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Show 359 He had met many. How sad the tones of the invisible undercurrent of many a life here, now the clang and excitements of the gold battles are over. What wrecks of hopes and health, and how truly interesting are those wrecks. Perhaps no other country in the world contains so many rare and interesting men. Yet he would not cater to the sentimental lies about gold periods in California or elsewhere; he spoke of "Nevada's dead towns" with clear and cold authority. These were monuments to the failure of wasted effort, "monuments of fraud and ignorance - sins against science. . . . like prayers of any kind not in harmony with nature, they are unanswered." And this applied to more than just mining. It applied to all get-rich-quick schemes. Of the rural homesteads near Murphy's camp, he said, In spite of all the rustic beauty of these dell cabins, they can hardly be called homes. They are only a better kind of camps, gladly abandoned whenever the hoped-for gold harvest has been gathered. In these places, Muir sensed an air of "profound unrest and melancholy," which could be contrasted to the happy communal life of Grangers in Tulare County. He assured his readers that like wildcat mining, "Wildcat farming is dead." He hoped for a more permanent life in the land. He saw room for more farming in Nevada, through the use of wells and limited hut unused surface water which still "reached old deathbeds |