His money was about exhausted by this time, and funds to work the mining claims must come out of Orion’s rather modest salary.  The brothers owned all claims in partnership, and it was now the part of “Brother Sam” to do the active work.  He hated the hard picking and prying and blasting into the flinty ledges, but the fever drove him on.  He camped with a young man named Phillips at first, and, later on, with an experienced miner, Calvin H. Higbie, to whom “Roughing It” would one day be dedicated.  They lived in a tiny cabin with a cotton roof, and around their rusty stove they would paw over their specimens and figure the fortune that their mines would be worth in the spring.

Food ran low, money gave out almost entirely, but they did not give up.  When it was stormy and they could not dig, and the ex-pilot was in a talkative vein, he would sit astride the bunk and distribute to his hearers riches more valuable than any they would dig from the Esmeralda hills.  At other times he did not talk at all, but sat in a corner and wrote.  They thought he was writing home; they did not know that he was “literary.”  Some of his home letters had found their way into a Keokuk paper and had come back to Orion, who had shown them to an assistant on the “Territorial Enterprise,” of Virginia City.  The “Enterprise” man had caused one of them to be reprinted, and this had encouraged its author to send something to the paper direct.  He signed these contributions “Josh,” and one told of: 

     “An old, old horse whose name was Methusalem,
     Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,
     A long time ago.”

He received no pay for these offerings and expected none.  He considered them of no value.  If any one had told him that he was knocking at the door of the house of fame, however feebly, he would have doubted that person’s judgment or sincerity.

His letters to Orion, in Carson City, were hasty compositions, reporting progress and progress, or calling for remittances to keep the work going.  On April 13, he wrote: 

   “Work not begun on the Horatio and Derby—­haven’t seen it yet.  It is
   still in the snow.  Shall begin on it within three or four weeks
   —­strike the ledge in July.”

Again, later in the month: 

   “I have been at work all day, blasting and digging in one of our new
   claims, ‘Dashaway,’ which I don’t think a great deal of, but which I
   am willing to try.  We are down now ten or twelve feet.”

It must have been disheartening work, picking away at the flinty ledges.  There is no further mention of the “Dashaway,” but we hear of the “Flyaway,” the “Annipolitan,” the “Live Yankee,” and of many another, each of which holds out a beacon of hope for a brief moment, then passes from notice forever.  Still, he was not discouraged.  Once he wrote: 

   “I am a citizen here and I am satisfied, though ’Ratio and I are
   ‘strapped’ and we haven’t three days’ rations in the house.  I shall
   work the “Monitor” and the other claims with my own hands.