“Perfectly.”
“Could you wait a little?”
“Oh certainly–no particular hurry.”
“Well–good by.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“After the school report!”
And he did. I staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when
they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock.
I walked home, too–five miles–up hill. We had no school report next
morning; but the Union had.
Six months after my entry into journalism the grand “flush times” of
Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three
years. All difficulty about filling up the “local department” ceased,
and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the
world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every
day. Virginia had grown to be the “livest” town, for its age and
population, that America had ever produced. The sidewalks swarmed with
people–to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter
to stem the human tide. The streets themselves were just as crowded with
quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles. The procession was
endless. So great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half
an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street. Joy sat on
every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in
every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in
every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was
as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a
melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were military
companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, “hurdy-
gurdy houses,” wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic
processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill
every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor, a
City Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and
Third Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police
force, two Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen
jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a
church. The “flush times” were in magnificent flower! Large fire-proof
brick buildings were going up in the principal streets, and the wooden
suburbs were spreading out in all directions. Town lots soared up to
prices that were amazing.
The great “Comstock lode” stretched its opulent length straight through
the town from north to south, and every mine on it was in diligent
process of development. One of these mines alone employed six hundred
and seventy-five men, and in the matter of elections the adage was, “as
the ‘Gould and Curry’ goes, so goes the city.” Laboring men’s wages were
four and six dollars a day, and they worked in three “shifts” or gangs,
and the blasting and picking and shoveling went on without ceasing, night
and day.
The “city” of Virginia roosted royally midway up the steep side of Mount
Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and
in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty
miles! It claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand,
and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets like bees
and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the
“Comstock,” hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under those same
streets. Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a
blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office.
The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it
like a roof. Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street
below the descent was forty or fifty feet. The fronts of the houses were
level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were
propped on lofty stilts; a man could stand at a rear first floor window
of a C street house and look down the chimneys of the row of houses below
him facing D street. It was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere,
to ascend from D to A street, and you were panting and out of breath when