If you choose to read any government report, this is the one. Most government documents are rather dry reading. This one is not! It is a fair, wide-ranging assessment of the (early gold) and (later) silver mining efforts in the vicinity of Virginia City, Nevada. It quotes numerous sources, including the newspaper The Territorial Enterprise. Much later editors of that newspaper will quote different statistics than Lord uses, but I suspect Lord's figures are based on reports filed at the time with the territorial government while the newspaper's are based on what they obtained from other sources. Who knows which are more accurate?