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.”
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In early December 1865, to save money and preempt Gillis's prosecution on assault charges, the roommates abandoned the city to spend the winter in a pair of decayed mining camps in the Sierra foothills. “I took $300 with me,” Sam later recalled, probably from the sale of his last mining stock. ‘The Hale & Norcross Mine had been listed for sale at $1,000 a share in early Novernber but dropped to $310 on December 1, and Sam apparently liquidated his remaining interest in the mine during the bear market to finance his trip.
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After a three months’ absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent. When my credit was about exhausted, (for I had become too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper, and there were no vacancies on the evening journals,) I was created San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise, and at the end of five months I was out of debt, but my interest in my work was gone; for my correspondence being a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another change. The vagabond instinct was strong upon me. Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one. It was to go down to the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the Sacramento Union, an excellent journal and liberal with employees.