Roughing It - Mark Twain (most important books to read .txt) 📗

yard of fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and run. When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air, we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz jolted out. Nothing more. One week of this satisfied me. I resigned. Clagget and Oliphant followed. Our shaft was only twelve feet deep. We decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted.

So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge. I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer. We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted. We wanted a ledge that was already “developed.” There were none in the camp.

We dropped the “Monarch” for the time being.

Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly growing excitement about our Humboldt mines. We fell victims to the epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more “feet.” We prospected and took up new claims, put “notices” on them and gave them grandiloquent names. We traded some of our “feet” for “feet” in other people’s claims. In a little while we owned largely in the “Gray Eagle,” the “Columbiana,” the “Branch Mint,” the “Maria Jane,” the “Universe,” the “Root-Hog-or-Die,” the “Samson and Delilah,” the “Treasure Trove,” the “Golconda,” the “Sultana,” the “Boomerang,” the “Great Republic,” the “Grand Mogul,” and fifty other “mines” that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched with a pick. We had not less than thirty thousand “feet” apiece in the “richest mines on earth” as the frenzied cant phrased it⁠—and were in debt to the butcher. We were stark mad with excitement⁠—drunk with happiness⁠—smothered under mountains of prospective wealth⁠—arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous canyon⁠—but our credit was not good at the grocer’s.

It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a beggars’ revel. There was nothing doing in the district⁠—no mining⁠—no milling⁠—no productive effort⁠—no income⁠—and not enough money in the entire camp to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires. Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil⁠—rocks. Nothing but rocks. Every man’s pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was littered with them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves.

XXX

I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand “feet” in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars⁠—and as often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in the world. Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his “specimens” ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part with just a few feet in the “Golden Age,” or the “Sarah Jane,” or some other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a “square meal” with, as the phrase went. And you were never to reveal that he had made you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an eyeglass to it, and exclaim:

“Look at that! Right there in that red dirt! See it? See the specks of gold? And the streak of silver? That’s from the ‘Uncle Abe.’ There’s a hundred thousand tons like that in sight! Right in sight, mind you! And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the richest thing in the world! Look at the assay! I don’t want you to believe me⁠—look at the assay!”

Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton. I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of rock and get it assayed! Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert, was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it⁠—and yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton of rubbish it came from!

On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy. On the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondents were frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton!

And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses incurred? Everybody’s head was full of such “calculations” as those⁠—such raving insanity, rather. Few people took work into their calculations⁠—or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures of other people.

We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again. Why? Because we judged that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining⁠—which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by