and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust.  It is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his brother:  Somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again.  Soap and water and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first impression had been fatal to festivities of welcome.

Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a “wooden town,” with a population of two thousand souls.  Its main street consisted of a few blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing.  In ‘Roughing It’ the author writes: 

In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a “Plaza,” which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains, a large, unfenced, level vacancy with a Liberty Pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in.  Two other sides of the Plaza were faced by stores, offices, and stables.  The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering.

One sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but it requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat later to populate it.  The mineral excitement was at its height in those days of the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of nations as only the greed for precious metal can assemble.  The sidewalks and streets of Carson, and the Plaza, thronged all day with a motley aggregation—­a museum of races, which it was an education merely to gaze upon.  Jane Clemens had required him to write everything just as it was —­“no better and no worse.”

Well—­[he says]—­, “Gold Hill” sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; “Wild Cat” isn’t worth ten cents.  The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo- ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.  I overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was “the d—–­dest country under the sun,” and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to.  It never rains here, and the dew never falls.  No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye.  The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them.  Only the crow and the raven tarry with us.  Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, “sage- brush,” ventures to grow. . . .  I said we are situated in a flat, sandy desert—­true.  And surrounded on all sides by such prodigious mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the