From The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871, page 290
On March 17 [1866] Mollie headed to the California coast for three months while Orion took a last flier at a legal career in the boomtown of Meadow Lake, California, at the summit of the Sierras in the Excelsior mining district about forty miles northwest of Carson. He planned to see the elephant during the summer there, practicing law and working as a mining agent, and he hoped “to make some money and go home in December.’ Excelsior was supposedly the next Comstock, despite its inhospitable climate. Mining was only practical there, at an elevation of about eight thousand feet, during four months of the year. Two feet of snow fell in a single day as late as May 27, 1866, but building lots nevertheless were selling for as much as fifteen hundred dollars apiece. By mid-April 1866, a month after Orions arrival, the district was home to some three hundred dwellings, three sawmills, a weekly newspaper, three quartz mills, seven hundred mines, but only two lawyers.
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On the surface Orion seemed poised to make a fortune. As historians Warren Hinckle and Fredric Hobbs note, the silver mines of Nevada “created more millionaire lawyers” like William Stewart “than millionaire miners.”
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But as luck would have it, Orion opened a law practice in one of the least productive and least litigious mining districts in the West. The Excelsior correspondent for the Virginia Daily Union remarked in late May 1866 that ‘I do not think a single suit has been brought as yet concerning the mines here. By early June, Orion admitted to Mollie that his “only hope is that in July I may be able to sell out here for enough to take me home.
A year after the first claims were filed, the Excelsior mines finally shipped to San Francisco about a thousand pounds of gold and silver bullion extracted from low-grade ore, worth about twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars—by comparison, less than the average amount of precious metal removed from the Gould & Curry Mine in Virginia City every day.
August 30, 1866: Orion and Mollie Clemens left for Panama, and connections to New York on the steamer Golden City [MTL 1: 342n1].
Mark Twain wrote of Meadow Lake to the San Francisco Bulletin, December 8, 1866:
We traveled by stage to Meadow Lake, over a villainous road, which usually led through beautiful picturesque mountain scenery, variegated with taverns, where they charge reasonable rates for dinners and get them up satisfactorily.
We reached the town of Meadow Lake at 9 P. M. It is built on a level plat of ground shut in by rugged mountains well clad with heavy timber. The lake itself is a handsome sheet of water a mile long and perhaps a quarter of a mile wide. Meadow Lake is the prettiest site for a town I know of; and the town already built there is the wildest exemplar of the spirit of speculation I have ever stumbled upon. Here you find Washoe recklessness and improvidence repeated: A lot of highly promising but unprospected ledges, and behold! on such guarantees as these they have built a handsome town and painted it neatly, and planned wide, long streets, and got ready for a rush of business, and then--jumped aboard the stage coaches and deserted it! And they have done all this on what? Why, if I am correctly informed, only three or four mines are barely opened, and all the bullion ever shipped from this place would not foot up $30,000. Yet all this bad business was the work of men who had done such things before, and been scorched at Kern River, Gold Lake, Washoe and other theatres of fierce mining excitement. Here is a really handsome town, built of two-story frame houses--a town capable of housing 3,000 persons with ease, and how many inhabitants has it got? A hundred! You can have a house all to yourself merely by promising to take care of it. The place is perfectly citified with signs. There are the inevitable "Bank Exchanges" and Metropolitan Hotels, and wholesale hardware stores, printing, and lawyers' and doctors' offices, and restaurants and billiard saloons of a pretentious city. One man has even had the temerity to build a large, handsome dressed stone house, at great expense. A bright, new, pretty town, all melancholy and deserted, and yet showing not one sign of decay or dilapidation! Inever saw the like before.
The people who are there have strong faith in the ultimate prosperity of the place, though, and from all I hear I am a good deal of their opinion myself. Their rock pays all the way from $15 to $50 in free gold, and the sulphurets (they seem to be of an unusually rebellious character,) are uncommonly rich. Machinery has lately been erected there for working them, and my opinion that experimenting on those things outside of Swansea is a frittering away of valuable time, is not entitled to consideration, and is nothing against the enterprise.
There are five quartz mills in Meadow Lake, and they are jogging along comfortably and doing very well with the free gold. They shipped $4,000 one month, $6,000 another, and expected in October to yield $10,000. There is no question but that the leads are good, and there is also no question but that Meadow Lake can easily support its present population; but that they should go and provide house-room for 3,000 people so very early in the day was rather foolish. Wood is as cheap as dirt there, and water is plenty. Snow falls to the depth of six feet in winter, but the mill men do not seriously object to that, because it is easier to haul wood and quartz in sleds than in wagons. The winter cannot be excessively cold, else the snow would not fall so freely. It is expected that the camp will be as lively and populous as ever in the spring.
MARK TWAIN'S INTERIOR NOTES
Correspondence of the San Francisco Bulletin