days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred
miles to Unionville, Humboldt County, arriving at last in a driving
snow-storm. Unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the
bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other.
They were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by
the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton. Stones used to roll down
on them sometimes, and Mark Twain tells of live stock--specifically of
a mule and cow--that interrupted the patient, long-suffering Oliver, who
was trying to write poetry, and only complained when at last "an entire
cow came rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a
shapeless wreck of everything."--['The Innocents Abroad.']

Judge Oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow. He says
there were no cows in Humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a
literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. Judge Oliver's
name will go down with it to posterity.

In the letter which Samuel Clemens wrote home he tells of what they
found in Unionville.

"National" there was selling at $50 per foot and assayed $2,496 per
ton at the mint in San Francisco. And the "Alda Nueva," "Peru,"
"Delirio," "Congress," "Independent," and others were immensely rich
leads. And moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get
"feet" enough to make us all rich one of these days.

"I confess with shame," says the author of 'Roughing It', "that I
expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground." And he
adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own
account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden
specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and
how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold. His account
in 'Roughing It' of the Humboldt mining experience is sufficiently
good history to make detail here unnecessary. Tillou instructed them
in prospecting, and in time they located a fairly promising claim.
They went to work on it with pick and shovel, then with drill and
blasting-powder. Then they gave it up.

"One week of this satisfied me. I resigned."

They tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again. It was pleasanter to
prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new
ledge than it was to dig-and about as profitable. The golden reports of
Humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich