hat!
Six years after the openin' o' the Gould & Curry, there was 57 miles
o' tunnels, all in rich ore, an' the owners had to work it like a coal
mine, leavin' great pillars o' silver to prop up the roof!

"A telegraph line was run through an' that made Virginia City ten
times worse. It weren't a town o' miners, rightly, not like a gold
placer camp. Silver ore needs capital to work it, an' Virginia City
become a town o' loose fish, speculators, crooked brokers, an'
suckers. One man sold the Eureka mine to eight different people at the
same time, an' he'd never even seen the place an' didn't own a claim
in it. He pocketed eighty thousand dollars in eight days an' was
strung up to the limb of a pine-tree the ninth!

"There was some good work done, though. Durin' 1861 an' 1862
road-makers was busy, though laborers was gettin' fancy prices. But
the engineers kep' at it, an' afore the winter o' '62, there was a
wide road where two eight-mule coaches could cross each other at full
gallop without slacking the traces. Tolls were high, so high that the
road-makers got all their money back in the first year. Crack coaches
with relays made the trail from Sacramento to Virginia City in twelve
hours, instead of six weeks, like it was first. Hold-ups were frequent
an' plenty, but a 'road agent' didn't last long where every one
carried a gun.

"Then come the 'year o' nabobs,' that was '63. The Comstock Lode put
out over $26,000,000 in silver bullion alone, half-a-million dollars
o' silver every week in the year. By that time there was forty big
minin' plants operatin' wi' steam machinery. There weren't no place
for a small man any more, unless he wanted to do minin' on days'
wages, an' mighty few o' the early prospectors ever got any o' the
later wealth o' the Comstock. Father, he wouldn't touch silver, nohow,
but he made more'n the miners did by pannin' the dirt the mines were
throwin' away. They were makin' so much money out o' silver that they
wouldn't bother to take out the gold.

"Then come the first big smash. Half o' the mines sold to the suckers
weren't worth shucks. Wild-cat mines, they called 'em. There was one,
the Little Monte Cristo, which give the promoter half a million
dollars in shares which he sold to folk in New York an' Philadelphy.
An' they never made more'n an 8-foot pit in it an' didn't take out
enough bullion to melt down into a silver spoon!

"What was worse, the big mines got down to the rock water-level