Episode 96

The "flush times" held bravely on.Something over two years before, Mr.

Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of Virginia.They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die.They bought it, type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.

The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office, bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment and it was a small one, too.The editors and printers slept on the floor, a Chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the general dinner table.But now things were changed.The paper was a great daily, printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three compositors;the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the advertising rates were exorbitant, and the columns crowded.The paper was clearing from six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the "Enterprise Building" was finished and ready for occupation--a stately fireproof brick.Every day from five all the way up to eleven columns of "live" advertisements were left out or crowded into spasmodic and irregular "supplements."The "Gould & Curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars.Gould &Curry stock paid heavy dividends--a rare thing, and an experience confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the "main lead," the "Comstock." The Superintendent of the Gould & Curry lived, rent free, in a fine house built and furnished by the company.He drove a fine pair of horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve thousand dollars a year.The superintendent of another of the great mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to have had one per cent.on the gros…