From every state and many nations the pioneers of California came, young, ardent, hopeful, strong. Round the Horn in clipper ships, across the fever-swept Isthmus, by way of the long Overland Trail, they poured into the Golden West. They laughed at hardship. They wrote songs of defiance to bad luck and sang them while they worked and starved and died. Self-contained and confident, they gutted mountains, made deserts leafy green, built cities that were the marvel of their generation. To these sunset shores came the pick of the world’s adventurous youth.
Nevada absorbed the best and the worst of California’s seasoned veterans. Gay, reckless, debonair, the gold-seekers went their turbulent way. Every man was a law to himself, carried in his holster the redress for wrongs. The wildest excesses prevailed. The most brutal crimes went unpunished. For years there was no night at Virginia, at Austin, or at Eureka. The flare from dance halls, hurdy-gurdys, and gambling houses flung splashes of light on masses of roughly dressed men engaged in continual revelry.
But it would be unjust to condemn Washoe because it did not measure up to the standards of Philadelphia. At its worst no good woman was ever more revered than here, no child’s innocence more zealously guarded. And, as it proved, the strength of the bad man lacked the endurance of the one who was good. Law and order came to Nevada, brought by stalwarts who took their lives in their hands to punish desperadoes.
The dominance of law came slowly, because Washoe was under the jurisdiction of Utah, so far away across the desert that its authority was only a shadow. Until this handicap was taken away, no real civil authority was possible.
The earliest mining at Virginia was done from the grass roots, which fact accounts largely for the character of its population. Six-Mile Cañon heads on the north side of Mt. Davidson, Gold Cañon about a mile distant on its south slope. Placer miners, working among the decomposed rock and gravel of the ravines, moved up toward the mother lode without knowing it. The clay in which they dug was so tough it had to be “puddled” in water with shovels.
But the formation of the strata had convinced the astute that the Washoe diggings were a quartz proposition. The rocker and the long tom had had their day. Into the Ophir and the Gould & Curry, steam hoists had been put. The shafts were going deeper every hour. Much litigation developed, due in part to defective location work and disputes as to veins. This brought to the territory the ablest bar on the Pacific Coast. Among the newspaper reporters who worked a few months later on the Territorial Enterprise was Mark Twain. He was one of a dozen brilliant writers who later were known from coast to coast, all of whom were associated with the Goodwins on this paper.
No other such mining camp ever existed. Side by side with lawlessness and the roughest makeshifts there existed a high civilization which was satisfied with nothing less than the best. In the days to come, after the town had found its feet, McCullough, Booth, Barrett, and Modjeska played at Piper’s Opera House within a stone’s throw of the raucous uproar of the hurdy-gurdy houses. One lucky miner expressed himself in a mansion equipped with door stops of gold and door knobs of silver; another lifted his eyes to the stars and wrote his soul out with fire-tipped pen.
In this heterogeneous society there was at first no class consciousness. The professional gambler had a special standing. He was accepted as necessary to the community, much as a doctor or a merchant was. He set the standard of dress and of manners. If he was a “square sport” he played a fair game. The most distinguished men in the camp were glad to sit down at poker with such a gambler as Scot McClintock.
So long as the road from California was open Virginia City lived on the best that could be imported. But during the heavy winter just ending the trail had been closed for months. Food was dangerously short. The supply of potatoes and onions, the staple vegetables, had become completely exhausted. There was very little fresh meat, though jackrabbits were fortunately plentiful. To make conditions worse, soft heavy spring snows blocked the passes and made transportation impossible. At Placerville and at Strawberry Flat great trains of supplies waited for the opening of the trail.
On a sunny windswept afternoon Scot McClintock made his way from the International Hotel to the Crystal Palace, where he dealt faro to a high-priced clientele. He was pleasantly at peace with the world. If he carried a derringer in his pocket it was as a concession to the custom of a country where every man went armed. His progress along B Street and through the Crystal Palace to his seat was in the nature of a reception. For everybody knew Scot and wanted to claim acquaintance with him.