The $339 Orion paid to furnish his office with a bed, mattress, chairs, table, mirror, washstand, spittoons, carpet, and curtains raised so many red flags that the amount was deducted from his salary. As the comptroller complained, “There are many items in this a/c manifestly unnecessary and extravagant. This Department cannot allow expenditures of this sort.” Orion appealed the decision. “It was not my design to furnish my office or the Legislative Halls in an extravagant or unusual manner; but I never held an office before”—had never been in Washington, “never saw a Legislature in session, and never saw any office at the Capital of any State or Territory.” Elsewhere he noted, “For the first three or four months I paid my office rent out of my salary, although I had been instructed that the Government would pay it. This I found left me too little to live on.” The factotums in Washington reluctantly agreed to reimburse him for the rent on his office because he had paid it from his own pocket “for the first three or four months of his incumbency,” but he should “be instructed as to what am[oun]t he is to be allowed.” William Hemphill Jones of the Treasury Department suggested that Orion order furniture for the legislative halls made from the timber in the Nevada forests rather than buying it at retail stores: “The yellow pine of the mountains furnishes excellent lumber for ordinary furniture, & is susceptible of a good finish.” In any case, the “propriety” of Orion’s “using two stoves in his office at the expense of the U.S. is very doubtful. The Secretary should pay for the stove in his sitting-parlor or bedroom.”16 Orion was clearly out of his element in attempting to cope with the federal bureaucracy.
The territorial printing was an even more implacable problem. There were only three print shops in Nevada in 1861—the Carson City Silver Age, the Silver City Washoe Times, and the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise—and the first two shops were both co-owned by Gilbert T. Sewall and John C. Lewis. The federal government required that all printing of the laws and legislative journals be performed in the territory by the lowest bidder, so local competition for the work was limited and the costs of labor and paper, which like all supplies had to be hauled by mule train over the mountains from California, were higher than in any other part of the country. The authorities in Washington never understood the difficulties Orion faced in negotiating terms for the printing. The first year he contracted with the Silver Age, only to be caught in a legal and financial crossfire between the owners. While the legislature was in session, as Orion patiently explained to his Washington handlers, Lewis “published a dissolution of partnership between himself and Sewall,” “locked Sewall out of the office,” and
sold the whole affair to an Association of printers, without making any arrangement for the completion of the Journals. They would not complete them unless two-thirds of their bills were advanced to them at the end of every week. I had not the money, and was doubtful of the propriety of making advances on work not delivered. They were willing to take certificates, but I was not sure of my authority to issue any such evidences of indebtedness. In the meantime Lewis was supplied with copy, and kept promising to finish them.
Lewis and Sewall “each demanded I should pay him money due the firm, and each served a written notice on me not to pay the other. Subsequently, after a settlement between themselves, Sewall gave me a written order to pay to Lewis.” But the journals were still not completely printed; the proprietors of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise “refused to undertake them” because the payment that had been authorized was niggling; and besides, the territorial legislature had “passed an act requiring them to be printed in California,” countermanding the federal law that required them to be printed in Nevada Territory. Orion finally “told Lewis if he would give me what he had printed I would pay him for what he had done” and he sent the remainder of the journals “to California to be finished.” Meanwhile, Governor Nye accused Orion of malfeasance in office because “the Journals had not been printed and sent to Washington.” In the end, as Orion explained to the powers in Washington, “The printers in this Territory could not [finish the job],” so he outsourced the work to a shop in San Francisco. “It was by no choice of mine that the printing of the laws and journals went to California,” he wrote in his defense, “for I felt that the personal risk, anxiety and inconvenience to myself from sending and receiving across the mountains in a severe winter, documents that if lost could not be replaced without great expense, were very much more than I would endure, except on compulsion.” He was eventually forced to appeal directly to Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the Treasury in President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, for $3,700 to pay the print shop in San Francisco.17
The federal government only paid its bills in greenbacks, moreover, which were discounted about 50 percent in the West and sometimes as much as 70 percent in Nevada. Astute businessmen might pay their federal taxes and license fees with greenbacks, but this was virtually the only use for them beyond the Rocky Mountains. Paper currency was disrespected in the West; after all, gold and silver were mined and minted in California and Nevada. Sam’s friend Conrad Wiegand, formerly of the Philadelphia Mint and the U.S. Sub-Treasury in San Francisco, calculated in 1863 that, as a result, the “average cost of living” in the West was “not less than double that in New York” and that when gold sold at a premium in New York “legal tender notes” or greenbacks “were sold at 48 per cent discount” in San Francisco.18
Yet the Treasury Department was categorical in its refusal to pay its $20,000 annual subsidy to the Territory of Nevada except in paper money, in effect cutting the appropriation in half. “The prices to be allowed by you for the Territorial printing, as fixed by the Department, are $1.50 per thousand ems and $1.50 per token,” the auditors at the Treasury Department instructed Orion, and “the notes of the Government which may from time to time be placed in your hands for the liquidation of all debts against the Government is the only basis upon which you can contract for the execution of the Territorial printing.” A month later, even more bluntly: “payment in gold is out of the question.” That is, as Sam explained in Roughing It, Orion was required to “regard a paper dollar issued by the government as equal to any other dollar issued by the government” or, to use a sarcasm popular in the day, the federal government insisted that he “pay off an honest debt in greenbacks.” As a result, Orion kept two sets of books: one for the amount in gold and silver he paid for printing, the other for the amount in greenbacks he needed from the government to buy the specie. To obtain the sixty cents in coin that the printers charged to set a thousand ems, he was obliged to charge the federal government $1.50 in paper currency. Greenbacks were “impractical here,” he advised the Treasury Department. They were “merchandise” that was sometimes bought and sold, but only gold and silver were exchanged as money. In 1863 the California Legislature effectively demon(et)ized greenbacks by the Specific Contract Act, which permitted contractors to require payments in hard money. Fines levied in San Francisco courts could not be paid at face value in greenbacks. “Any man in this Territory having a legal tender note must sell it for its market price in [gold or silver] coin, or submit to an equivalent advance in price, before he can buy his breakfast, dinner or supper, or a night’s lodging, or any article of food or clothing,” Orion explained. “People here generally pay in coin from three to five times the currency prices in the States.” His pleas fell on deaf ears. But far from the bumbling incompetent Sam depicted (e.g., “I have convinced Orion that he hasn’t business talent enough to carry on a peanut stand”), his older brother Orion exhibited considerable financial savvy.19
Most of the business of the first territorial legislature was mundane. The lawmakers, Sam joked, “levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars and ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million.” He claimed in Roughing It that during the session they “passed private toll-road franchises all the time. When they adjourned it was estimated that every citizen owned about three franchises, and it was believed that unless Congress g
ave the Territory another degree of longitude there would not be room enough to accommodate the toll-roads. The ends of them were hanging over the boundary line everywhere like a fringe.” In fact, the first legislature only granted six toll road franchises.20 Ironically, too, the borders of Nevada were redrawn by federal law in 1862, 1866, and 1867 to expand into territory previously annexed by Utah and Arizona.
The legislators also voted themselves a pay raise. They were, by act of Congress, authorized to gobble three dollars per day from the public trough but they more than doubled their salaries by fiat to seven dollars. In addition, they voted to increase the size of the legislature to thirteen councilors and twenty-six representatives. Sometimes their work bordered on the trivial. They also passed an act “to provide for a Territorial seal,” the design to include “mountains, with a stream of water coursing down their sides, and falling on the overshot wheel of a quartz mill at their base—a miner leaning on his pick and upholding the United States flag, with the motto expressing the two ideas of loyalty to the Union and the wealth to sustain it—volens et potens” (willing and able). Orion was charged with supervising the cutting of the seal, and the cost was not to exceed a hundred dollars. Philip Lynch, editor of the Gold Hill News, joked for years afterward that the seal represented a drunken miner celebrating the Fourth of July. Sam had a couple of better ideas: perhaps “a figure of a jackass-rabbit reposing in the shade of his native sage-brush, with the motto ‘Volens enough, but no d——d Potens,’”21 or perhaps “Mount Davidson in the background” with “the honest miner,” a mule, a Mexican,22 a widow, small children, and a “rude cradle” in the foreground.
To be sure, the legislators also debated more serious issues. They discussed a path to statehood, authorized a state constitutional convention, and “reformed” the matrimony laws, specifying sixteen as the marriageable age for women and outlawing interracial unions. They also laid the groundwork, in consultation with the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington and Governor Leland Stanford of California, for construction of what would become a branch of the Central Pacific Railroad. Orion and Stanford were a political odd couple, to be sure. Whereas the governor later endowed Stanford University, Orion became the target of a resolution of no confidence in the Nevada Legislature for an “assumption of dictatorial power in various ways,” a dispute doubtless related to the problems with the territorial printing. But the Organic Act was unambiguous about the territorial secretary exercising sole discretion in awarding printing contracts, a point eventually but reluctantly conceded by the legislative Committee on Printing,23 and Orion jealously guarded his prerogative.
The legislature also passed an “Act to authorize the Secretary of the Territory to receive Compensation for certain Duties pertaining to his office.” This law enabled Orion to supplement his government salary by copying and recording deeds, mortgages, and other miscellaneous legal documents. At a rate of forty cents per folio or per hundred words, and $5 for furnishing a certificate of each record, he earned on average $1,000 a month in gold—over $625 in August 1863, over $1,250 in March 1864, over $1,950 in April and May 1864, and nearly $3,800 in August 1864. “Everybody had a toll-road franchise but no toll-road,” Sam remembered. “But the franchise had to be recorded and paid for. Everybody was a mining corporation, and had to have himself recorded and pay for it.” Sam bragged that he exerted his influence to assure passage of this fee law: “I learned to pull wires in the Washoe Legislature, & my experience is that when a bill is to be put through a body like that, the only thing necessary to insure success is to get the reporters to log-roll for it.” According to his journalist friend Alf Doten, Sam “became a respected and influential figure in the political life of the territory.” In any event, with the increase in his income Orion was able to build a house in Carson City—Sam claimed it cost $6,000—and finally send for his wife and daughter to join him.24
But the most hotly contested question before the body was a proposed law governing businesses, including mining companies, operating in Nevada. As Orion explained, the bill permitted the territory to tax the mines, obliged corporations to maintain offices in the territory, and required a majority of the trustees of firms with business in the territory to reside there. The latter provision was “very objectionable to California capitalists,” he conceded, and should the bill become law “it will undoubtedly cause some howling among San Franciscans.” Still, he argued, “the people of Nevada are becoming strongly impressed with the idea that the Territory should reap the full advantages of her great mineral wealth, instead of longer paying such heavy tribute to her wealthy neighbor.” Though its opponents predicted that such a law would discourage out-of-state investment, Orion insisted that the “prospect of its immediate passage has not seemed to have that effect so far.” The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the largest newspaper in the territory with a daily circulation of over a thousand, endorsed the bill and anticipated that its passage would “transfer a large advertising patronage from the San Francisco journals to the Territorial papers.”25 The bill was so controversial that the Carson City Silver Age insinuated that lawmakers on both sides had been bribed.
During the six weeks that Orion was preparing to convene the first territorial legislative session, Sam was exploring the rural regions of the territory where the transition to deep-vein mining was not yet complete. He wanted to remain as footloose as possible. “I always intend to be so situated (unless I marry) that I can ‘pull up stakes’ and clear out whenever I feel like it,” he wrote his family. In September he briefly toured the mining district around Esmeralda and Mono Lake, about a hundred miles south of Carson City, where he acquired fifty “feet” or shares in the Black Warrior Mine from his future partner Horatio (Raish) Phillips. “We [he and Orion] have now got about 1,650 feet of mining ground,” he bragged before admitting that “the trouble does not consist in getting mining ground . . . but the money to work it with after you get it.” In September and October he twice traveled on horseback to Lake Tahoe, the first time with John Kinney, “a Cincinnati boy, and a first-rate fellow” who had traveled to Nevada with Chief Justice George Turner, and the second with Tom Nye, his friend from Murphy’s boardinghouse, to establish timber claims. Once christened Lake Bigler for an undistinguished former governor of California, the name had been changed because John Bigler was a copperhead or Southern sympathizer. He was also the butt of a joke at the time: Bigler was “too shallow” for a deep lake. But Sam also hated the name Tahoe, which he alleged meant “grasshopper soup” in the local native language.26
The forests around Lake Tahoe were an even more promising source of wealth than the mines, or so Sam thought. To coin a cliché, with the transition from surface to industrial or hard-rock mining on the Comstock Lode, successful operations required not only an army of workers but also water, wood, roads, mills, and lawyers. Logs costing upwards of forty dollars a cord were needed for cooking and heating and to fuel the hoisting engines and steam quartz mills; milled timber was necessary in the construction of buildings and to plank the honeycomb of underground tunnels and excavations. The Gould & Curry alone had “underground, in the shape of braces and supports, more timber” than the rest of Virginia City aboveground, or so claimed a writer in the Cincinnati Enquirer (probably Kinney, who returned to Ohio in March 1862 to enlist in the Union Army). Sam recalled in Roughing It the
vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart. These timbers were as large as a man’s body. . . . One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines.
The amount of firewood consumed on the Comstock in 1862 averaged some seven hundred cords per day or about two hundred thousand cords per year, over half
of them burned in the quartz mills. The wood cost sixteen to twenty dollars per cord, and three mills in Gold Hill were forced to shut down in April 1862 because of a “wood famine,” a scarcity of fuel for the steam engines. Lumber from oak forests in Vermont was shipped through Lake Champlain and around Cape Horn to the West as early as 1863. The sawmills near Carson operated at peak capacity, a correspondent there reported in October 1861, “and yet there is an insufficiency of lumber to meet the demand.” Even charcoal cost forty to forty-five cents a bushel. It was little wonder Sam and his partners thought they could make a fortune by filing a timber claim and leveling tracts of virgin timber around Lake Tahoe.27
The Life of Mark Twain Page 24
