The two girls Julia and Emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, declare that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them.  They think they were the first attacked.  They further state that Hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence.  He flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind.

Curry says Hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of western Pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very recently no one had ever heard of his ill-treating his family.  He had been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when the San Francisco papers exposed our game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company, of San Francisco.  He was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently.  Hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went down to nothing.  It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad, and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family.  The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which the cunning financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the villainy at work.  We hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence.  II news-gathering with mark twain

Alfred Doten’s son gives the following account of a reporting trip made by his father and Mark Twain, when the two were on Comstock papers: 

My father and Mark Twain were once detailed to go over to Como and write up some new mines that had been discovered over there.  My father was on the Gold Hill News.  He and Mark had not met before, but became promptly acquainted, and were soon calling each other by their first names.

They went to a little hotel at Carson, agreeing to do their work there together next morning.  When morning came they set out, and suddenly on a corner Mark stopped and turned to my father, saying: 

“By gracious, Alf!  Isn’t that a brewery?”

“It is, Mark.  Let’s go in.”

They did so, and remained there all day, swapping yarns, sipping beer, and lunching, going back to the hotel that night.

The next morning precisely the same thing occurred.  When they were on the same corner, Mark stopped as if he had never been there before, and sand: