Mr.Clemens to Mr. Paine(January 9, 1906)

The more I think of this [the biography], the more nearly impossible the project seems. The difficulties of it grow upon me all the time. For instance, the idea of blocking out a consecutive series of events which have happened to me, or which I imagine have happened to me--I can see that that is impossible for me. The only thing possible for me is to talk about the thing that something suggests at the moment--something in the middle of my life, perhaps, or something that happened only a few months ago. It is my purpose to extend these notes to 600,000 words, and possibly more. But that is going to take a long time--a long time.
My idea is this: that I write an autobiography. When that autobiography is finished--or before it is finished, but no doubt after it is finished--then you take the manuscript and decide on how much of a biography to make. But this is no holiday excursion--it is a journey.
We will try this--see whether it is dull or interesting--whether it will bore us and we will want to commit suicide. I hate to get at it. I hate to begin, but I imagine if you are here to make suggestions from time to time, we can make it go along, instead of having it drag.
Now let me see, there was something I wanted to talk about, and I supposed it would stay in my head. I know what it is--about the Big Bonanza in Nevada.
I want to read from the commercial columns of the New York Times, of a day or two ago, what practically was the beginning of the great Bonanza in Nevada, and these details seem to me to be correct--that in Nevada, during 1871, John Mackay and Fair got control of the Consolidated Virginia Mine for $26,000; that in 1873, two years later, its 108,000 shares sold at $45 per share; and that it was at that time that Fair made the famous silver ore find of the great Bonanza. Also, according to these statistics, in November, '74 the stock went to 115, and in the following month--January, '75--it reached 700. The shares of the companion mine, the California, rose in four months from 37 to 780--a total property which in 1869 was valued on the Mining Exchange at $40,000, was quoted six years later at $160,000,000. I think those dates are correct. That great Bonanza occupies a rather prominent place in my mind for the reason that I knew persons connected with it. For instance, I knew John Mackay very well--that would be in 1862, '63, and '64, I should say. I don't remember what he was doing when I came to Virginia in 1862, from starving to death down in the so-called mines of Esmeralda, which consisted in that day merely of silver-bearing quartz--plenty of bearing, and didn't have much load to carry in the way of silver--and it was a happy thing for me when I was summoned to come up to Virginia City to be local editor of the Virginia City Enterprise during three months, while Mr. William H. Wright (Dan de Quille) should go east, to Iowa, and visit his family, whom he hadn't seen for some years. I took the position of local editor with joy, because there was a salary of forty dollars a week attached to it and I knew that that was all of forty dollars more than I was worth, and I had always wanted a position which paid in the opposite proportion of value to amount of work. I took that position with pleasure, not with confidence--but I had a difficult job--a difficult job. I was to furnish one column of leaded nonpareil every day, and as much more as I could get on paper before the paper should go to press at two o'clock in the morning. By and by, in the course of a few months, I met John Mackay, with whom I had already been well acquainted for some time. He had established a broker's office on C Street, in a new frame house, and it was rather sumptuous for that day and place, for it had part of a carpet on the floor and two chairs instead of a candle box. I was envious of Mackay, who had not been in such very smooth circumstances as this before, and I offered to trade places with him--take his business and let him have mine--and he asked me how much mine was worth. I said forty dollars a week. He said: "I never swindled anybody in my life, and I don't want to begin on you. This business of mine is not worth forty dollars a week. You stay where you are and I will try to get a living out of this."
I left Nevada in 1864 to avoid a term in the penitentiary (in another chapter I shall have to explain that) so that it was all of ten years, apparently, before John Mackay developed suddenly into the first of the hundred-millionaires. Apparently his prosperity began in '71--that discovery was made in '71. I know how it was made. I remember those details, for they came across the country to me in Hartford. There was a tunnel 1,700 feet long which struck in from way down on the slope of the mountain and passed under some portion of Virginia City, at a great depth. It was striking for a lode which it did not find, and I think it had been long abandoned. Now it was in groping around in that tunnel that Mr. Fair (afterward U. S. Senator and great multi-millionaire, who was at that time a day laborer working with pick and shovel at five dollars a day)--groping around in that abandoned tunnel to see what he could find--no doubt looking for cross lodes and blind veins--came across a body of rich ore--so the story ran--and he came and reported that to John Mackay. They examined this body of rich ore and found that there was a very great deposit of it. They prospected it in the usual way and proved its magnitude and that it was extremely rich. They thought it was a "chimney," belonging probably to the California, away up on the mountain-side, which had an abandoned shaft--or possibly the Virginia mine which was not worked then--nobody caring anything about the Virginia, an empty mine. And these men determined that this body of ore properly belonged to the California mine and by some trick of nature had been shaken down the mountain-side. They got O'Brien--who was a silver expert in San Francisco--to come in as capitalist, and they bought up a controlling interest in that abandoned mine, and no doubt got it at that figure--$26,000--six years later to be worth $160,000,000.
As I say, I was not there. I had been here in the East, six, seven, or eight years--but friends of mine were interested. John P. Jones, who has lately resigned as U. S. Senator after an uninterrupted term of perhaps thirty years--John P. Jones was not a Senator yet, but was living in San Francisco. And he had a great affection for a couple of old friends of mine--Joseph T. Goodman and Dennis McCarthy. They had been proprietors of that paper that I served--the Virginia City Enterprise--and had enjoyed great prosperity in that position. They were young journeymen printers, typesetting in San Francisco in 1858, and they went over the mountains--the Sierras-............