The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1903-09-06
ReCOIIeCtiOnS
and Reflections
CbcmdS Fitch q Copyright r ises y Thomas
The SILVER STRTE

A verdureless, treeless, arid plain.
stretching away westward from the
eastern slope of the pine crowned
Sierras, with a few streams tumbling
in cascades and rapids from the noun
tains, and coursing through few mar
row, green valleys ere they lose them
selves in the sage brush desert-such
was the Silver State in 1860, when Hor-
ace Greeley said, Nevada ought to be
good for silver, for it is not good for
anything else And the pioneers re-
Piled
what though Nevada's hills be scar,
Her deserts drear, her tempests cold !;
Still to her mountain breast
The precious ore is pressed,
Her brow is silver tressed, her veins
are gold"
!. XTens of thousands of the brightest,
siravest, most generous, enterprising
and energetic men on earth, the Knight
Paladins who challenged the brute
forces of Nature to combat, the SOL
diers who possessed with the aura sacra
famos, faced the storm and the savage,
the desert and disease, swarmed around
the base of Mount Davidson, and reach
ed out to Aurora, to Reece River, and
to the mountains of the Humboldt.
Crawling like huge flies over the bald
skulls of lofty mountains, plodding
across alkaline deserts, which pulsed
with deluding mirages under the throb-
bling light, and shifting with pick and
hammer at the adamantine doors of
the earth's treasure chamber, these
pioneers engaged in their self-imposed
task.
Reader with rifle or revolver than
with Scriptural quotations was the
Nevadan of those days, and reader
still with his coin sack at the call OF
distress. Under the blue shirt might
be found sometimes graduate OF
Yale, and sometimes fugitive from
Texas. No man assumed to be better
than his neighbor, and no man con-
ceded his inferiority to anybody. Fret
burg graduates and sheep herders, di-
vinity students and Cornish miners
farmer boys and ex-Judges of the Su-
preme Court were all treasure seekers
together, and a blow of pick might
make or unmake fortunes, and equaliZe
the beggars and the princes of this
Aladdin's cave. Some found fortunes
and some found unmarked graves upon
the hillsides, and many have become
rich or renowned in other fields, but not
one among them all will remember with
other than affection the days away
back 'in the sixties" when he wrought
the warp and spun the wool of rain
bows in the sage-brush state.
A IA
In those days only the upper levels
of the Comstock We're yielding theil
treasures, the great Bonanza was un-
discovered, the California and Con. Vir,
ginia exhibited nothing but barren
quartz and hope, and those who at g
later day controlled the financial and
political destinies of Nevada, We're
working as laborers in the mines, OIL
mixing cocktails, or practicing as mem
bers of as brilliant a bar as could be
found in any community of thrice its
size in all the land.
A A A
Never was there Berseker in all the
realm of Odin who loved to fight fol
the fights sake, for the very joy OF
combat better than U. S. Senator VIM
H. Stewart. Glorious, Incompatible
indomitabFe, undismayed, tireless
'Old Bill" Though fortune forsake
him, though death snatch from him
his nearest. though the favored OF
Plutus intrigue for his toga, though
the wand of age has changed his tawny
hair and beard to silver his steel blue
eyes have not lost their glitter. nor his
port its erectness, and he springs tC
the front in the tournament of Senator
ial debate as vigorous and alert as
when he engaged IN the contests of the
court room forty years ago.
A A A
And it was a field of battle in which
the warriors were intellectual athletes
Ex-Supreme Justice Charley Bryan
who escaped from desert Sand-storms
and Apache arrows, and at last choked
to death on beefsteak in a Carson
restaurant; Thomas H Williams, who
was forced to take a portion of the
California mine for a fee, and held it
because he could not sell it, and was
made a millionaire in despite of himself.
Frank Hereford, afterwards Congress
man and Senator from West Virginia,
Mesick and Hillyer and Baldwin and
DeIong and Perley, and last but not
least Charles H. S. Williams, who once
said to me 81 am going back to Cali
fo mia; have practiced law in Virginia
City for a year; 1 have taken in over
forty thousand dollar in cash fees, and
/ have never tried a case in which
was not forced 20 know that either by
my client or the client of my opponent.
the Judge, or the jury, or both, had
been bribed." He returned to San
Francisco, failed to recover his lost
practice there, and too proud to be
second where he had once been first. in
a fit of dependency blew out his brains
"A A
General Williams did not much over
estimate the situation, for the voters
of Nevada who had previously voted
almost unanimously to reject a con-