Adventure Magazine, December 10, 1924 — page 160: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

138 Carson was a trading station known as Ragtown, from the fact that there the womenfolk of the Plains-crossers discarded the clothes they had worn on the journey before bedecking themselves anew for their appearance in California, although they still had the great barrier of the Sierra to sur- mount before entering the promised land. About the time of the settlement of Genoa, Mormon immigrants found gold not iar from the Carson River and named the place Gold Cafion. As it was too late in the season for safe passage over the Sierra into California, they worked the diggings. But the gold being of a dust-like fineness and the quantity not up to their expecta- tions, nearly all of them left for California in the spring, expecting to get rich picking up nuggets. Other miners from California, where new diggings had become rare, crossed the Sierra and took up the work abandoned by the Mormons. Pushing up the cajion, where they found the ground richest, they founded a camp called Johntown. The original discovery, abandoned to the de- spised Oriental, became known as China- town. But the principal settlement in all that vast region of more that 112,000 square miles was Johntown, which at the height of its prosperity numbered almost two hundred souls. The nearest town to the east was Salt Lake, about six hundred miles away. To the west was Sacramento, one hundred and fifty miles, but the great ramparts of the Sierra uplifted themselves between. ‘Then came the discovery of the Comstock, four or five miles above John- town, and with the announcement of that rich find adventurers from the four corners ofthe earth flocked in. Among them were practically all the “bad men” from Salt Lake to the Pacific ocean and from the Canadian to the Mexican border. Brown more nearly approximates ea the level of the Montana gunmen than any other of the Nevada contingent. He was preéminently the worst of all the bad men who flocked to that territory with the discovery of the Comstock lode. He used to brag that he had killed sixteen men, but dispassionate historians declare that he padded his record. Unlike most of the Chiefs, Brown seldom drew a gun. He was a knife specialist. FOR all-around deviltry, Sam Adventure His home state was Texas, but history is silent as to any bowie exploits of his before his Californian debut, which took place in Mariposa, where one night he killed a patron of his gambling-house. Mariposa was in the throes of a law-and-order spasm at the time, as a result of which Brown was obliged to betake himself to Calaveritas. There one night two Mexicans, playing at his monte game, incurred his disesteem by persisting in crimping the cards. He slashed them wide open and left them dead on the floor. A mob of Mexicans beset him, but, armed with knives though they were, their ferocity was inferior to his, for he carved ene of them to death before he escaped and gave himself into the hands of the sheriff. In that day and place it was almost as safe to kill a Mexican as it was a Chinaman, and for the second time Sam Brown went scot free. . Six years passed, and although the full toll of death exacted by that lethal bowie is not known, it must have claimed another victim, for Brown fled the pleasant clime of California for the rough frontier village of Genoa, on the eastern slope of the Sierras, where he opened another monte game. It was a year memorable in the annals of the Far West, for one sunny afternoon in June two prospectors, from washing out a poor dirt that was netting them less than two dollars a day, unwittingly uncovered the croppings of the Comstock, from which a third of a billion in gold and silver bullion was afterward taken. Genoa, but thirty miles away, emptied itself into the Comstock. The first winter was frightful, particularly so to those who toiled not. It must have been during that time that Sam Brown descended so close to the level of honest toil as to take a job as station-keeper on the line of the Overland stage. But with the spring living conditions bet- tered and the immense riches of the mines drew, magnet-like, the male vultures and female harpies who infested all the mining camps of the Pacific Coast. News of the harvest came to Sam Brown ‘at his lonely station and he struck out for Virginia City. The last stage-stop on the way was at Carson City, but fourteen miles off. The evil fate of Billy Bowe decreed that Sam Brown should elect to remain there over- night. There was a hilarious throng at the CoMmicbook ) (© 5}