The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain (good book recommendations .TXT) 📕

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 mountainside, 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 mountainside. 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,