I reckon I'll take that
money, if you please."
The Gould & Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all
belonged originally to the two men whose 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
millions 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.
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