Much of the wealth on which Carson City - and indeed San Francisco - was built came from the silver mines of the Comstock Lode , a solid seam of pure silver discovered underneath Mount Hamilton, fourteen miles east of Carson City off US-50, in 1859. Raucous VIRGINIA CITY grew up on the steep slopes above the mines, and a young writer named Samuel Clemens made his way here from the east with his older brother, the acting Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory, to see what all the fuss was about. His descriptions of the wild life of the mining camp, and of the desperately hard work men put in to get at the valuable ore, were published years later under his pseudonym, Mark Twain . Though Twain also spent some time in the Gold Rush towns of California's Mother Lode, on the other side of the Sierra - which by then were all but abandoned - his tales of Virginia City life, collected in Roughing It , form a hilarious eyewitness account of the hard-drinking life of the frontier miners. There's not much to Virginia City nowadays, since all the old storefronts have been taken over by hot-dog vendors and tacky souvenir stands, but the surrounding landscape of arid mountains still feels remote and undisturbed.