n, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive
newspaper policy. Being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond
the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely
free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon
knowledge. His instructions to the new reporter were about as follows:

"Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and
so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out
and say it is so and so. In the one case you are likely to be shot, and
in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the
public confidence."

Goodman was not new to the West. He had come to California as a boy and
had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns. Early
in '61, when the Comstock Lode--[Named for its discoverer, Henry T.
P. Comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his
stupendous find.]--was new and Virginia in the first flush of its
monster boom, he and Denis McCarthy had scraped together a few dollars
and bought the paper. It had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a
while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty
the Enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift
compositors brought up from San Francisco, had become altogether
metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the Coast.
It had been borne upward by the Comstock tide, though its fearless,
picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere. Goodman
himself was a fine, forceful writer, and Dan de Quille and R. M. Daggett
(afterward United States minister to Hawaii) were representative
of Enterprise men.--[The Comstock of that day became famous for its
journalism. Associated with the Virginia papers then or soon afterward
were such men as Tom Fitch (the silver-tongued orator), Alf Doten, W.
J. Forbes, C. C. Goodwin, H. R. Mighels, Clement T. Rice, Arthur McEwen,
and Sam Davis--a great array indeed for a new Territory.]--Samuel
Clemens fitted precisely into this group. He added the fresh, rugged
vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the
Comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a
more lavish, more overwhelming scale.

There was no uncertainty about the Comstock; the silver and gold were
there. Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill
and Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed an