Chapter XLV

The "flush times" held bravely on. Something over two years before, Mr.
Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and
set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of
Virginia. They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken
weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die. They bought it,
type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.
The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office, bed-
chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment and
it was a small one, too. The editors and printers slept on the floor, a
Chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the general
dinner table. But now things were changed. The paper was a great daily,
printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three compositors;
the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the advertising rates
were exorbitant, and the columns crowded. The paper was clearing from
six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the "Enterprise Building" was
finished and ready for occupation--a stately fireproof brick. Every day
from five all the way up to eleven columns of "live" advertisements were
left out or crowded into spasmodic and irregular "supplements."

The "Gould & Curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at
a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars. Gould &
Curry stock paid heavy dividends--a rare thing, and an experience
confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the "main lead," the
"Comstock." The Superintendent of the Gould & Curry lived, rent free, in
a fine house built and furnished by the company. He drove a fine pair of
horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve
thousand dollars a year. The superintendent of another of the great
mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand
dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to
have had one per cent. on the gross yield of the bullion likewise.

Money was wonderfully plenty. The trouble was, not how to get it,--but
how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it. And so it
was a happy thing that just at this juncture the news came over the wires
that a great United States Sanitary Commission had been formed and money
was wanted for the relief of the wounded sailors and soldiers of the
Union languishing in the Eastern hospitals. Right on the heels of it
came word that San Francisco had responded superbly before the telegram
was half a day old. Virginia rose as one man! A Sanitary Committee was
hurriedly organized, and its chairman mounted a vacant cart in C street
and tried to make the clamorous multitude understand that the rest of the
committee were flying