How Not to Get Rich Read online

  I confess, with 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 on myself. Yet I was 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 . . .

  One day, he came back to camp too excited by what he had discovered in a shallow riverbed to contain himself. Although he had been content until now with “vulgar silver,” he had stumbled onto something he thought was far more valuable. In his eagerness, he gave in to the temptation to show off the shimmering yellow samples he had gathered and sought an expert’s opinion of its worth. He handed the samples to a sixty-year-old prospecting partner and asked the man what he thought of the discovery.

  “Think of it!” the old prospector responded. “Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn’t worth ten cents an acre!”

  From this episode, Twain drew a sharp lesson. “All that glitters is not gold,” he said.

  The prospector told Twain he could go further than that: “Nothing that glitters is gold.”

  Even getting to the places where prospectors thought they might find gold and silver turned out to be far more arduous than Twain imagined. On a frigid afternoon in December 1861, for instance, he and three other men loaded a wagon with 1,800 pounds of provisions and rolled out of Carson City for the Humboldt district, northeast of Lake Bigler.

  The men were to ride in the wagon, which would be pulled by two horses. But when the horses proved old and feeble, the prospectors “found that it would be better if one or two of us got out and walked. It was an improvement. Next, we found that it would be better if a third man got out. That was an improvement also.” At this point, Twain volunteered to drive, though he had no experience, “and many a man in such a position would have felt fairly excused from such a responsibility.” But soon after he took the reins, “it was found that it would be a fine thing if the driver got out, and walked also.”

  Within an hour, the men further decided that they would take turns, two at a time, pushing the wagon through the sand, which left little for the horses to do “but keep out of the way.” Shoving that wagon and those horses two hundred miles took fifteen days, if you counted the two days the men just sat around and smoked their pipes so the horses could rest. They could have made the trek in half the time, Twain figured, “if we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it was too late.” Well-meaning strangers along the way suggested the prospectors might have made even better progress had they put the horses in the wagon.

  ONCE THE PROSPECTORS got to a likely spot, their work didn’t get any easier, nor did they become noticeably more efficient at working the ground. It took an hour to sink a shaft deep enough into the rocky soil to plant a charge and to blow a hole in the ground. One man would hold an iron drill while another slammed it with an eight-pound sledgehammer. After they had created a hole a couple of inches in diameter and two or three feet deep, they deposited gunpowder, covered it with rocks, dirt, and sand, lit the fuse, and ran for their lives. Once the blast went off and the rocks, dirt, and sand rained down, the prospectors would race back and, typically, find nothing more valuable than a small pile of quartz. “One week of this satisfied me,” Twain said. “I resigned.” The others resigned, too, and tried to think of different ways to meet the challenge. Instead of driving a shaft straight into the mountaintop, they decided they would dig a tunnel into the mountainside.

  So we went down the mountainside and worked a week; at the end of which time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge. I resigned again, and the other boys held out only one day longer. We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted. We wanted a ledge that was already “developed.” There were none in the camp.

  FOR ONE BRIEF SPELL in 1862, Twain was reduced to working as a laborer in a quartz mill. At the mill, quartz was pulverized and filtered and heated and rinsed and otherwise manipulated to dislodge whatever silver might be in it. This noisy and dirty work held no prospect whatever of making a man rich. All you did at the mill was help other men get rich. You processed other men’s ores from six in the morning till darkness fell, with no breaks between. All day long, you were exposed to quicksilver, with the ever-present danger of mercury poisoning. The pay was $10 a week. This was a significant comeuppance, or “comedownance,” for someone who saw himself, with every sunrise, as an incipient millionaire; it was a humiliating demotion for the son of a Tennessee real estate speculator whose heirs were “always going to be rich—next year.”

  There was always next year, and the next year after that. Back in Tennessee, Orion was supposed to be managing the sale of that land but he was getting nowhere. He had done some investigating and in the late 1850s determined that the family actually had title to only twenty-four tracts totaling just 30,000 acres. Even worse, the value of the acreage they owned was declining. A New York agency expressed interest in buying it for 10 cents an acre, and Twain’s family back east was eager to get rid of at least half the property. “I think we had better take it,” Pamela said. This was the best offer they had received. It wasn’t much, but “every little we get now is of great importance to us.” For some reason, the deal fell through, and Twain was becoming more and more impatient with the whole sorry business.

  ALL THE WHILE he worked in the quartz mill, he worried about money. But this did not last long—the work, that is. In his first days on the job, he explained, he was put to shoveling sand onto a screen used to filter out any silver it might contain. But he never learned to swing the shovel properly. “All too often, the sand never made it to the screen at all, but went over my head and down my back.” Twain found the work too hard, and he could well understand why the company “did not feel justified in paying me to shovel sand down my back.”

  Eventually, there came the inevitable parting of ways—a mutual parting of ways, Twain would insist in his autobiography. After a week, he went to his immediate supervisor. Twain explained that he “had never grown so attached to an occupation in so short a time, that nothing, it seemed to me, gave more scope to intellectual activity” as work at the mill. Even so, he “felt constrained to ask an increase of salary.” The boss said he considered $10 a week “a good round sum,” but how much did Twain want? About $400,000 a month, Twain claimed to have asked for—plus lodging. This “was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.” Twain was ordered off the premises. Given how hard he’d worked, “I only regret that I did not ask him [for] seven hundred thousand,” he wrote in Roughing It. But in his autobiography, Twain remembers the negotiations differently, though the outcome was the same: “I was discharged just at the moment I was going to resign.”

  Albert Bigelow Paine suggests that Twain worked in the mill with a larger purpose in mind than merely putting food on the table and tobacco in his pipe. “It was not entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing ‘riffles’ and ‘screenings,’” Paine writes. “The money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining.” That way, when he owned mines and his own mills, he could “personally superintend the work.”

  This is persuasive as far as it goes. Learning a business from the factory floor, as it were, almost always makes sense. It is certainly easy to imagine Twain seeing himself as a superintendent of many things. No doubt superintending was what he thought he did best; many of us believe telling others what to do is our true core competency.

  Paine is probably right, too, that Twain was coming to realize that, if he wished to succeed in a big way, being a mere prospector was not the best route. He and his
friends found “the real secret of success in silver mining—which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining!”

  He would have to become a speculator, too, and run the numerous businesses he planned to acquire with the earnings from his investments. As a speculator, he “bought and sold ‘feet’ and related interests like latter-day boys would deal in bubblegum baseball cards, and with about as much to show for it,” Ron Powers writes in his Twain biography. Keeping meticulous rec­ords of his holdings, Twain became “conversant in mining pyrites, copper, selenite crystals, mica, water rights, even the effect of underground springs on rheumatism. He also grew familiar with the phrase ‘played out.’”

  OF COURSE, SPECULATING would not be easy, even when you were in the field yourself, staking claims to can’t-miss opportunities. It wasn’t even easy when you located a genuine bonanza. In the summer of 1862, the whole community was talking about a new claim, the so-called Wide West Mine, which the Esmeralda Enterprise reported as rich not only in silver but in gold. Crowds gathered, and free samples of the rich ore were given away to spark interest.

  Recipients of these samples routinely took them back to their cabins and washed them to see for themselves if they were the real stuff. Cal Higbie, a kind of business associate with whom Twain shared a cabin, took his sample, rinsed it, ground it up, and examined it with a magnifying glass. One evening, he hid in the sagebrush and, when the workers had left the scene, he quietly slipped seventy-five feet down into the shaft and snooped around on his own. Then he climbed back to the surface, brushed himself off, and raced back to the cabin, “hot, red and ready to burst with smothered excitement,” to tell Twain the good news: “We are rich!”

  6

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  “Rich and Brimful of Vanity”

  As the two men huddled in their cabin, Higbie told Twain about the discovery. The sample he had been given wasn’t from the Wide West Mine at all, he said. It was from a vein that snaked its way parallel to the Wide West. It was a “blind lead,” in mining jargon, meaning it was in no way visible from the surface and unlikely to be discovered except by sheer luck or, in Higbie’s case, sheer snooping. Even better, a blind lead was anybody’s for the taking. All you had to do was stake your claim to it, which would shut down operations on the existing mine. This would allow Twain and Higbie to get at the riches unmolested.

  Twain, for once, was speechless. All his dreams were coming true. Once they secured this ore, he’d never need to work another day in his life. He’d never have to worry about that land back in Tennessee, or anything else. “I thought the very earth reeled under me,” he wrote in Roughing It. “Doubt—conviction—doubt again—exultation—hope, amazement, belief, unbelief—every emotion imaginable swept in wild procession through my heart and brain, and I could not speak a word. After a moment or two of this mental fury,” Twain asked Higbie to repeat himself.

  “It’s a blind lead!”

  Twain responded. “Let’s—let’s burn the house—or kill somebody!” he exclaimed. “Let’s get out somewhere where there’s room to hurrah . . . It is a hundred times too good to be true!”

  AT TEN ON the night of June 20—remember that date—Twain and Higbie went to the recorder’s office and entered their claim in the recorder’s book. Historians disagree about exactly what securing their rights to the claim required, but judging from Section 11 of the Esmeralda Mining District, regulations were pretty minimal. You filed the paperwork. Then, to show you were serious, you had ten days to begin the hard labor of actually getting those minerals out of the ground. If you didn’t start the work, your claim was forfeited, and at the stroke of midnight on the eleventh day, someone else could “jump” your claim.

  After Twain and Higbie entered their claim and returned to their cabin, neither could sleep. Lying awake in their drafty, dirt-floor shack, they began to talk about how the riches they were about to reap would totally change their lives. As soon as the work was started, they agreed to leave Nevada, take a steamer out of California, and wait in the East for the silver to be mined and sold and their money to roll in. When they were flush, they’d move back to the West.

  “Where are you going to live?” Higbie asked.

  “San Francisco,” Twain said.

  Higbie said he would live there, too.

  They’d agreed that Russian Hill would be the best place to build their houses but decided it might take too much climbing. They were sick of walking up and down hills. Then they remembered they would own carriages. So it would be Russian Hill, after all.

  “What kind of a house are you going to build?” Twain asked.

  “Three-story and an attic,” Higbie said.

  “But what kind?”

  “Well, I don’t hardly know. Brick, I suppose.”

  Twain sneered at brick. He had other ideas.

  “Brownstone front—French plate glass—billiard-room off the dining-room—statuary and paintings—shrubbery and two-acre grass plat—greenhouse—iron dog on the front stoop—gray horses—landau, and a coachman . . .”

  After a pause, Twain asked, “Cal, when are you going to Europe?”

  “Well, I hadn’t thought of that. When are you?”

  “In the Spring.”

  “Going to be gone all summer?” Higbie asked.

  “All summer! I shall remain there three years.”

  Higbie decided he would go too.

  “What part of Europe shall you go to?”

  “All parts,” Twain said. “France, England, Germany—Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Syria, Greece, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Egypt—all over everywhere.”

  Higbie thought for a moment and agreed it would be a “swell trip.”

  “We’ll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it one, anyway,” Twain said.

  Then, after a long pause, Twain added: “Higbie, we owe the butcher six dollars, and he has been threatening to stop our—”

  “Hang the butcher!”

  “Amen.”

  THEY TALKED LIKE this until 3 a.m., then got up and played cribbage and, till sunrise, smoked their pipes. Twain continued to plan his European trip. He “managed to get it all laid out, as to route and length of time to be devoted to it—everything, with one exception—namely, whether to cross the desert from Cairo to Jerusalem per camel, or to go by sea to Beirut, and thence down through the country per caravan.”

  He also decided to write to friends back east, asking them to find a suitable home for his mother (which he would pay for himself, of course) and then sell his interest in the Tennessee land and donate the profits to the widows’ and orphans’ fund of the typographers’ union.

  But before he could start working the claim, he was suddenly called away to the sickbed of a friend nine miles out of town. Twain left a note in the cabin for Higbie explaining where he had gone.

  Higbie, however, had decided to set off on his own in search of an even richer vein that everyone had begun to gossip about. Passing the cabin as he rode out of town, Higbie simply tossed a note for Twain through the window. Being in a hurry, he never went inside, where Twain’s note lay.

  Several days passed. Around midnight on June 30, Twain shambled back into camp, too exhausted to notice the crowd gathered around the Wide West, and went straight to the cabin. There, in the candlelight sat Higbie, staring in sullen disbelief at the note Twain had left him.

  “Higbie, what—what is it?” Twain asked.

  “We’re ruined—we didn’t do the work.”

  Higbie, it turned out, had never seen Twain’s note because he had not gone back inside the cabin. Of course, Twain hadn’t seen the note Higbie left for him because he hadn’t been back either. Neither had done a thing about their claim, and it had been jumped. That’s why the crowd had gathered at the shaft. Higbie had gone to see what the commotion was about, arriving ten minutes too late.


  For an hour, “busy with vain and useless upbraidings,” the two men tried to sort out what had gone wrong. Mostly they sat in silence. “A minute before, I was rich and brimful of vanity,” Twain wrote in Roughing It. “I was a pauper now, and very meek.” He tried to look on the bright side: “I can always have it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days.”

  Now what can the astute business leader of today—the so-called lifelong learner—conclude from this episode, which Twain called “the most curious, I think, that had yet accented my slothful, valueless, heedless career”? Any consultant will tell you. The key to accomplishing anything in business (you see it in every PowerPoint presentation) is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Twain and Higbie had not even managed to communicate, or even communicate, communicate, much less communicate, communicate, communicate. That’s the lesson here. There might be others, but that’s the first one any of our self-styled “thought leaders” of today would spot.

  THE PARTNERSHIP THAT found and lost the blind lead was not the only business organization in which Twain was involved in his mining days. He was also a partner in the Clemens Gold and Silver Mining Company (now defunct) with Orion as his partner. Theirs was a complicated relationship, personally and professionally.

  “Send me $40 or $50—by mail—immediately,” Twain wrote shortly after beginning his prospecting. “Don’t buy anything while I am here—but save up money for me. Don’t send any money home. I shall have your next quarter’s salary spent before you get it, I think. I mean to make or break here within the next 2 or 3 months.”

  That was in April 1862. In May, he reported to Orion that the Clemens Company owned one-eighth of a new mine, and he wouldn’t sell a share of it for any price “because I know it to contain our fortune.” Before the summer was over, however, Twain began to worry—and was losing his patience with a brother who he felt was insufficiently supportive. The younger brother, he reminded Orion, was the mining expert and should be recognized as such.