Rawhide correspondents reorganized the full value of the occasion from the press-agent's standpoint. Mr. Grannan had been a world-famous plunger on the turf, and the correspondents burned the midnight oil in an effort to do their subject justice.
Some other lights and shadows of Rawhide press-agenting are contained in the following dispatch, which appeared in a San Francisco newspaper in the early period of the boom:
GOLDFIELD, February 19.--W. H. Scott of the Goldfield brokerage house of Scott & Amann, who returned from Rawhide this morning, expresses the opinion that within a year that camp will be the largest gold-producer in the State. "When a man is broke in Rawhide," said Mr. Scott, "he can always eat. All he has to do is to go to some lease and pan out breakfast money. There is rich ore on every dump, and every man is made welcome."
H. W. Knickerbocker sent this one to a Reno newspaper:
Gold, Gold, Gold! The wise men of old sought an alchemy whereby they could transmute the base metals into gold. It was a fruitless quest then; it is a needless quest now. Rawhide has been discovered! No flowers bloom upon her rock-ribbed bosom. No dimpling streams kiss her soil into verdure, to flash in laminated silver 'neath the sunbeam's touch. No flowers nor food, no beauty nor utility on the surface; but from her desert-covered heart Rawhide is pouring a stream of yellow gold out upon the world which is translatable, not simply into food and houses and comfort, but also into pictures and poetry and music and all those things that minister in an objective way to the development of a full-orbed manhood.
Joseph S. Jordan, the well-known Nevada mining editor, filed this dispatch to the newspapers of his string on the Coast:
Right through what is now the main street of Rawhide, in the days of '49, the makers of California passed on their way to the new Eldorado. They had many hardships through which to pass before reaching the gold which was their lure, and thousands that went through the hills of Rawhide never reached their goal. They were massacred by the Indians, or fell victims to the thirst and heat of the desert, and for many years the way across the plains was marked by the whitening bones of the pathfinders. And here all the while lay the treasures of Captain Kidd, the ransoms of crowns.