Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/March 7, 1906

She’s been asleep for a few years. Sometimes she has stirred uneasily, and murmured in her dreams, but for twenty years she has told the world about the Comstock, and set men mad with delirium of wild hearted fortune.

She’s talking now, is old gray, fierce hearted, desert-eyed, mountain-crowned Nevada and the world is standing on tip-toe in a frenzy to catch every syllable of her lisping.

She’s a wonderous fine story teller is old Nevada. The market places of earth have stilled their tumult time and again to harken to the tales it was her pleasure to tell.

She began to speak way back in ’49 but California had the floor then and nobody listened to Nevada’s voice.

In ’57 two old miners, who were digging for gold in Six Mile Canyon, near where Virginia City stands now, were annoyed by a heavy metal which got in the way all the time.

They cursed the metal wherever they met it, after the fashion of the times, and went on digging for gold.

One day a man, who was born with heaven-sent sent curiosity, took some of this impeding metal to an assay office and found that it was the richest silver ore that had ever been found anywhere on earth. Then began the Washoe rush. Men killed one another to get to Nevada first. Women deserted babies on their breast to be lighter footed to join in the great race for the great gray desert and tall peaks of Nevada.

A town of 4,000 people sprang up out of the desert in a single week, and the bonanza days were fairly started.

Miners working with the pick and shovel for day’s wages became millionaires in a day.

Millionaires went crazy and lost every dollar they had in a wild fever of speculation—laughed, and went to Nevada to begin again.

Every steamer that touched at American shores carried its Nevada pilgrims. Every train that ran toward the West was crowded with Nevada journeyers.

The stagecoaches rolled into Virginia City day after day, loaded down with men of every nation of this earth, all came to Nevada to dig a fortune out of the hard and sullen ground.

For a few years all was a golden dream in Nevada. A dream of red sunrises and yellow sunsets, a dream of wild fairy stories come true, of strange legends turning into facts, and of the impossible becoming of a sudden the probable and almost the “must be” of every day life.

Then came Nevada’s time for resting.

She went calmly to sleep and left the half-crazed men she had lured into her purple solitudes to beat their breasts and sing whatever requiem they might over their vanished hopes.

In ’73 Nevada woke up and told the world the amazing story of the big bonanza strikes on the Comstock, and laughing and crying, praying and sobbing, cursing and singing, the whole Pacific Coast went stark, starving raving mad, and yelled to all the world to join in the carnival of insanity.