vy!

"From Sacramento up the old emigrant trail to Placerville weren't no
gentle stroll in winter time! From Placerville to the bottom o'
Johnson Pass was a trail for timber wolves, not for humans. Snow lay
thick. Winds, fit to freeze a b'ar, come a-howlin' down the high
Sierras. A few men got through an' froze to death on Mount Davidson,
the silver actooally ticklin' the soles o' their feet. Some got caught
in slow-slides in the Johnson Pass an' their bodies didn't show up
till June. A lot more died o' starvation an' exposure on the way.

"That didn't keep the rest from comin'. They fair stormed the Pass. In
March there was a thaw, an' the flood o' men broke through.

"It was a bad crowd. Aside from decent prospectors and miners, there
was a pack o' gamblers, saloon-keepers, 'bad men,' fake speculators,
an' all the rest o' the human buzzards that follow on the heels of a
rush. They remembered the first days o' the forty-niners, an' every
bad egg in Californy wanted to be the first to murder an' to rob. In
three weeks, the silent an' deserted slopes o' Mount Davidson was
peppered wi' tents. Virginia City had been started an' had become a
roarin' town.

"That wasn't a minin' camp, it was a hell-hole. I've seen tough joints
in my day, but Virginia City beat all. It wasn't jest the miners lost
their heads, but experts, geologists, an' all, went plumb crazy.
'Twasn't much wonder. That black rock was jest one continooal bonanza.
A gold mine was a fool to it.

"The ore in one of the shafts--the Potosi Chimney, it was called--was
rangin' steadily over a hundred dollars a ton silver, an' that shaft
alone was bringin' up 650 tons a day. Three prospectors tapped the big
lode at another point, near Esmeralda, worked a week an' took six
thousand dollars apiece for their claims. The man who bought first
rights on Esmeralda, sold them before the end or that summer, for a
quarter of a million. An' yet McLaughlin an' O'Riley havin' given up
their claims to Comstock, got nothin' out of it. As for Comstock, he
filed a false claim of ownership which the courts wouldn' give him,
an' he went down an' out.

"The Gould & Curry mine, one o' the richest, was bought from its
finders for an old horse, a bottle o' lightnin'-rod whisky, three
blankets, an' two thousand dollars in cash. After four millions had
been taken out of it, an Eastern syndicate come along an' bought it
for seven millions o' dollars--an' they made money out of it, at t