Sheba mine is in the hands of energetic San Francisco capitalists.  It would seem that the ore is combined with metals that render it difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain machinery.  The proprietors have combined the capital and labor hinted at in my exordium.  They are toiling and probing.  Their tunnel has reached the length of one hundred feet.  From primal assays alone, coupled with the development of the mine and public confidence in the continuance of effort, the stock had reared itself to eight hundred dollars market value.  I do not know that one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal.  I do know that there are many lodes in this section that surpass the Sheba in primal assay value.  Listen a moment to the calculations of the Sheba operators.  They purpose transporting the ore concentrated to Europe.  The conveyance from Star City (its locality) to Virginia City will cost seventy dollars per ton; from Virginia to San Francisco, forty dollars per ton; from thence to Liverpool, its destination, ten dollars per ton.  Their idea is that its conglomerate metals will reimburse them their cost of original extraction, the price of transportation, and the expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net them twelve hundred dollars.  The estimate may be extravagant.  Cut it in twain, and the product is enormous, far transcending any previous developments of our racy Territory.

A very common calculation is that many of our mines will yield five hundred dollars to the ton.  Such fecundity throws the Gould & Curry, the Ophir and the Mexican, of your neighborhood, in the darkest shadow.  I have given you the estimate of the value of a single developed mine.  Its richness is indexed by its market valuation.  The people of Humboldt county are feet crazy.  As I write, our towns are near deserted.  They look as languid as a consumptive girl.  What has become of our sinewy and athletic fellow-citizens?  They are coursing through ravines and over mountain tops.  Their tracks are visible in every direction.  Occasionally a horseman will dash among us.  His steed betrays hard usage.  He alights before his adobe dwelling, hastily exchanges courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay office and from thence to the District Recorder’s.  In the morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he is off again on his wild and unbeaten route.  Why, the fellow numbers already his feet by the thousands.  He is the horse-leech.  He has the craving stomach of the shark or anaconda.  He would conquer metallic worlds.

This was enough.  The instant we had finished reading the above article, four of us decided to go to Humboldt.  We commenced getting ready at once.  And we also commenced upbraiding ourselves for not deciding sooner—­for we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and secured before we got there, and we might have to put up with ledges that would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton, maybe.  An hour before, I would have felt opulent if I had owned ten feet in a Gold Hill mine whose ore produced twenty-five dollars to the ton; now I was already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with mines the poorest of which would be a marvel in Gold Hill.