Ten years later, the California placers were becoming exhausted, and
miners began to go elsewhere in their search for gold.

Among those who were working in what is now the State of Nevada were
two Irishmen who had been unlucky in California and had fared no
better in Nevada. They wanted to go somewhere else, but they had not
money enough for the journey; so they kept on with their work at the
foot of Mount Davidson, washing the gravel and saving the little gold
that they found. They were annoyed by some heavy black stuff that
united with the quicksilver in their cradles, interfered with the
saving of the gold, and put them in a very bad temper. At length a man
named Henry Comstock came along, who told them that this black stuff
was silver ore. They examined the mountain-side, and discovered the
outcrop or edge of a great vein containing gold and also silver. It is
no wonder that people rushed from the east and west to the wonderful
new mines, for it was plain that these new "diggings" were not mere
placers, but rich veins that many years of working might not exhaust.
Every newcomer hoped to discover a vein; and within a year or two the
district around the Comstock lode was full of deep shafts, many of
them abandoned and half-hidden by low brush, but some of them yielding
quantities of gold and silver. Before this, there had been only about
a thousand people in what is now Nevada, but in two years after the
discovery of silver, there were 16,000, and a new Territory was
formed.

The miners knew how to get gold out of ore, but silver was another
matter, and some of it was difficult to extract. They had so much
trouble that they were ready to believe in any treatment of the ore,
no matter how absurd, that promised to help them out of their
difficulties. Some of them were actually persuaded that the juice of
the wild sagebrush would bring the silver out. It is no wonder that
they were troubled, for in the Comstock lode were not only gold and
silver, but ten or twelve other metals or combinations of silver with
something else. At length processes were invented for treating the
different kinds of ore. Some kinds were crushed in a stamping mill,
then ground to a powder and mixed with quicksilver or mercury. This
mercury united with both the gold and the silver, making an amalgam.
The amalgam, together with the finely ground ore, was put into a
"settler," and here the heavy amalgam sank to the bottom and was then
strained.