ver, about a man who came out there from the East to be a miner.
He began digging under a tree because it was shady. People passed by and
laughed at him. He kept on digging. After a while he sent a waggon load
of the dust to be assayed, and there was $9,000 worth of metal in it. He
retired with a fortune.

A man with $3,000 and good health could have gone West in 1880, invested
it in cattle, and made a fortune. San Francisco was only forty-five
years old then, Denver thirty-five, Leadville sixteen, Kansas City
thirty-five. They looked a hundred at least. Leadville was then a place
of palatial hotels, elegant churches, boulevards and streets. The West
was just aching to show how fast it could build cities. Leadville was
the most lied about. It was reported that I explored Leadville till long
after midnight, looking at its wickedness. I didn't. All the exploring I
did in Leadville was in about six minutes, from the wide open doors of
the gambling houses on two of the main streets; but the next day it was
telegraphed all over the United States. There were more telephones in
Leadville in 1880 than in any other city in the United States, to its
population. Some of the best people of Brooklyn and New York lived
there. The newspaper correspondents lost money in the gambling houses
there, and so they didn't like Leadville, and told the world it was a
bad place, which was a misrepresentation. It is a well known law of
human nature that a man usually hates a place where he did not behave
well. I found perfect order there, to my surprise. There was a vigilance
committee in Leadville composed of bankers and merchants. It was their
business to give a too cumbrous law a boost. The week before I got to
Leadville this committee hanged two men. The next day eighty scoundrels
took the hint and left Leadville. A great institution was the vigilance
committee of those early Western days. They saved San Francisco, and
Cheyenne, and Leadville. I wish they had been in Brooklyn when I was
there. The West was not slow to assimilate the elegancies of life
either. There were beautiful picture galleries in Omaha, and Denver, and
Sacramento, and San Francisco. There was more elaboration and
advancement of dress in the West than there was in the East in 1880. The
cravats of the young men in Cheyenne were quite as surprising, and the
young ladies of Cheyenne went down the street with the elbow wabble,
then fashionable in New York. San Francisco was Chi