Hurry was the word!  We wasted no time.  Our party consisted of four persons—­a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself.  We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses.  We put 1,800 pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon.

In a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of killikinick, Watts’s Hymns, fourteen decks of cards, Dombey and Son, a cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the “Carmina Sacra.”

The two young lawyers were A. W.(Gus) Oliver (Oliphant in ’Roughing It’), and W. H. Clagget.  Sam Clemens had known Billy Clagget as a law student in Keokuk, and they were brought together now by this association.  Both Clagget and Oliver were promising young men, and would be heard from in time.  The blacksmith’s name was Tillou (Ballou), a sturdy, honest soul with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair of tools.  There were also two dogs in the party—­a small curly-tailed mongrel, Curney, the property of Mr. Tillou, and a young hound.  The combination seemed a strong one.

It proved a weak one in the matter of horses.  Oliver and Clemens had furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best.  It was two hundred miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand.  The horses could not drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out.  Then they found it necessary to push.

Not because we were fond of it, Ma—­oh, no! but on Bunker’s account.  Bunker was the “near” horse on the larboard side, named after the attorney-general of this Territory.  My horse—­and I am sorry you do not know him personally, Ma, for I feel toward him, sometimes, as if he were a blood relation of our family—­he is so lazy, you know—­my horse—­I was going to say, was the “off” horse on the starboard side.  But it was on Bunker’s account, principally, that we pushed behind the wagon.  In fact, Ma, that horse had something on his mind all the way to Humboldt.—­[S.  L. C. to his mother.  Published in the Keokuk (Iowa) Gate city.]—­

So they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow and sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained only by the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles would all be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time and never know want or fatigue any more.

There were compensations:  the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food satisfying.  They bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer of kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their discomforts.  Judge Oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent letter to the writer of this history, says: