SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 28 (of 78)
Mining and Milling, and the Blind Lead (1861, 1862)
Chapter 28
Mining and Milling, and the Blind Lead (1861, 1862)
Rather than serve long as Orion’s private secretary, I almost immediately contracted silver fever and went out in search of it myself.
Silver wasn’t just lying on the ground, waiting to be scooped up, though, as I had hoped would be the case.
In reality, it became so hard to find a valuable claim and perform the necessary labor to make it profitable, that I finally took a job for wages in a stamp mill. It was there that I learned just how much I hated tedious manual labor of that sort.
There are few things so terrible as a short-handled shovel. A short-handled shovel and a never-ending pile of tailings that needed to be moved from one place to another simply sent me into reveries. By that I mean reveries of how the work could be performed in a more efficient manner (requiring less back-breaking lifting and toting). It was for these reveries that I was eventually deemed expendable.
I had thought otherwise of my skills, and so had requested a modest increase in wages. My employer felt that he was already paying me a good round sum, with board to boot, and asked what exactly I had in mind. I told him that I considered $400,000 per month to be about right. He ordered me off the premises!
I then returned to prospecting for rich mineral deposits with various partners, and at one point became—prospectively—a millionaire. This was when my partner and I discovered an unclaimed but wildly productive vein of silver, a so-called “blind lead.”
But due to a miscommunication between my partner and myself, neither one of us performed the necessary preliminaries which would transfer ownership of the property to ourselves, and we lost out completely. Our pipe dreams of wealth faded away, and we were as destitute as ever.
I had written a few letters for the press, and just when I was about as broke as I could be, I received a note from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise offering me $25 a week to go and be a reporter on that paper. I could hardly believe it—that was a lot more than I had been paid at the stamp mill. Necessity is the mother of taking chances—if I had been offered the job of translating Josephus from the original Hebrew, I would have taken it.
EDITOR’S NOTES: For the full story on how Twain and his partner Calvin Higbie were on the verge of great wealth upon discovery of the “blind lead,” see chapter XL (40) of Roughing It.
In his essay Is Shakespeare Dead? Twain wrote in reference to his mining and milling experiences:
I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions—a pretty hard life; . . . I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less robust to do, and find it.
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Twain also investigated the possibility, along with a partner, of setting up a great lumber concern on the shores of Lake Tahoe (or Lake Bigler, as he preferred to call it) in 1861, but was inadvertently the cause of a great forest fire there, burning up the standing inventory before he and his partner even got a chance to make a start on that venture.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.