going on, too. All freights were brought over the mountains from
California (150 miles) by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons
drawn by such long mule teams that each team amounted to a procession,
and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals
stretched unbroken from Virginia to California. Its long route was
traceable clear across the deserts fo the Territory by the writhing
serpent of dust it lifted up. By these wagons, freights over that
hundred and fifty miles were $200 a ton for small lots (same price for
all express matter brought by stage), and $100 a ton for full loads.
One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid
$10,000 a month freightage. In the winter the freights were much higher.
All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco (a bar was
usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $1,500
to $3,000 according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the
freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per
cent. of its intrinsic value.
So, the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than $25
each. Small shippers paid two per cent. There were three stages a day,
each way, and I have seen the out-going stages carry away a third of a
ton of bullion each, and more than once I saw them divide a two-ton lot
and take it off. However, these were extraordinary events.
[Mr. Valentine, Wells Fargo’s agent, has handled all the bullion shipped
through the Virginia office for many a month. To his memory–which is
excellent–we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company’s
business in the Virginia office since the first of January, 1862: From
January 1st to April 1st, about $270,000 worth of bullion passed through
that office, during the next quarter, $570,000; next quarter, $800,000;
next quarter, $956,000; next quarter, $1,275,000; and for the quarter
ending on the 30th of last June, about $1,600,000. Thus in a year and a
half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion. During the
year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments
have more than doubled in the last six months. This gives us room to
promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863
(though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are
under estimating, somewhat). This gives us $6,000,000 for the year.
Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us–we will give them
$10,000,000. To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir and Carson City, we will
allow an aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps,
and may possibly be a little under it. To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000.
To Reese River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not
be before the year is out. So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion
this year will be about $30,000,000. Placing the number of mills in the
Territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing
$300,000 in bullion during the twelve months. Allowing them to run three
hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes
their work average $1,000 a day. Say the mills average twenty tons of
rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the
actual work of our one hundred mills figured down “to a spot”–$1,000 a
day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate.–Enterprise.
[A considerable over estimate–M. T.]]
Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars,
and the freight on it over $1,000. Each coach always carried a deal of
ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty
passengers at from $25 to $30 a head. With six stages going all the
time, Wells, Fargo and Co.’s Virginia City business was important and
lucrative.
All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of
miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode–a vein of ore from fifty to
eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock–a vein as wide as some