(This headnote is repeated in numbers 29 and 30)

When the Ophir claim was located on the Comstock Lode in June 1859, Emanuel Penrod and Henry Comstock, two members of the Ophir Company, were allotted an extra one hundred feet on the lead. The company gave them this either in return for water rights under their control or, as Penrod later said, because he, supported by Comstock, had identified the ore-bearing quartz lead. Later that year Penrod and Comstock sold their one hundred feet for $9,500 to Gabriel Maldonado and Francis J. Hughes, who formed the Mexican Company and began to work the Mexican, or Spanish, mine.1 It soon became one of the most productive and valuable mines on the Comstock Lode.

In late October 1862 and again in mid-February 1863 Mark Twain descended into the Spanish mine and published two closely linked accounts of his visits. The first, called “The Spanish Mine,” was published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise sometime in October, but is extant only in the Oroville (Calif.) Butte Record for 1 November 1862, which reprinted the Enterprise. The second, which is entitled “The Spanish,” survives in an Enterprise clipping; it fulfilled the author's promise in the first sketch to speak at a later date of the “steam hoisting apparatus now in process of erection by the Spanish Company.”

Neither piece was signed, but circumstantial and stylistic evidence combine to show that Clemens wrote both of them. The first sketch is, for instance, remarkable for its irresistible drift toward humor. The author played [begin page 161] with the notion of nearing “the confines of purgatory—so to speak,” and visiting “the infernal regions.” The complex timbering prompted him to wonder “where the forest around [him] came from, and how they managed to get it into that hole.” He compared descending through these square-set timbers to “falling through a well-ventilated shot-tower with the windows all open.” And he casually mocked his own guided tour of a local marvel: “keep on going until you come to a horse.”

Dan De Quille, the mining expert on the Enterprise staff, was sharing the duties of local reporter with Clemens in October 1862. Dan was capable of such playful reporting, but a number of circumstances show that he did not write these two sketches. The style of each is unmistakably Clemens': the use of the phrase “you know” and of “waltz” as a slang verb of motion are both practically signatures. But beyond this, the implicit sense of naive wonder that pervades the first sketch is not consistent with Dan's expertise.2 And he certainly could not have written the second one (forecast in the first), because he had by then left Nevada for Iowa, and Clemens was writing all of the local items by himself. The first sketch must, in fact, record Clemens' earliest exposure to mining techniques, such as Philip Deidesheimer's square-set method of mine timbering, and the relatively primitive methods of descent—a winding staircase, and a bucket at the end of a rope.

Moreover, many of the details mentioned in the first sketch were used in other descriptions of mine interiors that were demonstrably written by Clemens. In a letter probably written early in 1863 to his family, Clemens said that if Pamela were to visit a mine, she would see “great, dark, timbered chambers, with a lot of shapeless devils flitting about in the distance, with dim candles flickering in the gloom; and then she could look far above her head, to the top of the shaft, and see a faint little square of daylight, apparently no bigger than one of the spots on a chess-board.”3 And in late May 1868, while visiting Virginia City on his western lecture tour, Clemens wrote a newspaper letter in which he recalled visiting the mines:

We may compare these passages with references in the first sketch to “workmen poking about in the gloom with twinkling candles,” “bottomless holes with endless ropes hanging down into them,” and “hot candle-grease” and the chance to “get your clothes dirty,” and particularly to the anxiety to return to the daylight above.

External circumstantial evidence also corroborates Clemens' authorship. In January 1870 he reminisced about the Spanish mine and its sudden rise in “market value”: “I was down in it about that time, 600 ft under the ground, and about half of it caved in over my head.”5 “About that time” could mean either 1862 or 1863. Another factual detail, moreover, seems to link Clemens with the first sketch. The mine superintendent mentioned late in the sketch, Harvey Beckwith, was evidently known to Clemens in 1862, when the piece was published: in January 1868 Clemens wrote a letter of recommendation for him in which he said that Beckwith was “a first-rate man in every way—steady, faithful, smart & particularly energetic. . . . God never made two such men. . . . I have known him six years.”6

The Enterprise clipping from the local column that included the second sketch is in the Grant Smith Papers. Above it someone has penciled “Mark visits the Mexican mine, Enterprise Feb. 2, 1863.” This date cannot be correct, however, because February 2 fell on a Monday that year, and the Enterprise did not publish on Mondays. Moreover, Clemens was in Carson City from January 29 until at least February 7 and so could not have visited the mine “yesterday,” if publication occurred in the first week of February. Still, February 1863 is a plausible time for it to have appeared. Clemens was then busily feuding with Clement T. Rice (the Unreliable), whose head, we are told in the second sketch, was “filled with oysters instead of brains.” And early in 1863 heavy rains caused flooding in some of the Comstock mines, a condition alluded to in this account. It therefore seems likely that whoever annotated the clipping in the Grant Smith Papers mistook the date by one digit, and we have conjectured it as either February 12 or 22.

When Clemens wrote this second sketch he had obviously learned more about mines and mining than he had known in the fall of 1862, when he wrote the previous one. Sometime between 17 and 22 February 1863 he also published “Silver Bars—How Assayed” (no. 43), a rather wide-eyed account of what he had recently learned of the assay process. And the first item in his column for February 19 was also devoted to mining news.7 But like other “experts,” including the officials of the Spanish mine, he did not foresee the seriousness of the damage caused by the flooding. Water from the spring thaw further weakened the mine's timbering and caused a major cave-in on July 15.