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Show IJ II EaLirly Jt&x-&.tiLxx& of Nevada I By O. C. O. If In the days -when the Comstock was first H, - opened; when the news from every camp in Ne- I vada was of new discoveries of silver and gold; B when the whole coast was wild with excitement, B and when hostlers and servant girls and ladies of B high degree and ministers of the gospel were all B dealing in stocks; when the delirium swept over B the coast that we would all be millionaires by B and by; when from the Comstock great struc- ir tures were being built in San Francisco and in Hi the east; when from that same great lode new B life was given to San Francisco and the city be- B gan to grow in earnest; when everybody was a B prospective millionaire, there were still some peo- pie left who thought more of a grand oration, or 5 of a lovely poem, or of an intellectual achieve- . ment anywhere in literature than they did of gold H and silver. And Nevada had her full ratio of that B class of people. H There was a little lady in Nevada named Miss H Carmichael, who every week or two furnished a H poem for some little newspaper, which was as H sweet and beautiful as ever was written. A few Hi years later her mind became disordered and H; t when she died her reason had gone altogether. H' The writer knows a man who is practically blind, H but about once every minute or two a flash of H light comes to his eyes which enables him to Hj walk about by himself, and the thought has often H; come that the mind of Miss Carmichael was like H. the eyes of this man, only the flashes that came H to her mind were pure gold and she seemed to H write some things higher and sweeter than any B1 sane mortal could. I am sorry I have not a copy H of one or two of her poems that I might give to B the readers of the WEEKLY, a sample of the Hi'' wonderful genius of the woman. I say genius, I B - suspect a better word would be glimpses of her B own soul, and now that the tabernacle of her Bf body has fallen away it is to be hoped that that B' soul is untrammeled and in some happier land B is making joy for all that are near. B Down in the little camp of Hot Creek in those B first days there lived a genius named Dr. Gaily. B In his youth he was trained as an engineer. Later B he perfected himself as a surgeon dentist, but B when he came west he drove a big team across B the plains and everything after that that he wrote B ' he signed "Single Line," being a reference to the i single lino that he used when he drove his mules, ,k and in honor of that fact. He wrote wonderful articles for the newspapers. Later he wote a . ' book which was full of meat from cove w cover. i He was a splendid judge of literature; he had - ' read everything; he seemed to know everything. i " In private life he was the most lovable -of men. r , When he came west his thought was like every a other eastern man's, that if he could make a little I p- stake he would go back to his native Ohio and H il become one of her citizens, and I suspect that he I ' had in his soul the thought that he might aspire H I l to something high. He was a little provincial 11 when he first came and it used to annoy him ex- I j ceedingly to hear old Californians tell about Cal- I , ifornia. He did not believe in it at all, but after MS a while he found a little mine down at Tybo and IIL in a couple of years he made a "big little" for- E tune out of it, more than he ever dreamed of pos- ftf sessing, and then when he obtained this fortune, IK before settling anywnere else, he conceded to lift make one visit to California. The writer of thin IK found him In San Francisco. He was rushing X down Bush street, looking neither to right nor lji left, when the writer said, 'Which way, Doctor?'' Ill;' Then he stopped, and ne said, "I have just come rV in off a boat race on the bay. I went up three Bah miles and hired a boat and we came down at rail- IHH road speed. A fresh breeze was blowing and lB blowing stronger and stronger every moment and it got to be lively before we reached here, but we were only a mile from shore and my thought was if the boat went over or under I could swim that mile, and just now I am going down here to the corner of Sampson and Market street because I heard an outdoor preacher there discussing religion re-ligion yesterday. He did not reach any point. Ho said he would be back again today at two o'clock, and I am going to hear him and if his sermon today is as it was yesterday, if he goes all over the field and then does not reach 4any point, I am going to get up after he gets through and tell that crowd down there what infernal sinners they are and how they need salvation. My belief Is I can make a hit, the d d biggest kind of a hit." And the doctor never left California. Cali-fornia. He wandered down about Holister and bought him a grape ranch, and when I met him three years later he could tell me all the vagabond vaga-bond parasites that ever afflicted grapes, all the parasites that ever played havoc with peaches and plums and apples and what investigations he was making to do up those parasites so that every man could rest in peace under his own vine and fig tree. And he toiled on there until his summons sum-mons came, and my belief is that in some other land he is doing a little preaching, a great deal of writing, and that if any trees grow around his door, he Is watching them every day to see if there is not some parasite that he can murder. After Tom Fitch had been in Virginia City a little while in the early sixties, he with his gifted wife decided that that would be a good field to start a literary magazine. He went to consult Mark Twain about it and the answer Mark made was something like this: "Tom, I think you would come as near making a success as anybody any-body could, but plant roses in the middle of the Sahara? Take a swarm of bees to Hibla? Set out an apple orchard in the vale of Cashmere? Start a literary paper in Virginia City? H I" But the paper was started. The first numbers were complete successes. Mrs. Fitch had written writ-ten her beautiful apostrophe to the flag, which drew attention to her. That happened this way. Some young men dragged a flagstaff to the top of Mt. Davidson on the eve of the Fourth of July, set the pole up, ran the flag up to the peak, and the next morning as the sun came up from out of the desert to the east, that flag was turned to gold and it was a spectacle so splendid that half the men and women in Virginia City stopped their usual avocations to look at it. Well, Mrs. Fitch took up the idea that it would be good to write a story in Ave numbers, and consulting with Daggett and Goodman and Twain, it was agreed to. Mrs. Fitch wrote the opening article. She was followed by Daggett. That got the story pretty well outlined. Then Fitch himself wrote the third article. The next was written by Joe Goodman, but when Mark Twain wrote his article there was nothing to do but to suppress the magazine. None of them talked very much about that afterwards, but Daggett Dag-gett intimated one day to the writer of this that the story was beautifully begun, so engagingly written, so gathering in strength as it went on, it caused all the people to be anxious to see how the characters would Anally adjust themselves, but when Mark Twain's Anal article was supplied, sup-plied, as said above, there was nothing to do but to suppress the magazine, because Mark caused to hero of the story to turn out to be about the toughest of the tougu and the heroine he went back into her history and when he wrote it up it was a clear casehat if she were to come to Virginia City in person, no respectable house in that town would be open to her. It was a painful ending to a rosy dream and was another proof that "the results of as campaign do not always come up to the sounding phrases of the manifesto." mani-festo." About the brightest of them all was Joe Goodman. Good-man. He was a plodding, slow writer, but when his work was Anished there was not a word to change nor a punctuation point, and some things he wrote were beautiful beyond description. As nearly everyone in Nevada knew him in the old days, perhaps it would be well enough to give one verse of one poem that he wrote, as follows: "Golden Jaees and butterflies, Ranging under other skies, Have you seen my lover there Did you know him, brave and fair? Said he when he came this way, In a year or in a day? When again you sip the flowers 'Round that future home of ours, Tell him he will find me, Leal, Sitting by my spinning wheel, Watching o'er the mountain rim, Keeping all my love for him, Holding beings in suspense Till he comes to take me hence." And when Joe wrote that he was wondering a'l the time whether he had better unload Nor-crosse Nor-crosse and buy Gould and Curry, or whether it would do to sell Con. Virginia short, and what the 'atest developments were in the lower levels" of the Yellow Jacket. There was a lawyer in Virginia City named Rhodes. He plodded away at his profession, he dealt in stocks, he was dreaming all the time that when he got rich he would have a home in the golden state, but about once a week he would J write something because he had to and it was al- J ways magniflcent. He used to sign his communl- I cations "Caxton," and in those days he was known from Siskiyou to San Diego, as the old say- ing was, and if what he wrote was not of the very highest, there was none of it that was not high, for he was a Anished scholar, a born poet and a great-souled man. Another wonderful genius of those days was William H. Claggett. He lived out in Humboldt. He was a lawyer, he was an impractical business busi-ness man, but unless we except Tom Fitch, he was the Anest speaker that ever made his home in Nevada. He was not a voluminous writer, but when an oration was needed to stir the depths of men's souls to the very bottom, no one could do it better. He drifted away at last to Montana and was sent to Congress from that state. He always lived more or less in dream-'and. At one time he got rich in Ave minutes. He explained to a friend that on the east shore of Virginia there was plenty of worn-out land and all that was needed to restore it to its pristine fertility was a deep coating of the alkali from the desert of Nevada. He Agured up that land could be 1 bought down there for ?2 to ?3 per acre, that a ,. coating six inches deep of alkali would at once make the soil worth perhaps ?40 an acre. He dreamed of a proAt of ?37 an acre on no end of land, until one day a friend said to him, "How much will six inches deep of alkali on an acre of land weigh?" He Agured it out in a moment, told how many tons, then the friend pulled the old Central PaciAc schedule on him, showing its rates for freight, and he discovered suddenly that to take that land at ?3 an acre and make it very valuable, worth $40, t would cost him at least $80 an acre for the fertilizer, and he gave up that scheme. He had the same idea Ubout an apple orchard in Oregon. , A hundred trees to the acre and a hundred acres would make 10,000 trees. Each one would give two bushels of apples after hB i the seventh year. That would be" 20,000" ffushels B I of apples and they in New York would be worth HH h ?2 a bushel and would make $40,000 a year clear I profits. Again he forgot about the freights and H when he figured them up he decided Oregon was fl too damp a country. But when it came to talking m ' on great themes presented in the most perfect i English and with an eloquence that would have made Cicero envious, there was no superior to W. H. Claggett. He would have been elected as Sen- H I ator from Idaho where he finally lived and died, H except that with the stubbornness of his nature, P after the legislature was elected and it wanted T t elect him in turn, he insisted on handling the B campaign himself, and it came out exactly as did 1 his fertilizer and his Oregon apples. But he was H ( a genius and one of the most lovable of men. iOf course, in those days there were a dozen lawyers in Virginia City that could be spurred up to talk magnificently on almost any theme. H Among the foremost perhaps was Frank Tllford. H He was a fine lawyer, and a natural orator, and H on any literary theme he was better than at the H bar. No one could introduce a speaker so well H as Frank Tilford. 1 Another wonderful lawyer and talker was Tod Hf Robinson. He was a long time on the Comstock. K He was as much inclined to literature as he was to H' law, and an idea of the man can be gotten from H one circumstance. He made an argument before H the Supreme Court at Carson. A friend of his H1 said to him two or three days later, "Mr. Robin- Hj son, I heard Judge Brosnon of the Supreme Court Hi say today that the finest argument he ever heard H in court was delivered by you on Wednesday H last." To which, he replied, "Judge Brosnon is H not onlj n honest, but a discerning man. It H1 was the finest argument he ever heard." H Judge Joe Baldwin was a long time in Virginia Hf City practicing his profession. He had been a H, judge in Alabama before California was discov- H ered, or at least, peopled by Americans. He had written a book entitled "Flush Times in Alabama," Ala-bama," which was full of humor. He was by nature na-ture a literary genius, but so careful was he in the practice of his profession that whenever he went into court all the lawyers present knew that the subject in hand would be exhausted by him before he would lose the case. In a suit on a great Spanish land grant in California, In which he was employed, he found it necessary to examine exam-ine the titles in the City of Mexico, and before he began he put himself in training and learned to read and speak Spanish fluently that he might be sure that the records he obtained would be straight and the law governing Spanish titles. John B. Felton practiced law in Virginia City. He was the foremost scholar and literary man in California. He followed the crowd to Virginia City, but he reached there just in time to hear great stories from Reese River, there was richer ore in Austin than on the Comstock, so the boys got half his money for prospects and the other half in assessments and he returned to San Francisco. Fran-cisco. Standing on Montgomery street on one St. Patrick's day with a friend, they watched the procession coming up Montgomery street. Turning Turn-ing to the friend, he suid: "Do you know why that flag reminds me of Reese River?" The friend could see no coincidence. (Of course it was the green flag with the shattered harp.) "Why," said Felton, "It is a plain case. It is made up mostly of shamrock and a blasted liar." Daniel O'Connell was for a while on the Comstock. Com-stock. He was a newspaper man, btu he wrote some wonderful things. Just listen to this, the first stanza of a little poem: "Drunk, Your Honor," the officer said, "Drunk in the street, sir." She raised her head. A lingering trace of the olden grace Still softened the lines of her woeworn face. Unkempt and tangled her rich brown hair, Yet with all the furrows of stain and of care, The years of anguish and slnand despair, The child of the street was passing fair." t Perhaps the finest talker that ever lived in Nevada was Tom Fitch. The coast is still ringing ring-ing with some of the eloquence which he threw off in his younger days, and to remind old readers read-ers of something of his style, we copy a half dozen lines of his speech when called on to speak at the funeral of W. C. Ralston, as fol- . lows : i "His deeds may be heard in tones that sound 4 like the blare of tr'umepts; his monuments rise from every rod of ground in San Francisco; his eulogy is written on ten thousand hearts. Commerce Com-merce commemorates his deeds with her whitened whit-ened sails and her laden wharves; philanthropy sings the chimes of all public charities in attes7 tation of his munificence; patriotism sings paeons for him who in the heart of the nation's struggle sent the singing gold of mercy to chime with the flashing steel of valor. Unnumbered deeds of private generosity attest his secret munificence; munifi-cence; sorrow found solace in his deeds; despair has been lifted into hope by his voice; there are churches whose heaven-kissed spires chronicle his donations; schools claimed him as their patron; hospitals own him as thpir luef actor. He was the supporter of art,; scleiiu ned on him while her vision swept the infi The footsteps of progress have been sandled with his silver. He has upheld invention while she wrestled with the forces of nature. He was the life blood of enterprise; enter-prise; he was the vigor of all progress; he was the epitome and representative of all that was broadening and uplifting in the life of California." |