The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, part 4 | Page 9

down in his own dooryard. . . . .
I lecture in the theatre at Carson, which opens out of a drinking and
gambling house. On each side of the door where my ticket-taker stands
there are monte-boards and sweat-cloths, but they are deserted to-night,
the gamblers being evidently of a literary turn of mind. . . . .
Five years ago there was only a pony-path over the precipitous hills on
which now stands the marvelous city of Virginia, with its population of
twelve thousand persons, and perhaps more. Virginia, with its stately
warehouses and gay shops; its splendid streets, paved with silver ore;
its banking houses and faro-banks; its attractive coffee-houses and
elegant theatre, its music halls and its three daily newspapers.

Virginia is very wild, but I believe it is now pretty generally believed
that a mining city must go through with a certain amount of
unadulterated cussedness before it can settle down and behave itself in
a conservative and seemly manner. Virginia has grown up in the heart
of the richest silver regions in the world, the El Dorado of the hour; and
of the immense numbers who are swarming thither not more than half
carry their mother's Bible or any settled religion with them. The
gambler and the strange woman as naturally seek the new sensational
town as ducks take to that element which is so useful for making
cocktails and bathing one's feet; and these people make the new town
rather warm for a while. But by and by the earnest and honest citizens
get tired of this ungodly nonsense and organize a Vigilance Committee,
which hangs the more vicious of the pestiferous crowd to a sour-apple
tree; and then come good municipal laws, ministers, meeting-houses,
and a tolerably sober police in blue coats with brass buttons. About five
thousand able-bodied men are in the mines underground, here; some as
far down as five hundred feet. The Gould and Curry Mine employs nine
hundred men, and annually turns out about twenty million dollars'
worth of "demnition gold and silver," as Mr. Mantalini might express it,
though silver chiefly.
There are many other mines here and at Gold Hill (another startling
silver city, a mile from here), all of which do nearly as well. The silver
is melted down into bricks of the size of common house bricks; then it
is loaded into huge wagons, each drawn by eight and twelve mules, and
sent off to San Francisco. To a young person fresh from the land of
greenbacks this careless manner of carting off solid silver is rather a
startler. It is related that a young man who came Overland from New
Hampshire a few months before my arrival became so excited about it
that he fell in a fit, with the name of his Uncle Amos on his lips! The
hardy miners supposed he wanted his uncle there to see the great sight,
and faint with him. But this was pure conjecture, after all.
. . . .
I visit several of the adjacent mining towns, but I do not go to Aurora.
No, I think not. A lecturer on psychology was killed there the other
night by the playful discharge of a horse-pistol in the hands of a
degenerate and intoxicated Spaniard. This circumstance, and a rumor
that the citizens are "agin" literature, induce me to go back to Virginia.

. . . .
I had pointed out to me at a restaurant a man who had killed four men
in street broils, and who had that very day cut his own brother's breast
open in a dangerous manner with a small supper knife. He was a
gentleman, however. I heard him tell some men so. He admitted it
himself. And I don't think he would lie about a little thing like that.
The theatre at Virginia will attract the attention of the stranger, because
it is an unusually elegant affair of the kind, and would be so regarded
anywhere. It was built, of course, by Mr. Thomas Maguire, the
Napoleonic manager of the Pacific, and who has built over twenty
theatres in his time and will perhaps build as many more, unless
somebody stops him--which, by the way, will not be a remarkably easy
thing to do.
As soon as a mining camp begins to assume the proportions of a city, at
about the time the whiskey-vender draws his cork or the gambler
spreads his green cloth, Maguire opens a theatre, and with a
hastily-organized "Vigilance Committee" of actors, commences to
execute Shakespeare.
4.6. MR. PEPPER.
My arrival at Virginia City was signalized by the following incident:
I had no sooner achieved my room in the garret of the International
Hotel than I was called upon by an intoxicated man who said he was