CHAPTER INEVADA
The mountain wall of the Sierra bounds California on its eastern side. It is a rampart, towering and impregnable, between the garden and the desert. From its crest, brooded over by cloud, glittering with crusted snows, the traveler can look over crag and precipice, mounting files of pines and ravines swimming in unfathomable shadow, to where, vast, pale, far-flung in its dreamy adolescence, lies California, the garden. On the other side—gaunt, hostile, gray—is Nevada, the desert.
In other lands nature and man have ended their struggle for supremacy. Man has conquered and nature, after long years of service, is glad to work for him, to quicken the seed he sows, to swell the fruit on the branch, and ripen the heads of grain. She laps him round with comfort, whispers her secrets to him, reveals herself in sweet, sylvan intercourse. And he, cosily content, knows her as his loving slave, no more rebellious, happy to serve.
But in Nevada, nature is still unconquered, savage and supreme. It is the primordial world, with man a shivering stranger amid its grim aloofness. When the voice of God went out into the darkness andsaid, “Let there be light,” the startled life, cowering in caves and beneath rocks, may have looked out on such a land—an unwatered waste, treeless, flowerless, held in an immemorial silence.
Man as we know him has no place here. He is a speck moving between the dome of sky and the floor of earth. Nature scorns him, has watched him die and whitened his bones in a few blazing weeks. The seed he plants withers in its kernel, the earth he turns up, frosted with alkali, drops apart in livid flakes. The rare rivers by which he pitches his tent are sucked into the soil, as though grudging him the few drops with which he cools his burning throat. An outcast from a later age he is an intruder here. These solemn wastes and eternal hills have not yet learned to call him master.
When the pioneers trailed across it, Nevada was to them only “the desert,” a place where the horrors of heat and thirst culminated. They knew it as a sterile, gray expanse, breaking here and there into parched bareness, and with lines of lilac-blue or reddish-purple hills seeming to march with them as they moved. From high places they saw it outspread like a map, its surface stippled with sage and the long green ribbon of a tree-fringed river looping across its grim aridity. At evening it took on limpid, gem-like colors. The hills turned transparent sapphire and amethyst, the sky burned a thin, clear red. An unbroken stillness lay upon it and struck chill on the hearts of the little bands who, oppressed by its vast indifference, cowered beneath its remote, unfamiliar stars.
As they passed across it they mined a little; here and there they scraped the surface, clustered round a stream-bed for a day or two and sent the water circling in their pans. But California, the land of promise, was their goal. With the western sun in their eyes they looked at the mountain wall and spoke of the Eldorado beyond where the gold lay yellow in the sluice box, and flecked with glittering flakes the prospector’s pan.
That was in forty-nine. Ten years later they were hurrying backward over the mountains to the streams that drain Mount Davidson. Nevada had its wealth too, a hidden, rock-ribbed wealth, jealously buried. They tore it out, built a city of tents and shacks as they delved, and in ten years more were gone again, dispersed over the far West like the embers of a fire which a wind scatters.
Then once again the barren state drew them back. Deep in the roots of Mount Davidson one of the greatest ore-bodies in the world lay buried. This time they gathered in their might. Miner, engineer, assayer, stock-jobber, manipulator, manager and millionaire poured over the mountain wall, bringing in their train the birds of prey that follow in the wake of the mining army. The city of tents and cabins grew into a city of streets and buildings and spread, climbing the mountain side in terraces. A railroad crawled perilously to it, looping over the mountain flanks. In a cleared nook by a river the smoke of its mills blackened the sky.
Isolated from the rest of the world, encircled by desolation, the town seethed and boiled with an abnormalactivity, a volcano of life in the midst of a dead land. About it the desert brooded, pressing in upon it, watching and waiting. To it the little city was an outside thing, hostile, alien, unwelcome. It scorned the pigmy passions of its men and women, had no sympathy with the extravagances of their money madness. When they had been brushed away like an ant-hill by a passing foot, it would sweep over their town, obliterate their traces, reclaim its own. And once again the silence of a landscape where there is neither ripple of water nor murmur of leaf would resettle in crystal quietude.
Confined within their own walls, with no outlet for the pressure under which they lived, the inhabitants of Virginia burned with a wild activity and energy. The conditions of life were so unusual, so fiercely stimulating to effort and achievement, that average human beings were lifted from their places and became creatures of dauntless initiative. They conquered the unconquerable, accomplished triumphs of daring and ingenuity where under ordinary circumstances they would have recoiled before insuperable obstacles. They were outside themselves, larger for good or evil than they had ever been before or would be again. Nature had dared them to her vanquishing and they had risen to the challenge.
In the spring of 1874 the ferment incident to the opening of the great ore-body that has gone down in history as the “Big Bonanza,” began to bubble toward boiling point. Month by month stocks had steadily risen, and month by month the huge treasure chamber, filled with silver as a nut is with kernel, developedin ever-increasing richness. The city was packed close as a hive with bees with twenty-five thousand souls all quivering to the increasing momentum of the excitement. The mines were a dynamo whence electric vibrations spread into the world outside. The dwellers in huts among the sage were shaken by them. They thrilled along the Pacific slope. In New York and London men felt them and their pulses quickened. The Bonanza times were nearly at the flood.
The city grew with astonishing rapidity, breathlessly climbed the side of Mount Davidson in ascending tiers of streets. There was no time for grading or paving. Two stories in the front meant four in the back, the kitchens of B Street looked over the shingled roofs of the shops on C Street. It was a gray town, clinging to a desolate mountain side, in a gray country. At its base, appearing to force it up the slope, were the hoisting works of the mines, dotted so close along the lode they nearly touched. Every mine in this line was a mighty name in the world of finance. New York, London and Paris waited each morning to hear news from the town in the wilderness. And as the ant-hill swarmed and trembled with the fury of its concentrated life, the desert looked on, serene, incurious, still.