Free Which Way to the Wild West? by Steve Sheinkin Page B

swirled the cup around, slowly splashing out the dirt and water. Soon all that remained in the bottom of his cup was about an ounce of gold flakes.
    â€œI went to bed and dreamed of riches galore,” Jackson said. “I had struck it rich! There were millions in it!” News of Jackson’s find set off a whole new gold rush, as more than 100,000 people raced to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. And Jackson was right, there were millions of dollars of gold in those hills. Actually, there were hundreds of millions (though Jackson sold his mine for just a few thousand).
    From Colorado, hopeful miners fanned out all over the West. It was “a mad, furious race for wealth,” one miner said. In June 1859 the furious race led a miner named Henry “Old Pancake” Comstock to a rocky hillside in the desert of western Nevada.
    Comstock got his nickname because he was too lazy to bake bread
and always used his flour to fry piles of pancakes. But Old Pancake was feeling energetic on this day. It paid off—he stumbled onto one of the biggest mineral strikes in world history. Or, more precisely, he stumbled onto two Irish immigrants who had already found the spot. Comstock liked the looks of it, so he started shouting that the land was his. He was so loud and annoying that the Irish guys finally agreed to make him a partner.
    The men spent a few weeks digging, finding several ounces of gold a day. They could have gotten even more if it weren’t for the heavy bluish sand that kept caking to their boots and shovels. They were constantly stopping to scrape the stuff off and toss it aside.
    Finally someone decided to bring a bit of this irritating sand to a nearby town to find out what it was. The answer: nearly pure silver. This sparked yet another rush, this time to the desert of Nevada. Miners founded the booming town of Virginia City. And Old Pancake’s mine, which became known as the Comstock Lode, produced four hundred million dollars in silver and gold over the next thirty years.
    The Ten-Day Millionaire
    O ne of the thousands racing to Nevada was a young man from Missouri named Samuel Clemens.
    Clemens traveled by stagecoach, which was by far the fastest way to cross the West. By stopping often at stations to trade tired horses for fresh ones, stagecoaches could get you from St. Louis to San Francisco in just twenty-five days (compared to the four months it took people who traveled in their own wagons).

    Clemens did point out some drawbacks, however. Passengers were quickly coated with dust and bugs. And Clemens and the other passengers sat facing each other on benches, packed so tightly that knees bumped. This was only a little painful on smooth sections of road. But when they hit holes and rocks (which were everywhere), passengers smashed together and sent each other flying.

    â€œFirst we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads.”

    Samuel Clemens
    Bags of mail, luggage, loose books, pipes, canteens, even pistols, went flying around the car. People shouted:
    â€œCan’t you quit crowding?”
    â€œTake your elbow out of my ribs!”
    This continued day and night for more than three weeks. Passengers could get out
for only about twenty minutes at a time, when the coach stopped at a station to change animals.
    Clemens survived the journey and immediately started searching for silver and gold. And as he later wrote in his book Roughing It (full of great stories and great exaggerations) he and two friends really did find a rich mine. So rich, in fact, that one of the partners was offered $200,000 (about $3 million in today’s money) for his share—and he refused it!
    Much too excited to sleep, Clemens and his partner Calvin Higbie spent the night dreaming of how to spend their fortunes.

    Clemens: Cal, what kind of house are you going to build?
    Higbie: I