d even thousands of dollars. To make money,
and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.

Every man owned "feet" in fifty different wild cat mines and considered
his fortune made. Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!
One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a
wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not
located on the mother vein, i.e., the "Comstock") yielded a ton of rock
worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting
too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought
of such a thing. They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.

New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run
straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty
"feet," and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of
it. They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said
something. Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect
that the "indications" were good, or that the ledge was "six feet wide,"
or that the rock "resembled the Comstock" (and so it did--but as a
general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you
down). If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of
the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very
marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a
"developed" one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn't), we
praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in
the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out
of ecstasies--but never said a word about the rock. We would squander
half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed
pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of
admiration of the "gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent" of the mine
--but never utter a whisper about the rock. And those people were always
pleased, always satisfied. Occasionally we patched up and varnished our
reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving
some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones
rattle--and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting
notoriety thus conferred upon it.

There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable.
We received presents of "feet" every day