9 July 1862 • Aurora, Calif./Nev. Terr. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00054)
I am here again. Capt. Nye, as his disease grew worse, grew so peevish and abusive, that I quarreled with him and left. He required almost constant attention, day and night, but he made no effort to hire anyone to assist me. He said he nursed the Governor three weeks, day and night—which is a d—d lie, I suspect. He told Mrs. Gardiner he would take up the quarrel with me again when he gets well. He shall not find me unwilling. Mr. and Mrs. G. dislike a himⒶemendation, and are very anxious to get rid of him.1explanatory note
Don’t send me that $75, and do not let anyone find out that you have got your salary—above all, Phillips—but no one if not necessary. Pay off your indebtedness to the school fund when you can do so without having to pay a heavy discount on your draft, and put the balance away by itself, and keep a strict account of your disbursement of it.
Private. I do not think these new placer diggings are a “steamboat.”Ⓐemendation A friend of mine, C. H. Higbie, happened to pass through the locality two years ago, and intended paying it a quiet visit this summer—so last week when the news came, he said nothing, but got a horse, and left here at thatⒶemendation night at midnight. I had a whispered message from him last night, in which he said he had arrived safely on the ground, and was in with the discoverers, turning the river out of its bed. They will allow no others to participate.2explanatory note Higbie left here while I was with Capt. Nye. Now keep all this entirely to yourself. Nine-tenths of the people who leave here fore the diggings, don’t know where to go to. Higbie is a large, strong man, and has the perseverance of the devil. If there is anything there, he will find it. And when he gets discouraged and leaves, rest assured he will leave no one behind him. You can no more discourage him than you can frighten him. Visiting the Yo-Semite Falls, (100) milesⒶemendation from here,) he carried for two-thirds of a day, a 60-pound pack on his back, and a rifle and shot-gun in his hands, and then, with this load, and all his company trying to dissuade him, he left the valley and climbed to the summit of the ridge, (which is 7,000 feet above the valley,) by a trail which the mountain goats are almost afraid of. I am telling you these things so that if you learn that Higbie calls the new diggings a steamboat, you can feel convinced that there is no gold in that part of the country.3explanatory note I am freezing for him to send word for me to come out there—for God knows a respite from this same old, old place would be a blessing.
From what I can learn, the Pride of Utah and the Dimes have run together, at a depth of less than 100 feet, and now form one immense ledge, of fabulous richness. I suppose the Annipolitan will share the same fate. They are down 15 or 20 feet on the ledge, and have passed through a 2-inch vein of rich decomposed quartz—but they doneⒶemendation nothing with it of course, as it was too narrow to be worth working. It was a cross vein,4explanatory note like all the rich rock in those claims.
I caught a violent cold at Clayton’s, which lasted two weeks, and I came near getting salivated, working in the quicksilver and chemicals. I hardly think I shall try the experiment again. It is a confining business, and I will not be confined, for love nor money.
Gillespie talks reasonably now, and I shall try and be ready for him as soon as he starts his paper. Tell him not to secure a San Francisco correspondent for the winter, because they do nothing here do duringⒶemendation the winter months, and I want the job myself. I want to spend the winter in California. When will his first number be published, and where?
Tell Church I would as soon write a correspondence for the “Age” as not, since Lewis isⒶemendation out of the concern, but want of time will not permit it.5explanatory note Besides, I have no private room, and it is a torture to write when there is a crowd around, as is the case here, always.
The 100 feet cut off from the Monitor segregates itself, without further action.
Don’t you know that when you let Gillespie read my letters you take all privacy away from them?
I do hope you will be able to get into your new office soon.
I shall go on a walking tour of 40 or 50 miles shortly, to pass get rid of this infernal place for a while. If I go, I will let you know. We projected the tour some time ago, but could not leave at that time.
Old Col. Youngs6explanatory note is very friendly, and I like him much.
Rip goes the d—d mail again, once a week. So when you are in a hurry, you will have to send by Express, as before.
I got the States letters you sent.
Three days after Clemens wrote this letter, the editor of the Esmeralda Star reported that John Nye, bedridden at Gardiner’s Nine Mile Ranch, a few miles northwest of Aurora, was “an invalid, lying upon his back, all stiffened and swollen up by that excruciating disease—inflammatory rheumatism” (“Captain John Nye,” Placer [Calif.] Weekly Courier, 26 July 62, 3, reprinting the Esmeralda Star of 12 July 62). In chapter 41 of Roughing It Clemens reported that he nursed Nye for nine days through a bout of “spasmodic rheumatism.” Recalling Nye’s violent bad temper, he excused it as the result of terrible discomfort and claimed he had been angered only “a little, at the moment” when Nye ordered him to leave. John Nye might have nursed his brother the governor on either of two occasions when the latter was ill, also with severe rheumatism: in late November 1861 and early June 1862 (Andrew J. Marsh, 354, 381; Marysville [Calif.] Appeal: “Gov. Nye . . .,” 1 Dec 61, 2; “Illness of Gov. Nye,” 7 June 62, 2).
These “new placer diggings” were an attempt to find the fabulously rich Whiteman “cement” mine, originally discovered in 1857 and then lost when its discoverer died in 1860, without ever exploiting it. Mark Twain later described this mine as a “curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of dull yellow metal. . . . The vein was about as wide as a curbstone, and fully two-thirds of it was pure gold” (Roughing It, chapter 37). The cement mine took its name from Gideon F. Whiteman, who played a prominent part in the intense searches for it that began in 1861. On 3 July 1862, the Aurora correspondent of the Sacramento Bee commented on recent activity in the area suspected to contain it:
’Twas but a few days ago that the news was whispered round in a few private circles, that mines of gold had been discovered down across the Adobe meadows. Directly parties of horsemen were noticed to leave town during the still hours of night, stealthily moving away to the west. And the late watchers who saw them were mystified and told what they saw to others. . . . Well, the next day . . . another and another party quietly took themselves out of town. . . . The second night more departed, and thus has this town excited itself for three several days and nights, till anxious listening and watching has produced a violent fever. . . . To-day everybody has been making up their minds or their packs to travel by midnight hour or early dawn towards the goal of all their visions—“a heap of oro.” (Veni, Vidi 1862, 3)
Ten days later the same correspondent reported “The Cement Diggings, on Owen’s river, about which there was such a wild excitement a week ago, will prove, I’m afraid, what the miners here call a ‘steamboat sell.’ There are about twenty men at work turning the river, and in a few days will prospect its bed and solve the problem whether or not there is gold in paying quantities in that region” (Veni, Vidi 1862, 1). In fact the cement mine was never found again, although the search continued into the twentieth century (see James W. A. Wright, iv–vi, 11–16, and Chalfant, 43–50).
Calvin H. Higbie (d. 1914), Clemens’s cabinmate for a short time in Aurora and his partner in the blind-lead scheme, was the “Honest Man, . . . Genial Comrade, and . . . Steadfast Friend” to whom Roughing It is dedicated. After Clemens left Nevada in 1864, he and Higbie, who traveled for a number of years and then mined unprofitably for the rest of his life, communicated infrequently. In 1906, following a long silence, Higbie requested Clemens’s “candid opinion” of “the recolections of our associations in Nevada,” which he wished to submit to the New York Herald in order to earn “a little money” (Higbie to SLC, 15 Mar 1906, CU-MARK). Clemens read Higbie’s manuscript, intending to help place it in the Herald. Unfortunately, he found it full of “such extravagant distortions of the actual facts that hardly an unimpeachable grain of truth is discoverable in them” and successfully urged its suppression (AD, 10 Aug 1906, CU-MARK). Portions of the manuscript published in 1920 do contain inaccuracies, among them Higbie’s claim to have met Clemens through Orion, an assertion that the present letter, which in effect introduces Higbie to Orion, plainly refutes (see Phillips, 23, 69).
An “intersecting vein” (Raymond, 27).
John C. Lewis had founded the Carson City Silver Age in 1860. The paper had recently been taken over by the “Age Association,” one of whose members was John Church (see 11 and 12 May 62 to OC, n. 11click to open link). Clemens’s evident antipathy toward Lewis has not been explained, but seems likely to have been related to his “falling out” with Lewis’s former partner, G. T. Sewall (see 8 and 9 Mar 62 to Clagett, n. 5click to open link).
Colonel Samuel Youngs.
MS, Moffett Collection, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L1 , 224–227; MTB , 1:199–200, brief paraphrase and excerpt.
see Moffett Collection, p. 462.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.