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[Item recovered from Reese River Reveille, July 4, 1863, p.1]
REESE RIVER AT SAN FRANCISCO
At the present moment, next to our own section of Washoe, Reese River occupies
the most prominent position before the speculative San Francisco eye. Esmeralda
and Humboldt have had their day of excitements, and have settled down into the
comfortable dog trot of acknowledged worth and secured independence, but Reese
River has only recently begun to blaze. Several mills for that District are
now under contract here and several more have already been shipped. Mr. Austin
started one to Austin last Saturday - an excellent six-stamp establishment.
Mr. Austin was, until recently, the efficient Superintendent of Messrs. Donahue
& Co.'s foundry, and formerly occupied a like position in the Union Foundry,
which institution, by his energy and mechanical skill, he built up to its present
high standing in the manufacturing world. He and his mill will ho valuable acquisitions
to the Reese River District.
Mr. D. E. Buel left here on the 28th of May with a five-stamp mill for Austin,
which port, he probably reached a week ago. The grading of the ground to be
occupied by this mill was completed a month ago.
Two other mills have also been shipped hence to Austin, but I could not learn
by whom; a third is on its way there from Pike's Peak, and two more are in course
of construction here.
Judge Gilchrist is in the city, and has closed a contract for the erection
of an excellent eight-stamp mill, to crush rock from the rich Wasson series
of four ledges.
Judge Hall, of Carson, is also here, and the object of his visit is to let
a contract for a fine twenty-stamp mill, to cost about forty thousand dollars.
If I remember rightly (in the absence of my note-book, which is lost for the
present, in some highly respectable locality), this mill is to be located somewhere
between Clifton and Austin, at a spot where wood and water are convenient and
abundant. Thus, according to my list, nine clattering quartz mills will soon
break up the solemn silence which has brooded over Reese River since God Almighty
created it. When Dan de Quille passed along there, less than six months ago,
there were probably not a dozen white men in that part of America! We aborigines
of Washoe are a wonderful nation. Why, in another six months, they may be playing
upon the enlightened piano and running a church in Reese River-who knows?
Judge Hall showed me a silver slug containing eleven dollars, which the certificate
showed to be the result of six pounds of rock, and informed me that this was
the lowest working test which had been yet returned to him from any of his Reese
River quartz. Mr. Toll-Road McDonald {of whom I was a half-breed colleague in
the late Legislature, by reason of my reportorial posit ion in that body) showed
me a silver slab something smaller than an ordinary architectural brick, which
was worked out of 125 pounds of rock from one of his Reese River claims. These
solid Reese River slugs are as common here as greenbacks in the States; every
man you meet from that District draws one of them on you as inevitably as the
old Esmeralda pioneers used to assail you with rock and magnifying glasses.
I weaken to the new fashion.
Every day's intelligence from Reese River serves to increase the confidence
of the public in the ultimate stability and importance of that District. No
desponding letters are received, and no tidings of ledges gone to seed, or their
precious burden turned to lead and antimony. Letters to Messrs. Samuel Ten Eyck
and Thompson Campbell state that a ledge eleven feet wide has been struck in
the Pony incline, at Clifton, and that the stock had advanced to $75 a foot
in consequence; alas, that the Durango, Illinois, Bay State, Clipper and other
well-known ledges had increased in width and richness; and furthermore, that
a constant stream of immigration was pouring in from California and the plains.
So much for Reese River.
[Reprinted in American Literary Realism, Vol. 47, No. 1, Fall 2014, pp. 88-89.]
