Interval of two years The final dictation

Interval of two years
The final dictation, beginning January 9, 1906.Present Mr. Clemens, Mr. Paine,Miss Hobby, stenographer.
Chapter 28
Mr.Clemens to Mr. Paine(January 9, 1906)The more I think of this [the biography], the more nearly impossible the project seems. The difficulties of it grow upon me all the time. For instance, the idea of blocking out a consecutive series of events which have happened to me, or which I imagine have happened to me--I can see that that is impossible for me. The only thing possible for me is to talk about the thing that something suggests at the moment--something in the middle of my life, perhaps, or something that happened only a few months ago. It is my purpose to extend these notes to 600,000 words, and possibly more. But that is going to take a long time--a long time.My idea is this: that I write an autobiography. When that autobiography is finished--or before it is finished, but no doubt after it is finished--then you take the manuscript and decide on how much of a biography to make. But this is no holiday excursion--it is a journey.We will try this--see whether it is dull or interesting--whether it will bore us and we will want to commit suicide. I hate to get at it. I hate to begin, but I imagine if you are here to make suggestions from time to time, we can make it go along, instead of having it drag.Now let me see, there was something I wanted to talk about, and I supposed it would stay in my head. I know what it is--about the Big Bonanza in Nevada.I want to read from the commercial columns of the New York Times, of a day or two ago, what practically was the beginning of the great Bonanza in Nevada, and these details seem to me to be correct--that in Nevada, during 1871, John Mackay and Fair got control of the Consolidated Virginia Mine for $26,000; that in 1873, two years later, its 108,000 shares sold at $45 per share; and that it was at that time that Fair made the famous silver ore find of the great Bonanza. Also, according to these statistics, in November, '74 the stock went to 115, and in the following month--January, '75--it reached 700. The shares of the companion mine, the California, rose in four months from 37 to 780--a total property which in 1869 was valued on the Mining Exchange at $40,000, was quoted six years later at $160,000,000. I think those dates are correct. That great Bonanza occupies a rather prominent place in my mind for the reason that I knew persons connected with it. For instance, I knew John Mackay very well--that would be in 1862, '63, and '64, I should say. I don't remember what he was doing when I came to Virginia in 1862, from starving to death down in the so-called mines of Esmeralda, which consisted in that day merely of silver-bearing quartz--plenty of bearing, and didn't have much load to carry in the way of silver--and it was a happy thing for me when I was summoned to come up to Virginia City to be local editor of the Virginia City Enterprise during three months, while Mr. William H. Wright (Dan de Quille) should go east, to Iowa, and visit his family, whom he hadn't seen for some years. I took the position of local editor with joy, because there was a salary of forty dollars a week attached to it and I knew that that was all of forty dollars more than I was worth, and I had always wanted a position which paid in the opposite proportion of value to amount of work. I took that position with pleasure, not with confidence--but I had a difficult job--a difficult job. I was to furnish one column of leaded nonpareil every day, and as much more as I could get on paper before the paper should go to press at two o'clock in the morning. By and by, in the course of a few months, I met John Mackay, with whom I had already been well acquainted for some time. He had established a broker's office on C Street, in a new frame house, and it was rather sumptuous for that day and place, for it had part of a carpet on the floor and two chairs instead of a candle box. I was envious of Mackay, who had not been in such very smooth circumstances as this before, and I offered to trade places with him--take his business and let him have mine--and he asked me how much mine was worth. I said forty dollars a week. He said: "I never swindled anybody in my life, and I don't want to begin on you. This business of mine is not worth forty dollars a week. You stay where you are and I will try to get a living out of this."I left Nevada in 1864 to avoid a term in the penitentiary (in another chapter I shall have to explain that) so that it was all of ten years, apparently, before John Mackay developed suddenly into the first of the hundred-millionaires. Apparently his prosperity began in '71--that discovery was made in '71. I know how it was made. I remember those details, for they came across the country to me in Hartford. There was a tunnel 1,700 feet long which struck in from way down on the slope of the mountain and passed under some portion of Virginia City, at a great depth. It was striking for a lode which it did not find, and I think it had been long abandoned. Now it was in groping around in that tunnel that Mr. Fair (afterward U. S. Senator and great multi-millionaire, who was at that time a day laborer working with pick and shovel at five dollars a day)--groping around in that abandoned tunnel to see what he could find--no doubt looking for cross lodes and blind veins--came across a body of rich ore--so the story ran--and he came and reported that to John Mackay. They examined this body of rich ore and found that there was a very great deposit of it. They prospected it in the usual way and proved its magnitude and that it was extremely rich. They thought it was a "chimney," belonging probably to the California, away up on the mountain-side, which had an abandoned shaft--or possibly the Virginia mine which was not worked then--nobody caring anything about the Virginia, an empty mine. And these men determined that this body of ore properly belonged to the California mine and by some trick of nature had been shaken down the mountain-side. They got O'Brien--who was a silver expert in San Francisco--to come in as capitalist, and they bought up a controlling interest in that abandoned mine, and no doubt got it at that figure--$26,000--six years later to be worth $160,000,000.As I say, I was not there. I had been here in the East, six, seven, or eight years--but friends of mine were interested. John P. Jones, who has lately resigned as U. S. Senator after an uninterrupted term of perhaps thirty years--John P. Jones was not a Senator yet, but was living in San Francisco. And he had a great affection for a couple of old friends of mine--Joseph T. Goodman and Dennis McCarthy. They had been proprietors of that paper that I served--the Virginia City Enterprise--and had enjoyed great prosperity in that position. They were young journeymen printers, typesetting in San Francisco in 1858, and they went over the mountains--the Sierras--for they heard of the discovery of silver in that unknown region of Nevada, to push their fortunes. When they arrived at that miserable little camp, Virginia City, they had no money to push their fortunes with. They had only youth, energy, hope. They found Williams there ("Stud" Williams was his society name), who had started a weekly newspaper, and he had one journeyman, who set up the paper, and printed it on a hand press with Williams's help and the help of a Chinaman--and they all slept in one room--cooked and slept and worked, and disseminated intelligence in this paper of theirs. Well, Williams was in debt fourteen dollars. He didn't see any way to get out of it with his newspaper, and so he sold the paper to Dennis McCarthy and Goodman for two hundred dollars, they to assume the debt of fourteen dollars and to pay the $200, in this world or the next--there was no definite promise about that. But as Virginia City developed they discovered new mines, new people began to flock in, and there was talk of a faro bank and a church and all those things that go to make a frontier Christian city, and there was vast prosperity there, and Goodman and Dennis reaped the advantage of that. Their prosperity was so great that they built a three-story brick building, which was a wonderful thing for that town, and their business increased so mightily that they would often plant out eleven columns of new ads on a standing galley and leave them there to sleep and rest and breed income. When any man objected, after searching the paper in the hope of seeing his advertisement, they would say. "We are doing the best we can." Now and then the advertisements would appear, but the standing galley was doing its work all the time. But after a time, when that territory was turned into a state, in order to furnish office for some people who needed office, their paper, from paying those boys twenty to forty thousand dollars a year, had ceased to pay anything. I suppose they were very glad to get rid of it, and probably on the old terms, to some journeyman who was willing to take the old fourteen dollars indebtedness and pay it when he could.These boys went down to San Francisco, setting type again. They were delightful fellows, always ready for a good time, and that meant that everybody got their money except themselves. And when the Bonanza was about to be discovered Joe Goodman arrived here from somewhere that he'd been--I suppose trying to make business, or a livelihood, or something--and he came to see me to borrow three hundred dollars to take him out to San Francisco. And if I remember rightly he had no prospect in front of him at all, but thought he would be more likely to find it out there among the old friends, and he went to San Francisco. He arrived there just in time to meet Jones (afterwards U. S. Senator), who was a delightful man. Jones met him and said privately, "There has been a great discovery made in Nevada, and I am on the inside." Dennis was setting type in one of the offices there. He was married and was building a wooden house to cost $1,800, and he had paid a part and was building it on installments out of his wages. And Jones said: "I am going to put you and Dennis in privately on the big Bonanza. I am on the inside, I will watch it, and we will put this money up on a margin. Therefore when I say it is time to sell, it will be very necessary to sell." So he put up 20-per-cent margins for those two boys--and that is the time when this great spurt must have happened which sent that stock up to the stars in one flight--because, as the history was told to me by Joe Goodman, when that thing happened Jones said to Goodman and Dennis:"Now then, sell. You can come out $600,000 ahead, each of you, and that is enough. Sell.""No," Joe objected, "it will go higher."Jones said: "I am on the inside; you are not. Sell."Joe's wife implored him to sell. He wouldn't do it. Dennis's family implored him to sell. Dennis wouldn't sell. And so it went on during two weeks. Each time the stock made a flight Jones tried to get the boys to sell. They wouldn't do it. They said, "It is going higher." When he said, "Sell at $900,000," they said, "No. It will go to million."Then the stock began to go down very rapidly. After a little, Joe sold, and he got out with $600,000 cash, Dennis waited for the million, but he never got a cent. His holding was sold for the "mud"--so that he came out without anything and had to begin again setting type.That is the story as it was told to me many years ago--I imagine by Joe Goodman; I don't remember now. Dennis, by and by, died poor--never got a start again.Joe Goodman immediately went into the broker business. Six hundred thousand dollars was just good capital. He wasn't in a position to retire yet. And he sent me the $300, and said that now he had started in the broking business and that he was making an abundance of money. I didn't hear any more then for a long time; then I learned that he had not been content with mere broking, but had speculated on his own account and lost everything he had. And when that happened, John Mackay, who was always a good friend of the unfortunate, lent him $4,000 to buy a grape ranch with, in Fresno County, and Joe went up there. He didn't know anything about the grape culture, but he and his wife learned it in a very little while. He learned it a little better than anybody else, and got a good living out of it until 1886 or '87; then he sold it for several times what he paid for it originally.He was here a year ago and I saw him. He lives in the garden of California--in Alameda. Before this Eastern visit he had been putting in twelve years of his time in the most unpromising and difficult and stubborn study that anybody has undertaken since Champollion's time; for he undertook to find out what those sculptures mean that they find down there in the forests of Central America. And he did find out and published a great book, the result of his twelve years of study. In this book he furnishes the meanings of those hieroglyphs, and his position as a successful expert in that complex study is recognized by the scientists in that line in London and Berlin and elsewhere. But he is no better known than he was before--he is known only to those people. His book was published in about 1901.This account in the New York Times says that in consequence of that strike in the great Bonanza a tempest of speculation ensued, and that the group of mines right around that center reached a value in the stock market of close upon $400,000,000; and six months after that, that value had been reduced by three-quarters; and by 1880, five years later, the stock of the Consolidated Virginia was under $2 a share, and the stock in the California was only $1.75--for the Bonanza was now confessedly exhausted.