The San Francisco call., 1898-01-23

ana Henry InOuaS Ralge
 Comstock. or "Old Pancake" had nothing to do with the discovery of the greatest of silver mines; there fore their names as applied to the Comstock lode and Virginia City have become world-famous.
 The thing in discoveries is to know Just when not to make them.
 We Comstockers are not exactly proud of our godfathers. In strict confidence, be it said that Old Vir- ginia was a bibulous, disreputable, Jolly old teamster. who smashed a bot tle Of whisky over the sage brush land one night and between hiccoughs de- clared. T baptize this ground Virginia Town" As to Comstock, shocking to relate. he inaugurated the great game of freeze out" with which reprehen- sible practice Comstockers have been associated ever since.
 It was this way. Two miners who had edged further and further east ward from COlOma, Placerville and the other great gold placers of California, came at last up Carson and Washoe- then Wassau-vaIleys They got to Dayton. which has been variousIv known as Nevada City, Mineral Rapids. Chinatown and Johntown. And they worked their way up the canyons, following the elusive gold which grew scarcer and deteriOrated in value as they neared the mountain tops. Naturally, any Comstock miner to-day could have told these fgnoram- uses why. Simply because the per centage of silver in the ore was in creasing and increasing till the bank CTS in Placerville, who used to pay Ne vada miners $16 an ounce, would pay only SIS.
 It makes a pious Comstoclker stand aghast to read how the miners of old blasphemed the silver god we Nevad- ans worship so devOutly. They swore at the unknown metal that clogged their sluice boxes. They called it bogus stuff, ,' 'accursed base metal. They hurled it down the echoing canyons, swearing Shockingly and saw agely just because silver wasn't gold. And they capped the climax to their stupidity by actually locating our Ophir mine, the north end of that marvellous winding ribbon of richest silver which is festoOr~d about Vir- ginia City and Gold Hill, as a gold placer claimi
 I wonder that Nature didn't shrug those powerful shoulders of hers, the Washoe Mountains. and so bury all Nevada's third of a billion of silver dollars where these fools of fortune might never profit by it. And where would Fair have been then, and Mac kay, and Flood, and O'Brien, and Sha- ron, and Jones and the lesser million aires-and San Francisco itself?
 But, fortunately, Nature was pa tient. She's a mother herself. and has all a mothers fertility in excuses for her offspring.
 So these two miners. whose names weren't Old Virginia and Comstock located their claim in June. 1859 ant then Comstock came galoping down the ridge on his old mustang, his long legs brushing the sagebrush as he rode. He-wen. Godfather SoDstock was rather bombastic in speech, and alas! that I should say it, he was ab- surdly ignorant and impudent, and he . actually bluffed the two miners into giving him a quarter interest in their claim. Then he quietly jogged or along the divide and down the steep narrow Gold Hill and good naturedly gave Old Virginia his mustang as z token of good will, you know. All h. asked in exchange was worthless one-tenth interest his old partner helC fin that barren piece of sagebruSh lanC upon the ridge which had been useC as a stock range. What did Old Vir gipia want of that deSOlate piece O. desolate Nevada?
 If things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other tn value of that old mustang should b' weighed against a palace in LondoI and another in Paris; a telegraph com pany or two, a railroad line, whole street of San Francisco, and the mos beautiful houses therein. and jewels gowns and expensive feminine fancie. without number. And still old Com stocks mustang would go down, down while the accumulated wealth of hal dozen of the greatest financfa geniuses of the world has known woul, be lifted heavenWard.
 But to return to our godfathers. Any Comstocker would have preferred tn, Crouch brothers; those heroic, intelli gent, pioneer martyrs who really dis covered the great lode, and died, on' of blood poisoning in that rude cabil of unhewn stones at the mouth O American Flat Ravine, and the othe1 from the effects of that terrible tw weeks Journey over the Sierras in tht dead of winter, a hundred miles iron the last cabin in Nevada to the frs one in California.
 But godfathers, like other fathers