Metaphorically, there is a great deal of underground life above the surface of the earth. Men devote time, and patience, and study to the acquisition of wealth by measures that are as far removed from the light of honesty as the tunnel the miner drives beneath the mountain is removed from the light of the sun. One builds a reputation which another burrows beneath and destroys, as the engineers at Hell Gate undertook to destroy the rocky reef which sunk the ships of many a navigator, from the days of Hendrick Hudson to Gen. Newton. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, but it is not always hope for better things.
MINING IN METAPHOR.
Dishonest men hope for wealth, they care not how obtained, and in its pursuit they frequently imitate the labors of the miner. Shafts are sunk and tunnels are driven; the pick, the drill, and the powder-blast perform their work; operations are silently and secretly conducted, and all unknown to the outer world; dangers of falls of earth, of floods of water, of choke-damp, and fire-damp, are unheeded, and by and by the prize may be obtained. A great city, in its moral or immoral life, is cut and seamed with subterranean excavations more extensive than those of the richest coal-fields of England or Belgium. Wall Street is a mining centre greater than the whole of Pennsylvania, and to one who knows it intimately it reveals daily more shafts and tunnels than can be found in Nevada or Colorado. The career of a politician is not unlike that of the miner, though it is frequently much more difficult to follow. The miner may be tracked and found, but there is many a politician whose devious windings would baffle the keenest detective that ever lived.
To describe underground life in its many phases is the object of this volume. The experience of the miner is full of adventures of an exciting character; so exciting, indeed, that there is no occasion to use fiction in place of fact. The hardships, the difficulties, and the dangers that surround him who labors beneath the earth’s surface might form the basis of a story more interesting than the most skilfully constructed romance ever printed. It is an old adage, that Truth is stranger than Fiction: the experience of the miner affords better illustrations of the correctness of this adage than does that of any other laborer. Especially is this the case if we consider Underground Life in its metaphoric as well as in its literal sense, and note the devious and hidden ways in which many of our fellow-men pass the greater part of their existence.
AUSTIN, NEVADA, SIX THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE SEA. THE METROPOLIS OF THE REESE RIVER DISTRICT. SILVER FIRST DISCOVERED AT THIS POINT IN JULY, 1862.