The camp was enjoying its maiden boom. In sixty days real-estate values had jumped from $25 for a lot on Main Street to $5,500. Roughly constructed business houses banked the main thoroughfare for two or three blocks. The heavy traffic incident to hauling in supplies from Tonopah had ground the dirt of the street into an impalpable mass of dust to the depth of fifteen inches, and the unchecked winds of the desert, sweeping from the Sierra Nevadas to the high uplifts east of Goldfield, whipped the dust into blinding clouds that daily made life almost unendurable. Practically the entire population was housed in tents that dotted the foothills. At night-time these presented the appearance of an army encampment. Provisions were scarce and barely met the requirements. The principal eating-place was the Mocha Café, which consisted of a 14 by 18 tent with an earthen floor and a roughly constructed lunch-counter. Here men stood in line for hours, waiting to pay a dollar for a dirty cup of coffee, a small piece of salty ham and two eggs that had long survived the hens that laid them. The popular rendezvous was the Northern saloon and gambling house, owned and managed by "Tex" Rickard and associates. Here fully seventy-five per cent. of the camp's male population gathered nightly and played faro, roulette and stud-poker, talked mines and mining, sold properties, and shielded themselves from the blasts that came with piercing intensity from the snow-capped peaks of the Sierras. The brokers of the camp gathered every night in the Northern and held informal sessions, frequently trading to the extent of 30,000 or 40,000 shares of the more active stocks. The mining stocks which were advertised through my agency in those early Goldfield days were generally of the 10, 20 and 30-cent per share variety. The incorporators of the companies were enthusiastic on the point of their "prospect" making good, but I argued to myself that if the chances of any mining prospect of this character proving to be a mine were only about one in 25 or one in 50, and my agency advertised 25 or 50 companies of the average quality, and one of them made good in a handsome way, he who purchased an equal number of shares in each would at least "break even" with the profits from the one winner. Later this principle was "knocked into a cocked hat" for conservatism by Mohawk of Goldfield advancing from 10 cents to $20 a share, proving that if Mohawk had been one among 50 companies, the shares of which were purchased by an investor at 10 cents, he would have gained handsomely. Early purchasers of Mohawk gathered 200 to 1 for their money, many times more than could usually be won on a long shot at the horse-races, and not so very much less than was formerly won by lucky prize-winners in the Louisiana Lottery. And Mohawk was only one of a dozen of the early ones which advanced in price on the exchanges and curb markets more than 1,000 per cent.