We found many persons at work in the higher part of the gulch, searching for veins and pockets of gold, in the holes which had already produced their first harvest. Some of these gleaners, following the lodes abandoned by others as exhausted, into the sides of the mountain, were well repaid for their perseverance. Others, again, had been working for days without finding anything. Those who understood the business obtained from one to four ounces daily. Their only tools were the crowbar, pick, and knife, and many of them, following the veins under strata of rock which lay deep below the surface, were obliged to work while lying flat on their backs, in cramped and narrow holes. Mark Twain Doesn’t Strike It Rich As Bayard Taylor suggests in the preceding narrative, not all fortune seekers in the mining camps succeeded in finding gold or silver. Many were unlucky or unwilling to work hard and returned home disillusioned. Most of them stayed in California, however, and became farmers or city workers. Thus the West Coast was settled before many states farther east. Sam Clemens, who tried his hand at prospecting, was not a very serious miner and found his gold when he turned his western experiences into literary material, such as _Roughing It_, from which the next selection comes. Here he tells how he almost got rich. I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground. I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the mountain summits. I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me that I might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon myself. Yet I was as perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything, that I was going to gather up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two, silver enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy—and so my fancy was already busy with plans for spending this money. The first opportunity that offered, I sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they seemed to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, I fled away as guiltily as a thief might have done and never halted till I was far beyond sight and call.