Explanatory Notes
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Apparatus Notes
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CHAPTER 30
[begin page 195]

CHAPTER 30

I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand “feet” in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars—and as often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in the world. Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his “specimens” ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part with just a few feet in the “Golden Age,” or the “Sarah Jane,” or some other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a “square meal” with, as the phrase went. And you were never to reveal that he had made you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an eye-glassemendation to it, and exclaim:

“Look at that! Right there in that red dirt! See it? See the specks of gold? And the streak of silver? That’s from the ‘Uncle Abe.’ There’s a hundred thousand tons like that in sight! Right in sight, mind you! And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the richest thing in the world! Look at the assay! I don’t want you to believe me—look at the assay!”

Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton. I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of rock and get it assayed! Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert, was the only fragment in a ton that had [begin page 196] a particle of metal in it—and yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton of rubbish it came from!

“do you see it?”

On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy. On the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondents were frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton!

And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses incurred? Everybody’s head was full of such “calculations” as those—such raving insanity, rather. Few people [begin page 197] took work into their calculations—or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures of other people.

We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again. Why? Because we judged that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining—which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining!

Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased “feet” from various Esmeralda stragglersexplanatory note. We had expected immediate returns of bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant “assessments” instead—demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines. These assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into the matter personally. Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to Carson and thence to Esmeralda. I bought a horse and started, in company with Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorffexplanatory note, a Prussian—not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questionsexplanatory note which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings. We rode through a snow-storm for two or three days, and arrived at “Honey Lake Smith’s,”explanatory note a sort of isolated inn on the Carson river. It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds its melancholy way. Close to the house were the Overland stage stables, built of sun-dried bricks. There was not another building within several leagues of the place. Towardemendation sunset about twenty hay wagonsemendation arrived and camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper—a very, very rough set. There were one or two Overland stage-driversemendation there, also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers; consequently the house was well crowded.

We walked out, after supper, and visited a small Indian camp in the vicinity. The Indians were in a great hurry about something, and were packing up and getting away as fast as they could. In their broken English they said, “By’m-byemendation, heap water!” and by the help of signs made us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming. The weather was perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season. [begin page 198] There was about a foot of water in the insignificant river—or maybe two feet; the stream was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely higher than a man’s head. So, where was the flood to come from? We canvassed the subject awhile and then concluded it was a ruse, and that the Indians had some better reason for leaving in a hurry than fears of a flood in such an exceedingly dry time.

farewell sweet river.

At seven in the evening we went to bed in the second story—with our clothes on, as usual, and all three in the same bed, for every available space on the floors, chairs, etc., was in request, and even then there was barely room for the housing of the inn’s guests. An hour later we were awakened by a great turmoil, and springing out of bed we picked our way nimbly among the ranks of snoring teamsters on the floor and got to the front windows of the long room. A glance revealed a strange spectacle, under the moonlight. The crooked Carson was full to the brim, and its waters were raging and foaming in the wildest way—sweeping around the sharp bends at a furious speed, and bearing on their surface a chaos of logs, brush and all sorts of rubbish. A depression, where its bed had once been, in other times, was already filling, and in one or two places the water was beginning to wash over the main bank. Men were flying hither and thither, bringing cattle and wagons close up to the house, for the spot of high ground on which it stood extended only some thirty feet in front and about a hundred in the rear. Close to the old river bed just spoken of, stood a little log stable, and in this our horses were lodged. While we looked, the [begin page 199] waters increased so fast in this place that in a few minutes a torrent was roaring by the little stable and its margin encroaching steadily on the logs. We suddenly realized that this flood was not a mere holiday spectacle, but meant damage—and not only to the small log stable but to the Overland buildings close to the main river, for the waves had now come ashore and were creeping about

the rescue.
the foundations and invading the great haycorral adjoining. We ran down and joined the crowd of excited men and frightened animals. We waded knee-deep into the log stable, unfastened the horses and waded out almost waist-deep, so fast the waters increased. Then the crowd rushed in a body to the hay-corral and began to tumble down the huge stacks of [begin page 200] baled hay and roll the bales up on the high ground by the house. Meantime it was discovered that Owens, an overland driver, was missing, and a man ran to the large stable, and wading in, boot-top deep, discovered him asleep in his bed, awoke him, and waded out again. But Owens was drowsy and resumed his nap; but only for a minute or two, for presently he turned in his bed, his hand dropped over the side and came in contact with the cold water! It was up level with the mattrass! He waded out, breast-deep, almost, and the next moment the sunburnedemendation bricks melted down like sugar and the big building crumbled to a ruin and was washed away in a twinkling.

At eleven o’clock only the roof of the little log stable was out of water, and our inn was on an island in mid-ocean. As far as the eye could reach, in the moonlight, there was no desert visible, but only a level waste of shining water. The Indians were true prophets, but how did they get their information? I am not able to answer the question.

We remained cooped up eight days and nights with that curious crew. Swearing, drinking and card playing were the order of the day, and occasionally a fight was thrown in for variety. Dirt and vermin—but let us forget those features; their profusion is simply inconceivableexplanatory note—it is better that they remain so.

There were two men—however, this chapter is long enough.

Editorial Emendations CHAPTER 30
  eye-glass (C)  ●  eye-  |  glass (A) 
  Toward (C)  ●  Towards (A) 
  hay wagons (C)  ●  hay-wagons (A) 
  stage-drivers (C)  ●  stage drivers (A) 
  By’m-by (C)  ●  By’m-  |  by (A) 
  sunburned (C)  ●  sun-burned (A) 
Explanatory Notes CHAPTER 30
 the Secretary and I had purchased “feet” from various Esmeralda stragglers] Before Clemens left Carson City for the Humboldt region he had acquired feet in at least two Esmeralda mines, the Black Warrior and the Farnum, the latter with his brother Orion. These shares were purchased from Horatio G. Phillips—who was associated with the Clemens brothers in several mining ventures in 1861 and 1862—and Noah T. Carpenter ( L1 , 140, 141 n. 1, 189 n. 11).
 with Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff] Clemens spent New Year’s Day in Unionville before beginning his return trip to Carson City, having stayed “two or three weeks” in Humboldt (SLC 1866d). His companions on the return trip were Colonel John B. Onstine and Captain Hugo Pfersdorff. Tillou (“Mr. Ballou”) was almost certainly not with them: references in Clemens’s correspondence with Clagett between February and September 1862 suggest that he remained in Humboldt during that time. Onstine was a lawyer from Ohio who established a practice in Carson City, and then in Unionville, in the early 1860s. Pfersdorff, one of the pioneers of the Unionville area, served as district recorder there from 1861 to about 1865 ( L1 , 150, 152 n. 13, 164, 166, 170, 171, 193, 239; “From the Humboldt Mines,” Stockton Independent, 8 Feb 62, 2, reprinting the Carson City Silver Age of 21 January; Knight 1863, 359–60; Knight 1864, 285).
 not the party . . . foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions] Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff (1802–65) was a grammarian and teacher of languages resident in Paris for most of his career. Beginning in the late 1830s, he published a series of textbooks—each issued in numerous editions—on how to become proficient within six months in reading, writing, and speaking the major modern languages. His method, “based on the principle that a foreign language should be taught in the same way in which a child learns to speak its mother tongue,” relied upon conversational question-and-answer exercises rather than upon memorizing and applying rules of grammar and syntax (Singer, 9:395).
  [begin page 630] “Honey Lake Smith’s,”] A trading post and stage station about thirty-six miles northeast of Carson City, named for its proprietor, formerly of Honey Lake, California. The site is now submerged by the waters of the Lahontan Reservoir (Carlson, 135–36; Gianella, 5–7; Kelly 1862, 13; see supplement B, map 2).
 

We remained cooped up eight days . . . their profusion is simply inconceivable] In his letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise dated 12 February 1866, Clemens recalled his stay at Honey Lake Smith’s:

I was 15 days on the road back to Carson on horseback, with Colonel Onstein and Captain Pfersdorff, nine of which were spent at Honey Lake Smith’s, when there was but two hundred feet of dry ground around the house, and the whole desert for miles around was under water. The whole place was crowded with teamsters, and we wore out every deck of cards on the place, and then had no amusement left but to scrape up a handful of vermin off the floor or the beds, and “shuffle” them, and bet on odd or even. Even this poor excuse for a game broke up in a row at last when it was discovered that Colonel Onstein kept a “cold deck” down the back of his neck! He would persist in cheating, and so we played no more. Take it altogether, that was the funniest trip I ever made. (SLC 1866d)