The steamers, in due course of time, began to return crowded with enterprising miners, who still believed there was gold there if the river would only fall. But generosity dictates that I should say no more on this point. It is enough to add, that the time arrived when it became a matter of personal offense to ask any spirited gentleman if he had been to Frazer River.
There was now, of course, an end to all mining excitements. It could never again happen that such an imposition could be practiced upon public credulity. In the whole state there was not another sheep that could be gulled by the cry of wolf. Business would now resume its steady and legitimate course. Property would cease to fluctuate in value. Every branch of industry would become fixed upon a permanent and reliable basis. All these excitements were the natural results of the daring and enterprising character of the people. But now, having worked off their superabundant steam, they would be prepared to go ahead systematically, and develop those resources which they had hitherto neglected. It was a course of medical effervescence highly beneficial to the body politic. All morbid appetite for sudden wealth was now gone forever.
But softly, good friends! What rumor is this? Whence come these silvery strains that are wafted to our ears from the passes of the Sierra Nevada? What dulcet Æolian harmonies—what divine, enchanting ravishment is it
"That with these raptures moves the vocal air?"
As I live, it is a cry of Silver! Silver in Washoe! Not gold now, you silly men of Gold Bluff; you Kern Riverites; you daring explorers of British Columbia! But Silver—solid, pure Silver! Beds of it ten thousand feet deep! Acres of it! miles of it! hundreds of millions of dollars poking their backs up out of the earth ready to be pocketed!
Do you speak of the mines of Potosi or Golconda? Do you dare to quote the learned Baron Von Tschudi on South America and Mexico? Do you refer me to the ransom of Atahualpa, the unfortunate Inca, in the days of Pizarro? Nothing at all, I assure you, to the silver mines of Washoe! "Sir," said my informant to me, in strict confidence, no later than this morning, "you may rely upon it, for I am personally acquainted with a brother of the gentleman whose most intimate friend saw the man whose partner has just come over the mountains, and he says there never was the like on the face of the earth! The ledges are ten thousand feet deep—solid masses of silver. Let us be off! Now is the time! A pack-mule, pick and shovel, hammer and frying-pan will do. You need nothing more. Hurrah for Washoe!"
Kind and sympathizing reader, imagine a man who for six years had faithfully served his government and his country; who had never, if he knew himself intimately, embezzled a dollar of the public funds; who had resisted the seductive influences of Gold Bluff, Kern, and Frazer Rivers from the purest motives of patriotism; who scorned to abandon his post in search of filthy lucre—imagine such a personage cut short in his official career, and suddenly bereft of his per diem by a formal and sarcastic note of three lines from head-quarters; then fancy you hear him jingle the last of his federal emoluments in his pocket, and sigh at the ingratitude of republics. Would you not consider him open to any proposition short of murder or highway robbery? Would you be surprised if he accepted an invitation from Mr. Wise, the aeronaut, to take a voyage in a balloon? or the berth of assistant manager in a diving-bell? or joined the first expedition in search of the treasure buried by the Spanish galleon on her voyage to Acapulco in 1578? Then consider his position, as he stands musing upon the mutability of human affairs, when those strange and inspiring cries of Washoe fall upon his ears for the first time, with a realizing sense of their import. Borne on the wings of the wind from the Sierra Nevada; wafted through every street, lane, and alley of San Francisco; whirling around the drinking saloons, eddying over the counters of the banking offices, scattering up the dust among the Front Street merchants, arousing the slumbering inmates of the Custom-house—what man of enterprise could resist it? Washoe! The Comstock lead! The Ophir! The Central—The Billy Choller Companies, and a thousand others, indicating in trumpet-tones the high road to fortune! From the crack of day to the shades of night nothing is heard but Washoe. The steady men of San Francisco are aroused, the men of Front Street, the gunny-bag men, the brokers, the gamblers, the butchers, the bakers, the whisky-dealers, the lawyers, and all. The exception was to find a sane man in the entire city.
HURRAH FOR WASHOE.