Nabobs of the Comstock III , “Innocents at Home”, Mark Twain

Nabob:  A very rich or important person, a person of great wealth or prominence; M. Webster

 

   The Gould and Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all belonged originally to the two men who’s names it bears.  Mr. Curry owned two-thirds of it – and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch.  And he said that Gould sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life.  Four years afterward the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven million six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin.

 

   In the early days a poverty-stricken Mexican, who lived in a canyon directly back of Virginia City, had a stream of water, as large as a man’s wrist, trickling from the hill-side on his premises.  The Ophir Company segregated a hundred feet of their mine and traded it to him for the stream of water.  The hundred feet proved to be the richest part of the entire mine:  four years after the swap, its market value (including its mill) was $1,500,000.

 

   An individual who owned twenty feet in the Ophir mine, before its great riches were revealed to men, traded it for a horse, and a very sorry-looking brute he was, too.  A year or so afterward, when Ophir stock went up to $3,000 a foot, this man who had not a cent, used to say he was the most startling example of magnificence and misery the world had ever seen – because he was able to ride a sixty-thousand dollar horse, yet could not scrape up cash enough to0 buy a saddle, and was obliged to borrow one or ride bareback.  He said if fortune were to give him another sixty-thousand dollar horse it would ruin him.

 

Next time….A youth of 19 strikes it rich in a questionable way.  Nabobs IV

 

 

Next time: 

 

See ya on the hill !                                               

C.L. Yearzago