exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never
heard of afterward.
We reached Carson in due time, and took a rest. This rest, together with
preparations for the journey to Esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the
delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great
land-slide case of Hyde vs. Morgan–an episode which is famous in Nevada
to this day. After a word or two of necessary explanation, I will set
down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and Washoe
Valleys–very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting
off fast in the Spring and the warm surface-earth begins to moisten and
soften, the disastrous land-slides commence. The reader cannot know what
a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole
side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the
valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain’s
front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he
may go on living within seventy miles of that place.
General Buncombe was shipped out to Nevada in the invoice of Territorial
officers, to be United States Attorney. He considered himself a lawyer
of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it–partly
for the pure gratification of it and partly because his salary was
Territorially meagre (which is a strong expression). Now the older
citizens of a new territory look down upon the rest of the world with a
calm, benevolent compassion, as long as it keeps out of the way–when it
gets in the way they snub it. Sometimes this latter takes the shape of a
practical joke.
One morning Dick Hyde rode furiously up to General Buncombe’s door in
Carson city and rushed into his presence without stopping to tie his
horse. He seemed much excited. He told the General that he wanted him
to conduct a suit for him and would pay him five hundred dollars if he
achieved a victory. And then, with violent gestures and a world of
profanity, he poured out his grief. He said it was pretty well known
that for some years he had been farming (or ranching as the more
customary term is) in Washoe District, and making a successful thing of
it, and furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the
edge of the valley, and that Tom Morgan owned a ranch immediately above
it on the mountain side.
And now the trouble was, that one of those hated and dreaded land-slides
had come and slid Morgan’s ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns and
everything down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single
vestige of his property, to a depth of about thirty-eight feet. Morgan
was in possession and refused to vacate the premises–said he was
occupying his own cabin and not interfering with anybody else’s–and said
the cabin was standing on the same dirt and same ranch it had always
stood on, and he would like to see anybody make him vacate.
“And when I reminded him,” said Hyde, weeping, “that it was on top of my
ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal meanness to ask me
why didn’t I stay on my ranch and hold possession when I see him
a-coming! Why didn’t I stay on it, the blathering lunatic–by George,
when I heard that racket and looked up that hill it was just like the
whole world was a-ripping and a-tearing down that mountain side–
splinters, and cord-wood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and
ends of hay stacks, and awful clouds of dust!–trees going end over end
in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping ’bout a thousand feet high
and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and
a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!–and
in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed Morgan on
his gate-post, a-wondering why I didn’t stay and hold possession! Laws