Explanatory Notes
Apparatus Notes
MTPDocEd
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[TWO DESCENTS INTO THE SPANISH MINE]
§ 30. The Spanish
12 or 22 February 1863

(This headnote is repeated in numbers 29 and 30)

When the Ophir claim was located on the Comstock Lode in June 1859, Emanuel Penrod and Henry Comstock, two members of the Ophir Company, were allotted an extra one hundred feet on the lead. The company gave them this either in return for water rights under their control or, as Penrod later said, because he, supported by Comstock, had identified the ore-bearing quartz lead. Later that year Penrod and Comstock sold their one hundred feet for $9,500 to Gabriel Maldonado and Francis J. Hughes, who formed the Mexican Company and began to work the Mexican, or Spanish, mine.1 It soon became one of the most productive and valuable mines on the Comstock Lode.

In late October 1862 and again in mid-February 1863 Mark Twain descended into the Spanish mine and published two closely linked accounts of his visits. The first, called “The Spanish Mine,” was published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise sometime in October, but is extant only in the Oroville (Calif.) Butte Record for 1 November 1862, which reprinted the Enterprise. The second, which is entitled “The Spanish,” survives in an Enterprise clipping; it fulfilled the author's promise in the first sketch to speak at a later date of the “steam hoisting apparatus now in process of erection by the Spanish Company.”

Neither piece was signed, but circumstantial and stylistic evidence combine to show that Clemens wrote both of them. The first sketch is, for instance, remarkable for its irresistible drift toward humor. The author played [begin page 161] with the notion of nearing “the confines of purgatory—so to speak,” and visiting “the infernal regions.” The complex timbering prompted him to wonder “where the forest around [him] came from, and how they managed to get it into that hole.” He compared descending through these square-set timbers to “falling through a well-ventilated shot-tower with the windows all open.” And he casually mocked his own guided tour of a local marvel: “keep on going until you come to a horse.”

Dan De Quille, the mining expert on the Enterprise staff, was sharing the duties of local reporter with Clemens in October 1862. Dan was capable of such playful reporting, but a number of circumstances show that he did not write these two sketches. The style of each is unmistakably Clemens': the use of the phrase “you know” and of “waltz” as a slang verb of motion are both practically signatures. But beyond this, the implicit sense of naive wonder that pervades the first sketch is not consistent with Dan's expertise.2 And he certainly could not have written the second one (forecast in the first), because he had by then left Nevada for Iowa, and Clemens was writing all of the local items by himself. The first sketch must, in fact, record Clemens' earliest exposure to mining techniques, such as Philip Deidesheimer's square-set method of mine timbering, and the relatively primitive methods of descent—a winding staircase, and a bucket at the end of a rope.

Moreover, many of the details mentioned in the first sketch were used in other descriptions of mine interiors that were demonstrably written by Clemens. In a letter probably written early in 1863 to his family, Clemens said that if Pamela were to visit a mine, she would see “great, dark, timbered chambers, with a lot of shapeless devils flitting about in the distance, with dim candles flickering in the gloom; and then she could look far above her head, to the top of the shaft, and see a faint little square of daylight, apparently no bigger than one of the spots on a chess-board.”3 And in late May 1868, while visiting Virginia City on his western lecture tour, Clemens wrote a newspaper letter in which he recalled visiting the mines:

In those old days, when we reporters went dangling down a dark shaft at the end of a crazy rope, with a candle in our teeth, to the depth of two or three hundred feet, we felt as if we were getting into the very bowels of the earth. We prowled uncomfortably through muddy, crumbling drifts and tunnels, and were happy no more until the man up at the bullet-hole that showed us a far-off glimpse of blue sky, wound us up with his windlass and set us in the cheerful light of the sun again.4

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We may compare these passages with references in the first sketch to “workmen poking about in the gloom with twinkling candles,” “bottomless holes with endless ropes hanging down into them,” and “hot candle-grease” and the chance to “get your clothes dirty,” and particularly to the anxiety to return to the daylight above.

External circumstantial evidence also corroborates Clemens' authorship. In January 1870 he reminisced about the Spanish mine and its sudden rise in “market value”: “I was down in it about that time, 600 ft under the ground, and about half of it caved in over my head.”5 “About that time” could mean either 1862 or 1863. Another factual detail, moreover, seems to link Clemens with the first sketch. The mine superintendent mentioned late in the sketch, Harvey Beckwith, was evidently known to Clemens in 1862, when the piece was published: in January 1868 Clemens wrote a letter of recommendation for him in which he said that Beckwith was “a first-rate man in every way—steady, faithful, smart & particularly energetic. . . . God never made two such men. . . . I have known him six years.”6

The Enterprise clipping from the local column that included the second sketch is in the Grant Smith Papers. Above it someone has penciled “Mark visits the Mexican mine, Enterprise Feb. 2, 1863.” This date cannot be correct, however, because February 2 fell on a Monday that year, and the Enterprise did not publish on Mondays. Moreover, Clemens was in Carson City from January 29 until at least February 7 and so could not have visited the mine “yesterday,” if publication occurred in the first week of February. Still, February 1863 is a plausible time for it to have appeared. Clemens was then busily feuding with Clement T. Rice (the Unreliable), whose head, we are told in the second sketch, was “filled with oysters instead of brains.” And early in 1863 heavy rains caused flooding in some of the Comstock mines, a condition alluded to in this account. It therefore seems likely that whoever annotated the clipping in the Grant Smith Papers mistook the date by one digit, and we have conjectured it as either February 12 or 22.

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When Clemens wrote this second sketch he had obviously learned more about mines and mining than he had known in the fall of 1862, when he wrote the previous one. Sometime between 17 and 22 February 1863 he also published “Silver Bars—How Assayed” (no. 43), a rather wide-eyed account of what he had recently learned of the assay process. And the first item in his column for February 19 was also devoted to mining news.7 But like other “experts,” including the officials of the Spanish mine, he did not foresee the seriousness of the damage caused by the flooding. Water from the spring thaw further weakened the mine's timbering and caused a major cave-in on July 15.

Editorial Notes
1 Myron Angel, ed., History of Nevada (Oakland: Thompson and West, 1881), pp. 56–57; Eliot Lord, Comstock Mining and Miners (Berkeley: Howell-North, 1959), p. 61. In his “Around the World. Letter Number 6” (no. 268), first published in the Buffalo Express, 8 January 1870, pp. 2–3, Clemens gave a condensed version of the origin of the Spanish mine which he later repeated in chapter 46 of Roughing It.
2 For instance, Dan probably wrote “Mexican Mine,” a detailed article describing the mine's steam-powered hoisting apparatus, reprinted from the Enterprise by the Oroville (Calif.) Butte Record, 29 November 1862, p. 2. This highly technical account of the machinery is absolutely humorless.
3 Clemens to Jane Clemens, [ca. February-March 1863], CL1 , letter 66.
4 “Letter from Mark Twain,” Chicago Republican, 31 May 1868, p. 2.
5 “Around the World. Letter Number 6,” Buffalo Express, pp. 2–3. This recollection seems to conflate Clemens' memories of his visits to the Spanish mine with those he made to the Ophir in July 1863, shortly before and shortly after the Spanish mine caved in to a depth of 225 feet with a force that damaged the bordering Ophir down to the fourth gallery. For Clemens' account of his descents into the Ophir see “ ‘Mark Twain's’ Letter,” San Francisco Morning Call, 15, 18, and 23 July 1863, PH at Yale. His story in the Enterprise, “An Hour in the Caved Mines,” must have appeared about the same time; it was reprinted at the end of chapter 52 in Roughing It, probably from an Enterprise clipping.
6 Clemens to Stephen J. Field, 9 January 1868, CL1 , letter 176. Harvey Beckwith is listed as foreman of the Spanish mine in J. Wells Kelly, Second Directory of Nevada Territory (San Francisco: Valentine and Co., 1863), p. 173.
7 See Appendix B8, volume 1.
Textual Commentary

The first printing appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably on 12 or 22 February 1863. The only known copy of this printing, in a clipping in the Grant Smith Papers, carton 3, book 4, Bancroft, is copy-text. There are no textual notes.

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The Spanish

We slid down into the Spanish mine yesterday, to look after the rich strike which was made there lately. We found things going on at about their usual gait, and the general appearance of the mine in no respect differing from what it was before the recent flood. A few inches of water still remain in the lower gallery, but it interferes with nobody, and can be easily bailed out whenever it may be deemed necessary. Every department of the Spanish mine is now in first class working order, owing to the able management of the general Superintendent, Mr. J. P. Corriganexplanatory note: the slight damage done by the inundation having been thoroughly repaired. In the matter of bracing and timbering the mine, an improvement upon the old plan has lately been added, which makes a large saving in the bill of expenses. This improvement consists in building the stations wider and higher, and filling up a wall of them here and there with refuse rock. Expenses are not only lightened thus, but such walls never rot, are never in danger of caving, need never be removed, and are altogether the strongest supports that a mine can have. Intelligent people can understand, now, that about a hundred dollars a day may be saved in this way, without even taking into consideration the costly job of re-timbering every two or three years, which is rendered unnecessary by it—and by way of driving the proposition into heads like the Unreliable's, which is filled with oysters instead of brains, we will say that by building these walls, you are saved the time and labor of lowering heavy timbers 300 feet into the earth and hoisting up refuse rock the same distance; for you can leave [begin page 168] the one in the woods, and pile the other into boxed-up stations as fast as you dig it out. However, it is time to speak of the rich strike, now. This charming spot is two hundred and forty feet below the surface of the earth. It extends across the entire width of the ledge—from twenty-five to thirty feet—and has been excavated some twenty feet on the length of the lead, and to the depth of twenty-one feet. How much deeper it reaches, no man knoweth. The face of the walls is of a dark blue color, sparkling with pyrites, or sulphurets, or something, and beautifully marbled with little crooked streaks of lightning as white as loaf sugar. This mass of richness pays from eight to twelve hundred dollars a ton just as it is taken from the ledge, emendationwithout “sorting.” Twenty thousand dollars' worth of it was hoisted out of the mine last Saturday; about two hundred and fifty tons have been taken out altogether. The hoisting apparatus is about perfectexplanatory note: when put to its best speed, it can bail out somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty tons of rock in daylight. The rich ore we have been talking about is sacked up as soon as it reaches the surface of the Territory, and shipped off to the Company's mill (the Silver State) at Empire City. The Silver State is a forty-stamp arrangement, with a thundering chimney to it, which any one has noticed who has traveled from here to Carson. Mr. Dorseyexplanatory note is the superintendent, and Mr. Janinexplanatory note assayer.

Editorial Emendations The Spanish
  ledge, (I-C)  ●  ledge.
Explanatory Notes The Spanish
 general Superintendent, Mr. J. P. Corrigan] John P. Corrigan was also the secretary of the Spanish mine company (Kelly, First Directory, p. 121).
 hoisting apparatus is about perfect] The new steam-hoisting apparatus, which Clemens said was “in the process of erection” in October (see “The Spanish Mine,” no. 29), fed ore into wagons that went to the brand-new Silver State Reduction Works, usually known as the Mexican mill, located near Empire City, an important milling town on the west bank of the Carson River about two and one-half miles east of Carson City. The Mexican mill had forty-four stamps (not forty, as Clemens says in the sketch) capable of crushing up to seventy-five tons of rock daily, the largest capacity of any mill then operating in Nevada (Kelly, Second Directory, p. 88).
 Mr. Dorsey] Edward B. Dorsey, the mill superintendent, lived in Empire City. He was a member of the 1863 Constitutional Convention from Empire City, Ormsby County (Kelly, Second Directory, p. 91; Marsh, Clemens, and Bowman, Reports, p. 464 n. 12).
 Mr. Janin] Louis Janin, Jr., also a resident of Empire City, was the assayer of the Silver State Reduction Works (Kelly, Second Directory, p. 120).