Devils Will Reign: How Nevada Began

Chapter 9: An Indian for Breakfast and a Pony to Ride, 1860

[126] hey waited, with mounting impatience. On the Comstock they waited, sporadically attempting to scrape away several feet of snow and resume prospecting. In Placerville they waited for the Sierra Nevada snows to retreat. The peripatetic journalist J. Ross Browne, on his way to the place they called Washoe, vividly described the Placerville scene in March: “Every hotel and restaurant was full to overflowing. The streets were blocked up with crowds of adventurers all bound for Washoe. The gambling and drinking saloons were crammed to su≠ocation with customers practicing for Washoe. . . . Mexican vaqueros were driving headstrong mules through the streets on the road to Washoe. . . . In short, there was nothing but Washoe to be seen, heard, or thought of.” Some who could not wait had earlier braved the crossing by laying blankets on the snow for their mules to step on. Fortunately for the eager horde, they faced only ten feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada, with drifts thirty to sixty feet deep, and a blanket of snow on the valleys for only one hundred days.1 Unable to hire a horse, Browne decided to backpack and set out on foot regardless of the lingering snowstorms. At each inn along the way, he rushed with a stampeding crowd to get a meal when a sitting was called. Finding the accommodations worse than the weather as he neared the summit, he continued through the falling snow, repeatedly stumbling into deep holes made by floundering mules. “It was a conAn Indian for Breakfast and a Pony to Ride, 1860 9 j J T stant struggle through melted snow and mud,” he wrote, “slipping, sliding, grasping, rolling, tumbling.” Undeterred and finding no accommodations in Hope Valley, he continued to forge forward through heavy wind and blinding sleet before emerging in the Carson Valley, which he disparaged as “barren in the extreme.” This assessment contradicted the summer emigrants arriving from the Forty Mile Desert who thought it a paradise and may have reflected the contrast with the wildflower-strewn meadows of the western Sierra Nevada foothills through which he had passed. It also tallied with Tennessee’s criticism of recent neglectful ranching practices. When Browne later observed hundreds of carcasses of starved cattle littering the valley, with thousands of gorged buzzards in attendance, the hellish spectacle did not improve his opinion of the place.2 As Browne continued on his journey, he gave Carson City a nod (“quite a pretty and thrifty little town”), but when he arrived at the “far-famed Virginia City,” he found it “essentially infernal in every aspect .” Its haphazard scattering of tents, shanties, and coyote holes amid the mud appalled him not less than its climate of “hurricanes and snow” and its unwashed polyglot population. Although he had little to say about the mines, not yet operating at full throttle until the winter snows subsided, he noticed knots of avid speculators “huddled around the corners, in earnest consultation about the rise and fall of stocks.”3 When Browne once more traversed the Sierra Nevada, racing to find a wide place in the narrow trail to avoid being tumbled into the canyon each time another pack train of mules attended by lustily cursing vaqueros came pounding along, he found San Franciscans in an even greater fever of anxiety over mining stocks. Because the San Francisco stock exchange that was to “make the market” on Nevada mining stocks for half a century had not yet been organized, all the action took place on the street. Browne could not take a step without being buttonholed by a panicky investor wanting to know if the Comstock was another humbug.4 An Indian for Breakfast and a Pony to Ride, 1860 [127] devils will reign [128] The fact was that less than a year after its discovery and only a season after that discovery became known in California, the Comstock was experiencing its first stock bust. Values plummeted. Investors scurried about the streets in a vain e≠ort to unload their stocks but could find no buyers. Although time would show the fabulous values Investors anxious for news of the mines besiege journalist J. Ross Browne upon his return to San Francisco from the Comstock. From J. Ross Browne, A Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited, p. 125. on the Comstock, these lay in only a handful of mines, and many claims of the sixteen thousand ultimately...