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Mark Twain and Gold Fever Gold fever was epidemic in the nineteenth-century West, inspiring masses of people to flow like the tides. These “mining rushes” could suddenly swell the location of a strike, which was just as likely to dissipate with the realization that the boom was a bust. Those with experience recognized that the excitement of a mining “bonanza” was typically little more than a fraud. Such shrewd players usually relocated or bought stock only when there was certainty in the enterprise. More often, it was the novice who responded with ignorant enthusiasm to such excitement. Samuel Clemens was taken in by just such mining excitement. Gold fever grasped him early in his stay in Nevada in 1862. For a fleeting moment, he fashioned himself to be richer than he hoped possible. He was neither the first nor the last to succumb to gold fever, but unlike many others he was able to describe it eloquently. The following is taken from Roughing It, Clemens’s semiautobiographical recollection of his stay in Nevada and the West. Although he is more famous for his experience with Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, where he took the name Mark Twain, Clemens traveled through much of the Nevada Territory. He examined prospects in Aurora on the Nevada-California border, and he did some mining in Unionville, then the county seat of Humboldt County. He failed miserably and found mining to be hard, dirty work. The experience inspired him to find an occupation that would demand less of him. He turned to writing. —Ronald M. James By and by I was smitten with the silver fever. “Prospecting parties” were leaving for the mountains every day, and discovering and taking possession of rich silver-bearing lodes and ledges of quartz. Plainly this was the road to fortune . The great “Gould and Curry” mine was held at three or four hundred dollars a foot when we arrived; but in two months it had sprung up to eight The Comstock 4 33 3 4 | u n c o v e r i n g n e v a d a ’ s p a s t hundred. The “Ophir” had been worth only a mere trifle, a year gone by, and now it was selling at nearly four thousand dollars a foot! Not a mine could be named that had not experienced an astonishing advance in value within a short time. Everybody was talking about these marvels. Go where you would, you heard nothing else, from morning till far into the night. Tom So-and-So had sold out of the “Amanda Smith” for $40,000—hadn’t a cent when he “took up” the ledge six months ago. John Jones had sold half his interest in the “Bald Eagle and Mary Ann” for $65,000, gold coin, and gone to the States for his family. The widow Brewster had “struck it rich” in the “Golden Fleece” and sold ten feet for $18,000—hadn’t money enough to buy a crepe bonnet when Sing-Sing Tommy killed her husband at Baldy Johnson’s wake last spring. The “Last Chance” had found a “clay casing” and knew they were “right on the ledge”—consequence, “feet” that went begging yesterday were worth a brick house apiece today, and seedy owners who could not get trusted for a drink at any bar in the country yesterday were roaring drunk on champagne today and had hosts of warm personal friends in a town where they had forgotten how to bow or shake hands from long-continued want of practice. Johnny Morgan, a common loafer, had gone to sleep in the gutter and waked up worth a hundred thousand dollars, in consequence of the decision in the “Lady Franklin and Rough and Ready” lawsuit. And so on—day in and day out the talk pelted our ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us. I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest. Cart-loads of solid silver bricks, as large as pigs of lead, were arriving from the mills everyday, and such sights as that gave substance to the wild talk about me. I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest. Every few days, news would come of the discovery of a brand-new mining region; immediately the papers would teem with accounts of its richness, and away the surplus populations would scamper to take possession. By the...

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