PREFATORY.This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history
or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of
variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting
reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad
him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information
concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about
which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in
person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude
to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada
-a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind,
that has occurred in the land; an
