RISE AND FALL OF COPPERHEAD CITY.
I trudged back nine miles to Sonora, my pockets full of “specimens” from
the newly discovered claim, my head a cyclone of copper-hued air
castles. I saw the “boys.” I was mysterious. I beckoned them to retired
spots. I showed them the ores. I told them of the find. They were wild
with excitement. They were half crazed with delight. And in ten minutes
some of them went just as far into the domains of unrest and unhappiness
for fear some one might find and jump the claim ere I got back to guard
it. The Copperhead Company was organized that night. The “Enthusiast,” a
man who lived in the very top loft of copper insanity, was sent down
with me to superintend the sinking of the shaft. The secret was soon
out. Shares in the vein were eagerly coveted. I sold a few feet for $500
and deemed I had conferred a great favor on the buyer in letting it go
so cheaply. I lived up, way up, in tens of thousands and hundreds of
thousands of dollars. The “company” in Sonora met almost every night to
push things while the Enthusiast and myself blasted and burrowed in the
rock. By day they exhausted their spare cash in horse hire, riding down
to the claim in hope of being on hand when the next blast should reveal
a bed of ore, immense in breadth and unfathomable in depth.
My Company was made up chiefly of lawyers, doctors, politicians, and
editors. They never realized how much they were indebted to me. For four
months I made them feel rich,--and if a man feels rich, what more should
he want? For a millionaire can do no more than feel rich.
Feeling certain that the Copperhead was a very rich claim, and that
other rich claims would be developed from the “extensions,” and that a
bustling town would be the result, I pre-empted a section of the land
which I deemed most valuable, on which it was intended that “Copperhead
City” should be built. This “city” I partly laid out. I think this was
the third city I had laid out in California. There is a sepulchral and
post-mortem suggestion in the term “laid out” which is peculiarly
applicable to all the “cities” which I attempted to found, and which
“cities” invariably foundered. Actuated, also, at that time, by those
business principles so largely prevalent in most Christian communities,
I “claimed” the only spring of good drinking water in the neighborhood
of my “city.” My intent in this was in time to realize a profit from the
indirect sale of this water to such of the future “city’s” population as
might want water--not to sell it by the glass or gallon, of course; but
if there was to be a “city” it would need water-works. The water-works
would necessarily lie on my land. I would not be guilty of the
inhumanity of selling water to parch-tongued people, but I proposed that
the “city” should buy of me the ground out of which came the water.
But one house was ever erected in Copperhead City proper, and that had
but one room. But three men ever lived in it. Yet the city was thickly
populated. It was located in a regular jungle, so far as a jungle is
ever attained in California, and seemed the head-centre and
trysting-place of all the rattlesnakes, coons, skunks, owls, and foxes
on the west side of Table Mountain. When the winter wore off and the
warm California spring wore on and merged into the summer heat of May,
and the pools made by the winter rains dried up, I think all the
rattlesnakes and copperheads for miles around went for my pre-empted
spring of pure water. The “city,” I mean the house, was located within a
few feet of the spring. Returning thither at noon for dinner, I have
started half a dozen snakes from the purlieus and suburbs of that
spring. Snakes get dry like human beings. Snakes love water. Snakes,
poor things, can’t get anything else to drink, and must fill up on
water. These were sociable snakes. When startled at our approach they
would not run away from our society. No. They preferred to remain in the
“city,” and so, in many instances they ran under the house. It is not
pleasant at night to feel that you are sleeping over a veteran rattler
four feet long, with a crown of glory on his tail in the shape of
fourteen or fifteen rattles. You won’t crawl under your house to evict
such a rattlesnake, either. Skunks inhabited our “city,” also. Skunks
know their power--their peculiar power.
The evening gloaming seems the favorite time for the skunk to go abroad.
He or she loves the twilight. There must be a vein of sentiment in these
far-smelling creatures. I have in the early evening travelled up the
only street our “city” ever laid out--a trail--and ahead of me on that
trail I have seen a skunk. I was willing he should precede me. In the
matter of rankness I was perfectly willing to fall a long way behind
him. Now, if you have studied skunks you will know that it is far safer
to remain in the skunk’s rear than to get ahead of him, because when he
attacks with his favorite aromatic means of offensive defence he
projects himself forward (as it were). I have then, in my city, had a
skunk keep the trail about fifty feet ahead of me at a pace which
indicated little alarm at my presence, and, do my best, I could not
frighten the animal, nor could I get ahead of him or her. If I ran he
ran; if I walked he concurred in rapidity of pace. I dared not approach
too near the animal. I would rather break in upon the “sacred divinity”
which, they say, “doth hedge a king” than transgress the proper bounds
to be observed with reference to a skunk. Let a king do his best, and he
cannot punish an intruder as can a skunk.
The skunk is really a pretty creature. Its tail droops over its back,
like the plumes of the Knight of Navarre. It is an object which can
really be admired visually at a distance. Do not be allured by him to
too near approach. “Beware! he’s fooling thee!”
At last it dawned upon the collective mind of the Copperhead Company
that their Superintendent, the Enthusiast, was digging too much and
getting down too little. They accepted his resignation. It mattered
little to him, for by this time his mind was overwhelmed by another
stupendous mining scheme, to which the Copperhead was barely a priming.
He had the happy talent of living in these golden visions which, to
him, were perfect realities. He held the philosophy that the idea, the
hope, the anticipation of a thing is sometimes more “the thing” than the
thing itself. The Enthusiast’s rich mines lay principally in his head,
but his belief in them gave him as much pleasure as if they really
existed. It was like marrying, sometimes. The long-sought-for,
longed-for, wished-for wife, or husband, turns out, as a reality, a very
different being from what he or she was deemed while in process of being
longed and sought for. The long-longed-for may have been estimated an
angel. The angel, after wedlock, may prove to have been a myth. The
reality may be a devil, or within a few shades or degrees of a devil.
So the shaft was sunk, as they said, properly and scientifically, by the
new Superintendent. The rock got harder as we went down, the ore less,
the vein narrower, the quantity of water greater, the progress slower,
the weekly expenses first doubled and then trebled, the stock became
less coveted, and as to reputed value, reached that fatal dead level
which really means that it is on its downward descent. The shareholders’
faces became longer and longer at their weekly Sunday afternoon meetings
in the Sonora Court-house.
The Copperhead Claim and Copperhead City subsided quietly. The
shareholders became tired of mining for coin to pay assessments out of
their own pockets. They came at last to doubt the ever-glowing hopeful
assertion of the Enthusiast that from indications he knew the “ore was
forming.” The inevitable came. Copperhead City was deserted by its human
inhabitants. The skunk, the snake, the squirrel, the woodpecker, and
the buzzard came again into full possession, and I bitterly regretted
that I had not sold more at ten dollars a foot when I found the stock a
drug at ten cents.