Clemens left Virginia City on 29 May 1864 on the California stage, accompanied by Steve Gillis and—unexpectedly—by Goodman, who had planned to accompany the travelers “a little way” and instead “kept clear on to San Francisco” (Goodman to A. B. Paine, 7 Apr 1911, Chester L. Davis 1956c, 4). Clemens’s cronies may have attended his departure with the “usual eclat,” but he was not universally regretted. The Gold Hill Evening News expressed no surprise at his disappearance in view of the “indignation aroused by his enormities” and remarked: “Mark Twain’s beard is full of dirt, and his face is black before the people of Washoe” (“An Exile,” Gold Hill Evening News, 30 May 64, 2). Roughing It makes no mention of a major reason for Clemens and Gillis’s departure: the desire to avoid arrest for violating the law against dueling (see the note at 378.6–8).
Chapter 55: note for 379.37," in Roughing It : an electronic text. 2016
From The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871, page 259-60
SAM CLEMENS INSISTED in later years that he left Virginia City only because he was “tired of staying in one place so long” and that “when the silver collapse came” and the local economy soured he simply “went to San Francisco.” True enough, mineral production on the Comstock began to decline in the spring of 1864 and the mining industry would not recover until the Big Bonanza strike of the mid-1870s. According to a prominent Virginia City attorney in May 1864, the same month Sam fled Nevada, “We are in the midst of unprecedented and unexpected hard times.” In early June 1864, less than two weeks after Sam resigned from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the Nevada City, California, Transcript reported that “thousands of men” in Virginia City were out of work and ‘every branch of business” was on ‘the down grade.” The Transcript added two weeks later that the “rush this way from Virginia City is still on the increase, and everyone that we have had any talk with says that employment cannot be had in the Territory. The average value of mining stocks plummeted by more than half over a few months. By the end of July, as Edgar Marquess Branch has documented, a foot of the Gould & Curry Mine worth $6,000 at its peak in 1863 “sold for $900, and Real del Monte stock worth $510 late in 1863” went begging at $9.” The depression in the diggings grew more severe during the course of the year. The companies reduced wages by fifty cents a day to $3.50, a measure that sparked the formation of miners’ unions in both Virginia City and Gold Hill. According to the Sacramento Bee, four thousand men in Virginia, nearly 20 percent of the population, were unemployed, and California newspapers gloated over the exodus from Nevada. Whereas the Comstock had been a magnet for Californians in 1862-63, the flow of immigrants was reversed in 1864, “The returning tide of Washoeites continues to come in upon us with increased numbers,” the Transcript reported in mid-August. Men who thought they were wealthy a few weeks earlier “have been ruined by the fall in stocks” and “hundreds of workmen thrown out of employment have been compelled to expend their last dime. This reaction which is now ruining, for the present, the business of Virginia City is the inevitable result of the wild speculations of people in mining stocks,” The market value of the Comstock companies fell from $40 million in 1863 to $12 million in the summer of 1865 to $4 million in December 1865,’