more'n the miners did by pannin' the dirt the mines were throwin' away. They were makin' so much money out o' silver that they wouldn't bother to take out the gold.
"Then come the first big smash. Half o' the mines sold to the suckers weren't worth shucks. Wild-cat mines, they called 'em. There was one, the Little Monte Cristo, which give the promoter half a million dollars in shares which he sold to folk in New York an' Philadelphy. An' they never made more'n an 8-foot pit in it an' didn't take out enough bullion to melt down into a silver spoon!
"What was worse, the big mines got down to the rock water-level. At first, they run little tunnels, what they called 'adits' from the side o' the mountain an' drained that way. That wasn't no good, much. They soon got below that. The lode got richer the farther down they went an' some o' the big companies took to pumpin' out the water. Right away, they started in to lose money. It cost more to pump than the silver was worth. The boom dropped with a thud.