Yet, in the midst of the general wreck and crash of matter, the business of trading in claims, "bucking" and "bearing," went on as if the zephyrs of Virginia were as soft and balmy as those of San Francisco.
"MY CLAIM, SIR."
This was surely—No matter; nothing on earth could aspire to competition with such a place. It was essentially infernal in every aspect, whether viewed from the Comstock Ledge or the summit of Gold Hill. Nobody seemed to own the lots except by right of possession; yet there was trading in lots to an unlimited extent. Nobody had any money, yet every body was a millionaire in silver claims. Nobody had any credit, yet every body bought thousands of feet of glittering ore. Sales were made in the Mammoth, the Lady Bryant, the Sacramento, the Winnebunk, and the innumerable other "outside claims," at the most astounding figures, but not a dime passed hands. All was silver under ground, and deeds and mortgages on top; silver, silver every where, but scarce a dollar in coin. The small change had somehow gotten out of the hands of the public into the gambling saloons.
Every speck of ground covered by canvas, boards, baked mud, brush, or other architectural material, was jammed to suffocation; there were sleeping houses, twenty feet by thirty, in which from one hundred and fifty to two hundred solid sleepers sought slumber at night, at a dollar a head; tents, eight by ten, offering accommodations to the multitude; any thing or any place, even a stall in a stable, would have been a luxury.
GOLD HILL.
The chief hotel, called, if I remember, the "Indication," or the "Hotel de Haystack," or some such euphonious name, professed to accommodate three hundred live men, and it doubtless did so, for the floors were covered from the attic to the solid earth—three hundred human beings in a tinder-box not bigger than a first-class hen-coop! But they were sorry-looking sleepers as they came forth each morning, swearing at the evil genius who had directed them to this miserable spot—every man a dollar and a pound of flesh poorer. I saw some, who perhaps were short of means, take surreptitious naps against the posts and walls in the bar-room, while they ostensibly professed to be mere spectators.