and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.
Every man owned “feet” in fifty different wild cat mines and considered
his fortune made. Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!
One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a
wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not
located on the mother vein, i.e., the “Comstock”) yielded a ton of rock
worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting
too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought
of such a thing. They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.
New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run
straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty
“feet,” and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of
it. They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said
something. Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect
that the “indications” were good, or that the ledge was “six feet wide,”
or that the rock “resembled the Comstock” (and so it did–but as a
general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you
down). If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of
the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very
marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a
“developed” one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn’t), we
praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in
the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out
of ecstasies–but never said a word about the rock. We would squander
half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed
pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of
admiration of the “gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent” of the mine
–but never utter a whisper about the rock. And those people were always
pleased, always satisfied. Occasionally we patched up and varnished our
reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving
some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones
rattle–and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting
notoriety thus conferred upon it.
There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable.
We received presents of “feet” every day. If we needed a hundred dollars
or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would
ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot. I had a trunk about half
full of “stock.” When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a
high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its stock
–and generally found it.
The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us
little, because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were
content to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it.
My pile of stock was not all given to me by people who wished their
claims “noticed.” At least half of it was given me by persons who had no
thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal
“thank you;” and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that.
If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in
your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a
few. That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the “flush
times.” Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual
custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends
without the asking.
Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a
man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and