The Territorial Enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier papers ever published.  Its editor-in-chief, Joseph Goodman, was a man with rare appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive newspaper policy.  Being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon knowledge.  His instructions to the new reporter were about as follows: 

“Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out and say it is so and so.  In the one case you are likely to be shot, and in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the public confidence.”

Goodman was not new to the West.  He had come to California as a boy and had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns.  Early in ’61, when the Comstock Lode—­[Named for its discoverer, Henry T. P. Comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his stupendous find.]—­was new and Virginia in the first flush of its monster boom, he and Denis McCarthy had scraped together a few dollars and bought the paper.  It had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty the Enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift compositors brought up from San Francisco, had become altogether metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the Coast.  It had been borne upward by the Comstock tide, though its fearless, picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere.  Goodman himself was a fine, forceful writer, and Dan de Quille and R. M. Daggett (afterward United States minister to Hawaii) were representative of Enterprise men.—­[The Comstock of that day became famous for its journalism.  Associated with the Virginia papers then or soon afterward were such men as Tom Fitch (the silver-tongued orator), Alf Doten, W. J. Forbes, C. C. Goodwin, H. R. Mighels, Clement T. Rice, Arthur McEwen, and Sam Davis—­a great array indeed for a new Territory.]—­Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group.  He added the fresh, rugged vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the Comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a more lavish, more overwhelming scale.

There was no uncertainty about the Comstock; the silver and gold were there.  Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill and Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world.  The streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and adventurers—­riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold.  Comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better.  The town of Virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them.  Everybody had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time.  The Enterprise, “Comstock to the backbone,” did what it could to help things along.