742 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



stone, basalt, porphyry, granite, in naked barrenness. There, 

 underfoot," writes Dr. Gaily, " the world is dry, gray, silent. 

 Overhead, during the long cloudless day, it is pale blue, dry, 

 silent. All abroad it is gray or dark with mountain distance, and 

 it is silent. Silence is everywhere. No roar of far-off torrents 

 tumbling down the hills to jar the night air underneath the stars 

 — the stars still are, but all the torrents have departed. At some 

 lost period backward of all dates, the Great High Sheriff of the 

 universe in open court has cried Silence and has been obeyed." 



Into such a land the silver seekers came, and it claimed them 

 for its own. Soil, climate, topography, environment, began to 

 create the Nevada type, with its large freedom, its quick com- 

 prehension, its broadly humorous buoyancy, and similar charac- 

 teristics that one finds abundantly illustrated in such books as 

 Mark Twain's Roughing It and in the writings of a great group 

 of younger newspaper men. " Desperate climatic humor" is what 

 Dr. Gaily calls it. Occasionally an old copy of an early Nevada 

 newspaper turns up, fairly scintillating with wit and sarcasm, 

 but for the most part the files have been destroyed in the great 

 fires. Said brave old De Quille, companion reporter with Mark 

 Twain on the Territorial Enterprise : 



" I used to make the newspaper my notebook for years, and I 

 thought what a book I could write some day out of that note- 

 book ; but now I don't know of a single file in existence." 



Still there are gleams of the past in stray copies that have 

 escaped the fires. Senator Stewart was the most prominent man 

 on the Comstock in the days before Sharon, and the Gold Hill 

 News, amazed at his audacity, once likened him to the Colossus 

 of Rhodes — he was as large and contained as much brass. Mark 

 Twain, in his forgotten Proceedings of the Third House, once 

 burlesqued nearly every member of the Constitutional Conven- 

 tion of 18G3. Larrowe, of Landor, for instance, was made to 

 glorify the " nine sceptered and anointed quartz mills " of his dis- 

 trict until the president ordered him to "hold his clatter" and 

 drop Reese River quartz-mill statistics. Mr. Stewart, after a long 

 speech on miners' taxes, was told : " Take your seat. Bill Stewart. 

 I have been reporting and reporting that same infernal speech of 

 yours for thirty days. . . . You and your bed-rock tunnels and 

 your blighted miners' blasted hopes have gotten to be a sort of 

 nightmare to me and I won't put up with it any longer." The 

 wealth of material in this field would fill volumes instead of 

 paragraphs. 



Hardly had the first rich ore been taken from the Comstock 

 when an age of litigation commenced. The early claims overlapped 

 and were badly defined, some being taken up under placer rules, 

 others as quartz claims, and all without accurate surveys. Mat- 



