From every state and many nations the pioneers of California came, young, ardent, hopeful, strong. Round the Horn in clipper ships, across the fever-swept Isthmus, by way of the long Overland Trail, they poured into the Golden West. They laughed at hardship. They wrote songs of defiance to bad luck and sang them while they worked and starved and died. Self-contained and confident, they gutted mountains, made deserts leafy green, built cities that were the marvel of their generation. To these sunset shores came the pick of the world’s adventurous youth. Nevada absorbed the best and the worst of California’s seasoned veterans. Gay, reckless, debonair, the gold-seekers went their turbulent way. Every man was a law to himself, carried in his holster the redress for wrongs. The wildest excesses prevailed. The most brutal crimes went unpunished. For years there was no night at Virginia, at Austin, or at Eureka. The flare from dance halls, hurdy-gurdys, and gambling houses flung splashes of light on masses of roughly dressed men engaged in continual revelry. But it would be unjust to condemn Washoe because it did not measure up to the standards of Philadelphia. At its worst no good woman was ever more revered than here, no child’s innocence more zealously guarded. And, as it proved, the strength of the bad man lacked the endurance of the one who was good. Law and order came to Nevada, brought by stalwarts who took their lives in their hands to punish desperadoes. The dominance of law came slowly, because Washoe was under the jurisdiction of Utah, so far away across the desert that its authority was only a shadow. Until this handicap was taken away, no real civil authority was possible. The earliest mining at Virginia was done from the grass roots, which fact accounts largely for the character of its population. Six-Mile Cañon heads on the north side of Mt. Davidson, Gold Cañon about a mile distant on its south slope. Placer miners, working among the decomposed rock and gravel of the ravines, moved up toward the mother lode without knowing it. The clay in which they dug was so tough it had to be “puddled” in water with shovels. But the formation of the strata had convinced the astute that the Washoe diggings were a quartz proposition. The rocker and the long tom had had their day. Into the Ophir and the Gould & Curry, steam hoists had been put. The shafts were going deeper every hour. Much litigation developed, due in part to defective location work and disputes as to veins. This brought to the territory the ablest bar on the Pacific Coast. Among the newspaper reporters who worked a few months later on the _Territorial Enterprise_ was Mark Twain. He was one of a dozen brilliant writers who later were known from coast to coast, all of whom were associated with the Goodwins on this paper.