CHAPTER VIII
THE GREAT BONANZA
"You certainly started young enough in the prospecting game," saidOwens, when Jim told of his birth in a mining camp, "and have you beenat it all your life?"
"Ever since I was big enough to twirl a pan or rock a cradle!"
"How do you mean rock a cradle?" queried Clem. "I thought you were inthe cradle!"
"Not that kind, boy," Jim answered, "what I'm meanin' is a miner'scradle, or a rocker, as some calls it. I gradooated from one tot'other."
"What's a miner's cradle, then?"
"It's a scheme to make pannin' easier. Pannin' is durn hard work,Clem. You're squattin' on your hams beside a river all the day long,you got to hold a pan full o' earth an' water at arm's length an' downat an angle what nigh tears your arms out o' their sockets, an' thenkeep revolvin' the mixture with a circular twist that wrenches themuscles somethin' cruel. I've seen big men, tough uns, too, faircryin' from the pain, at first.
"Not only that, but you got to work the sodden lumps o' dirt soft wi'your fingers, so's the grit gets right into the skin. Your hands arewet nigh all the time. The grit an' the constant washin' o' the water,in all weathers, cracks the skin all over, so's it's bleedin' most o'the time. You got to have hands like a bit o' rawhide to stand it.
"The cradle does the work quicker'n' easier, but it takes three men towork it right. It looks like a child's cradle from the outside, thoughmost o' them I've seen was made pretty rough. About six inches fromthe top there's a drawer, or sometimes jest a tray, with a bottom o'iron, punched wi' holes o' different sizes, accordin' to the kind o'dirt you're workin' in. If your pannin' out don't show no big grainso' gold-dust, why, you keep the holes o' the cradle small, otherwise,you got to have 'em bigger. Below that drawer is another one, slopin'like. It hasn't got no holes. It has cross-bars or cleats, what wecall 'riffles,' to keep the gold from washin' away.
"One man digs up the pay dirt an' chucks it in at the top o' thecradle. Another dips up bucket after bucket o' water, continuous, an'sloshes it in; it's his job, too, to break up the soft lumps an' keepstirrin' the pasty mess, an' to keep the cradle full o' water. Thethird man goes rock, rockin', without stoppin', hours at a time.Mostly, the pardners spell each other off."
"But I should think a good deal of gold would be washed away by thatsystem," objected Clem, "surely the rocking must dash some of it overthe riffles."
"Some does go," Jim agreed, "but a gang can handle so much more paydirt in a day that it more'n makes up. Three men with a cradle canhandle twice as much dirt as the three men workin' separately would,each with a pan. Team work pays, in minin'--if you can trust yourpardners.
"Just about the time I was born, Father made pardners with five otherprospectors, all pannin' on the Carson. Their claims were all in astring, one after the other, so they figures on makin' a sluice.That's jest a long trough. In richer an' more settled camps they'remade of iron, length after length, all ready to be fixed together likea stove-pipe, but on the Carson, they was jest hollowed-out logs.
"Sluices was always a foot deep, a foot an' a half wide, an' as longas could be made, slopin' slightly, so the water wouldn't run too fastor too slow, an' wi' riffles every few inches all along. The sixclaims I'm tellin' about give a chance for a sluice over a hundredfoot long. To save the trouble o' liftin' water up in a pail, orpumpin' it, Father made a sort o' small flume, leadin' from the riverhigher up right into the sluice, so's the water would run continuous.
"Bein' there was six o' them, the pardners worked three shifts, eighthours each. One man dug the dirt, wheeled it in a barrow to the heado' the sluice an' dumped it on a wooden platform. The other shoveledit into the sluice, stirred it up, an' broke up the lumps when theygot pasty. Eight hours o' that was a day's work, I'm tellin'! Mother,she cooked an' washed for all six men, aside lookin' after me. Wi'meals to be got for all three shifts, she was kep' busy.
"The sluice didn't stop runnin', day nor night, for a month at astretch. Then the water in the flume was turned off, the sluice,riffles an' platform were scraped clean wi' knives, an' all sixpardners panned the scrapin's. That was the clean-up. It was dividedby weight o' dust into seven equal parts, Mother gettin' a man'sshare."
"Didn't they use any mercury at all on the Carson?" queried Owens.
"After a bit, our gang did. Not until each man had a bag o' dust setaside, big enough to buy a few weeks' grub, though. They'd all gotbadly bit in Californy, an' quicksilver cost a lot o' money in themdays."
"What's the quicksilver for?" queried Clem.
"To catch the gold. If you spread it on the riffles it seems to grab ahold o' 'color' like glue, an', what's more, nothin' but gold'll stickto it."
"Why is that?"
"I don't know," Jim answered, a bit irritably, "it does, that's all."
Owens interposed.
"You can't blame Jim for not knowing why, Clem," he said. "So far asthat goes, I don't believe any chemist in the world can tell youexactly why quicksilver catches gold. It does, though, sure enough.But I can show you how it does it, in a way.
"You know that if iron is exposed to damp air, it turns red with rust?That is due to the chumminess or the affinity of iron with oxygen. Youknow if silver is exposed to city air, where the burning of coal infurnaces and fireplaces sends a sulphurous smoke into the air, itturns black? That's due to the fact that silver is a natural chum ofsulphur. Chemically speaking, they make compounds easily.
"It's the same way with mercury, or, as it is generally called,quicksilver. Gold and quicksilver are chums, and the minute they gettogether they join to form a mixture which is called an amalgam.That's one of the great discoveries of the age. Gold-mining has takena big jump forward since that was found out.
"You can see yourself how that would work. Whether with a pan, acradle, or a sluice, the only thing that enables a miner to separatethe gold from the worthless dirt is that the gold is smaller andheavier. But suppose the gold dust is so fine as to be invisible, itwill be so light as to wash away easily; if it is in fine flakes, theflakes will almost float. All that light gold would be lost in thedirt that flows out of the bottom of the sluice, the tailings, as theyare called.
"In the days that Jim is describing, two-thirds of the gold was lostthat way. Every one, absolutely every single one of the forty-ninerswould have made a fortune, if the chemistry of gold had been as faradvanced then as it is to-day. Even now, men are working over withprofit the tailings that the forty-niners threw away.
"Suppose, now, you make your sluice, cover the bottom of it and theriffles with copper plates to hold the quicksilver better, and thencover your copper with quicksilver. What happens when the dirt andwater come flowing down the sluice? The riffles will catch your heavygold, just as well as before, and the quicksilver will catch a lot ofthe light gold that used to escape. You've got your gold in theriffles, then, and you've got a mixture of gold and quicksilver whichhas formed an amalgam.
"Now, the mixture has to be made to give back that gold. First of allit is pressed through canvas or buckskin in order to get rid of theliquid quicksilver, which will pass through the weave of the first andthe pores of the second, leaving inside only such of it as has firmlyallied itself with the gold to form the amalgam.
"The next thing to do is to put this amalgam into a retort, out ofwhich leads a long pipe, and to subject this retort to intense heat.Quicksilver is vaporized at a comparatively low temperature--for ametal. It is driven from the amalgam in the form of vapor, much aswater may be driven off in steam. The quicksilver vapor passes alongthis long pipe, which leads to several coils placed in a tank ofrunning cold water. The cold chills the vapor, condensing it into theliquid state again, and the quicksilver runs out of the end of thepipe, ready for use once more. The pure gold is left.
"But, even with the use of quicksilver on the sluice there was still40 per cent. of the gold that got away. For many years there was nopractical way of recovering this loss, and the chemists of the worldtore their hair in d
espair. What was needed was to find some otherchum of gold, even more affectionate than mercury. The chemists foundthis new friend, at last, in cyanide, which is a salt of prussic acid.Cyanide, Clem, is an arrant flirt, as I'll show you, in a minute.
"Nowadays, the tailings, after passing over the long sluice or flume,and after having dropped the heavy gold in the riffles and given someof the light gold to the quicksilver, are led to a huge churn. Therethe earth and water are pounded together into a sort of slime. A wheellifts this slime into a movable chute from which it is poured into aseries of vats or tanks. These tanks contain cyanide, which hasalready allied itself with a chum--potassium.
"But cyanide likes gold even better than it does potassium, and, assoon as the slime strikes the vat, the cyanide lets go the potassiumand clings to the gold. Cyanide of gold is formed. So far, so good.But what the miner wants is pure gold.
"The cyanide is pumped up out of those tanks into another chute, whichpours it into a second lot of tanks, fastened to the side of which arelarge bundles of zinc shavings. The cyanide liked the gold better thanthe potassium, but it has the bad taste to prefer zinc even to gold.It releases the gold and flies to the embrace of the zinc. The gold,suddenly deserted of the friendship of the cyanide, powders down tothe bottom of the tank, in absolutely pure form, ready to be melteddown into bars. By other processes, which I won't bother you bydescribing now, the zinc is released from the cyanide, and the cyanideis led to its old friend the potassium, ready to begin work anew. So,you see, nothing is wasted.
"This process, and this only, has made the astounding wealth of SouthAfrica, for, as I told you, the reefs there are of very low-grade ore,so low that Jim, here, would have turned up his nose at it. Themodern ability of chemists to get out the tiniest particle of goldthat lies in the most stubborn rock has made the Rand a richer regionthan a prospector's wildest dream."
"If I'd known all that, forty years ago, I'd be a rich man now," saidJim, regretfully.
"You'd have been a millionaire, ten times over," Owens agreed, "but,since it hadn't been found out, you couldn't have known it. But didyou always stick to gold, Jim? That Carson River country has got moresilver in it than it has gold."
"Don't I know it? 'Ain't it been rubbed into me, good an' hard? Fatherwasn't a cussin' man, noways, but he couldn't keep his tongue in orderlike a man should, when he got to talkin' about silver. He threw awayany amount o' high-grade silver ore, while huntin' for gold. Therichest silver mine in the whole world, I reckon, was found less'n ahundred yards from where he'd been pannin'.
"It was the same ol' story--he didn't know enough! Workin' hard maybring a man some money, but havin' savvy will bring him a lot more.
"Right where Father was workin', he was havin' all sorts o' troublewi' a heavy black sand that kep' on fillin' up the riffles like it wasgold. He shoveled away cubic yards of it! An' do you know what thatwas? That dirty black sand was nigh pure silver, an' Father waspannin' less'n quarter of a mile away from the richest section in allNevada. He was campin' right on the Comstock Lode! I reckon you'veheard o' that, Mr. Owens!"
"Every mining man has heard of the Comstock," the mine-owner replied."Personally, I don't know a great deal about silver, although theBroken Hill mine, New South Wales, which is nearly as rich as thegreat Nevada deposit, is located not far from my home. I went straightfrom gold to coal. So I never did hear the real story of the Comstock.But you ought to know about it, Jim. Was it found by accident, too?"
"Rank good luck an' rotten bad luck mixed," Jim answered. "Do I knowthat story! The first week's pay I ever drew was on the Comstock. An'I was born, as I told you, near enough to throw a stone right on tothe Comstock outcrop. This was how it begun!
"There was two prospectors, Patrick McLaughlin an' Peter O'Riley,Irishmen both, what had been pannin' gold on Gold Canyon, where, Itold you, Father had been. Luck was poor. Grub was hard to get. Thewater o' the Carson had a strong taste, an' wasn't none too healthy.So the two pardners started diggin' a water-hole down in the gulch,near where they was workin'. What come up out o' the hole was a yellowsand, all mixed up with bits o' quartz an' a crumblin' black rock,much the same as the black sand Father'd been worried with.
THE MINER'S SLUICE.
Such a device as this was being worked by Jim's father when theComstock Lode was discovered.
_Courtesy of Netman & Co._]
PANNING GOLD ON THE KLONDYKE.
Typical summer scene on the junction of the Eldorado and BonanzaCreeks; "color" showing in both pans.]
"Now a prospector'll wash any durn dirt he sees, an' O'Riley, whilewaitin' for some bacon to fry, chucked some o' the yellow an' blacksand in a pan an' give it a twirl or two. You can reckon he jumpedsome when the pan showed color. He yelled to McLaughlin an' the two o'them got busy. Every pan showed color, not big, but enough. Thecleanin' up wasn't what you'd call rich but it was steady, an' therewas any amount o' pay dirt in sight. The two begin to fill theirbuckskin bags wi' dust, right smartly.
"Then a low-down, dirty, ornery coyote of a man, Henry Comstock byname, come amblin' along. A shifty critter was Comstock, trapper,fur-trader, gambler, claim-jumper, mine-salter, sneak-thief, an'everything else. He see O'Riley an' McLaughlin cleanin' up the cradlean' guessed they'd struck it rich. Lyin' glibly, like the yaller doghe was, he told the prospectors he was the owner o' the land, an' made'em give up their claims. They went on workin', but on small shares.The hole got deeper, but by-'n-by got hard to work because this seamo' black rock got wider'n wider as it went down. Riley an' McLaughlindodged the rock, the best they knew how, findin' gold enough to payfor workin' in the loose dirt on either side.
"One or two other prospectors drifted up that way, though the pickin'swas small. One o' them, wonderin' what the black rock might be, an'havin' a hunch it might be lead it was so heavy, put a chunk in thehands of an assayer in Placerville.
"The expert couldn't believe his eyes, at first, an' thought some onewas playin' a joke on him. His assay showed a value o' $3,000 per tonin silver an' $800 per ton in gold. He assayed one or two other bits,wi' the same result. Here was millions, jest beggin' to be picked up!Folks got wind of it, right away. That was in November, 1859, too latein the winter to cross the high Sierras into Nevada.
"The rush started a-hummin', early in 1860. 'Frisco was fair frothin'at the mouth. It was a long trail, an' the silver-hungry crowdcouldn't wait. Some o' the craziest got away as early as January. Theycaught it heavy!
"From Sacramento up the old emigrant trail to Placerville weren't nogentle stroll in winter time! From Placerville to the bottom o'Johnson Pass was a trail for timber wolves, not for humans. Snow laythick. Winds, fit to freeze a b'ar, come a-howlin' down the highSierras. A few men got through an' froze to death on Mount Davidson,the silver actooally ticklin' the soles o' their feet. Some got caughtin slow-slides in the Johnson Pass an' their bodies didn't show uptill June. A lot more died o' starvation an' exposure on the way.
"That didn't keep the rest from comin'. They fair stormed the Pass. InMarch there was a thaw, an' the flood o' men broke through.
"It was a bad crowd. Aside from decent prospectors and miners, therewas a pack o' gamblers, saloon-keepers, 'bad men,' fake speculators,an' all the rest o' the human buzzards that follow on the heels of arush. They remembered the first days o' the forty-niners, an' everybad egg in Californy wanted to be the first to murder an' to rob. Inthree weeks, the silent an' deserted slopes o' Mount Davidson waspeppered wi' tents. Virginia City had been started an' had become aroarin' town.
"That wasn't a minin' camp, it was a hell-hole. I've seen tough jointsin my day, but Virginia City beat all. It wasn't jest the miners losttheir heads, but experts, geologists, an' all, went plumb crazy.'Twasn't much wonder. That black rock was jest one continooal bonanza.A gold mine was a fool to it.
"The ore in one of the shafts--the Potosi Chimney, it was called--wasrangin' steadily over a hundred dollars a ton silver, an' that shaftalone was bringin' up 650 tons a day. Three prospectors
tapped the biglode at another point, near Esmeralda, worked a week an' took sixthousand dollars apiece for their claims. The man who bought firstrights on Esmeralda, sold them before the end or that summer, for aquarter of a million. An' yet McLaughlin an' O'Riley havin' given uptheir claims to Comstock, got nothin' out of it. As for Comstock, hefiled a false claim of ownership which the courts wouldn' give him,an' he went down an' out.
"The Gould & Curry mine, one o' the richest, was bought from itsfinders for an old horse, a bottle o' lightnin'-rod whisky, threeblankets, an' two thousand dollars in cash. After four millions hadbeen taken out of it, an Eastern syndicate come along an' bought itfor seven millions o' dollars--an' they made money out of it, at that!Six years after the openin' o' the Gould & Curry, there was 57 mileso' tunnels, all in rich ore, an' the owners had to work it like a coalmine, leavin' great pillars o' silver to prop up the roof!
"A telegraph line was run through an' that made Virginia City tentimes worse. It weren't a town o' miners, rightly, not like a goldplacer camp. Silver ore needs capital to work it, an' Virginia Citybecome a town o' loose fish, speculators, crooked brokers, an'suckers. One man sold the Eureka mine to eight different people at thesame time, an' he'd never even seen the place an' didn't own a claimin it. He pocketed eighty thousand dollars in eight days an' wasstrung up to the limb of a pine-tree the ninth!
"There was some good work done, though. Durin' 1861 an' 1862road-makers was busy, though laborers was gettin' fancy prices. Butthe engineers kep' at it, an' afore the winter o' '62, there was awide road where two eight-mule coaches could cross each other at fullgallop without slacking the traces. Tolls were high, so high that theroad-makers got all their money back in the first year. Crack coacheswith relays made the trail from Sacramento to Virginia City in twelvehours, instead of six weeks, like it was first. Hold-ups were frequentan' plenty, but a 'road agent' didn't last long where every onecarried a gun.
"Then come the 'year o' nabobs,' that was '63. The Comstock Lode putout over $26,000,000 in silver bullion alone, half-a-million dollarso' silver every week in the year. By that time there was forty bigminin' plants operatin' wi' steam machinery. There weren't no placefor a small man any more, unless he wanted to do minin' on days'wages, an' mighty few o' the early prospectors ever got any o' thelater wealth o' the Comstock. Father, he wouldn't touch silver, nohow,but he made more'n the miners did by pannin' the dirt the mines werethrowin' away. They were makin' so much money out o' silver that theywouldn't bother to take out the gold.
"Then come the first big smash. Half o' the mines sold to the suckersweren't worth shucks. Wild-cat mines, they called 'em. There was one,the Little Monte Cristo, which give the promoter half a milliondollars in shares which he sold to folk in New York an' Philadelphy.An' they never made more'n an 8-foot pit in it an' didn't take outenough bullion to melt down into a silver spoon!
"What was worse, the big mines got down to the rock water-level. Atfirst, they run little tunnels, what they called 'adits' from the sideo' the mountain an' drained that way. That wasn't no good, much. Theysoon got below that. The lode got richer the farther down they wentan' some o' the big companies took to pumpin' out the water. Rightaway, they started in to lose money. It cost more to pump than thesilver was worth. The boom dropped with a thud.
"Then Adolph Sutro come along. He was a big man was Sutro, one o'these here engineers folks talk about. He offered to build a drainagetunnel from the foot-hills o' the Carson Valley, just above the riversmack into the heart o' the lode, a distance o' four miles, tappin'all the mines. He figured that, if it weren't done, all the mines'dget flooded an' all the wealth o' Comstock'd go to smash.
"Seein' things were going' so bad, the mine-owners balked at first.After a while, though, the water come in so free that they all agreedto give him two dollars a ton for all the ore raised from the mines,providin' his tunnel drained 'em all, an' providin' he fixed it sothat they could get men an' material through the tunnel, instead o'having to pull it all up the shaft. It took Sutro six years to get thecapital, but he got it. He begun work in '71. Toward the end o' thejob the work was so hot an' tough that he doubled his rate o' wages,an' in '77, bein' eighteen years old then, I started operatin' a drillin the tunnel. I was thar on the day that we broke through."
Few engineering feats in the history of mining are more famous thanthe making of the Sutro Tunnel. In one of the publications of theU. S. Geological Survey, Eliot Lord has told its story of perseveranceand triumph.
"Sutro's untiring zeal," wrote Lord, "kindled a like spirit in hisco-workers. Changing shifts urged the drills on without ceasing;skilled timberers followed up the attack on the breast and coveredthe heads of the assailants like shield-bearers.
"The dump at the mouth of the tunnel grew rapidly to the proportionsof an artificial plateau raised above the surrounding valley slope;yet the speed of the electric currents which exploded the blastsscarcely kept pace with the impatient anxiety of the tunnel owners toreach the lode, when the extent of the great Consolidated VirginiaBonanza was reported; for every ton raised from the lode was a loss tothem of two dollars, as they thought.
"Urged on by zeal, pride, and natural covetousness, the miners cuttheir way indomitably towards the goal, though, at every step gainedthe work grew more painful and more dangerous.
"The temperature at the face of the heading, had risen from 72 deg(Fahr.) at the close of the year 1873 to 83 deg during the two followingyears; though in the summer of 1875 two powerful Root blowers wereconstantly employed in forcing air into the tunnel. At the close ofthe year 1876, the indicated temperature was 90 deg and, on the 1st ofJanuary, 1878, the men were working in a temperature of 96 deg.
"In spite of the air currents from the blowers, the atmosphere beforethe end of the year 1876 had become almost unbearably foul as well ashot. The candles flickered with a dull light and men often staggeredback from their posts, faint and sickened.
"During the months preceding the junction with the Savage Mine, theheading was cut with almost passionate eagerness. The miners were thentwo miles from the nearest ventilating shaft, and the heat of theirworking chamber was fast growing too intense for human endurance.
"The pipe which applied compressed air to the drills was opened atseveral points and the blowers were worked to their utmost capacity.Still the mercury rose from 98 deg on the 1st of March 1878 to 109 deg onthe 22nd of April, and the temperature of the rock face of the headingincreased from 110 deg to 114 deg. Four shifts a day were worked instead ofthree, and the men could only work during a small portion of theirnominal hours of labor.
"Even the tough, wiry mules of the car train could hardly be driven upto the end of the tunnel and sought for fresh air not less ardentlythan the men. Curses, blows, and kicks could scarcely force them awayfrom the blower-tube openings, and, more than once, a rationallyobstinate mule thrust his head in the end of the canvas air-pipe. Hewas literally torn away by main strength, as the miners, when othermeans failed, tied his tail to the bodies of two other mules in histrain and forced them to haul back their companion, snortingviciously, and slipping with stiff legs over the wet floor.
"Neither men nor animals could long endure work so distressing.Fortunately, the compressed air drills knew neither weariness norpain, and churned their way to the mines without ceasing.
"A blast from the Savage Mine tore an opening through the wall, in theevening of that day. The goal for which Sutro had striven so manyyears was in sight. He was waiting at the breach, impatient of delay,and crawled, half-naked, through the jagged opening, while the foulair of the heading was still gushing into the mine."
Meanwhile, over the heads of the workers of the Sutro tunnel, a notless marvelous change had come over the Comstock Lode. This was thediscovery of the Great Bonanza. After the slump of 1864 and theterrible handicap of the water, mine-owners on the Comstock felldeeper and deeper into despair. Gone were the wild days of riot andextravagance. Only by extreme care, by the use of every modernappliance, by the lowering of wa
ges--some thirty pitched battles, withsix-shooters, marked this period--were they able to keep going at all.
Then, just as two Irishmen had first found the Comstock, two otherIrishmen forged to the front. These were John W. Mackay, who had begunwork as a day-laborer in the mine, and James G. Fair, a young fellowwho had come to Virginia City with only a few hundred dollars'capital. They made a daring team. Seizing the opportunities of thedull times, they bought property after property as it was abandoned bythe owners, who declared that the great lode had "pinched out." With athird Irishman, Wm. O'Brien, and a 'Frisco miner, James C. Flood, theybought the entire stretch between the two famous mines--the Ophir andthe Gould & Curry--thus forming what became known to history as theVirginia Consolidated. The four men paid $50,000 for this hugeproperty; risking their all on the chance that deeper mining mightreach the supposedly "pinched out" vein.
They sank a shaft, down, down and down,--nothing! They ran a drift tomeet it from one of their purchased mines, and drilled forweeks--nothing! Then a thin seam of ore appeared, but so small as toseem insignificant. Fair pursued this vein. A quarter of a milliondollars were eaten up in chasing this elusive line of ore but the veinwould neither disappear nor get wider. Fair's partners tried to insiston running galleries in various directions to explore--and did so forone month while he was ill--but Fair returned insistently again tothat thin thread of silver. There was one place where it was only twoinches thick. And then, in October 1873, the miners cut suddenly intothe Big Bonanza.
"No discovery," wrote Lord, "to match this one had ever been made onthis earth from the time when the first miner struck a ledge with hisrude pick. The plain facts are as marvelous as a Persian tale, for theyoung Aladdin did not see in the glittering cave of the genii suchfabulous riches as were lying in the dark womb of the rock.
"The wonder grew as the depths were searched out foot by foot. TheBonanza was cut at a point 1167 feet below the surface, and, as theshaft went down, it was pierced again at the 1200-foot level. Onehundred feet deeper and the prying pick and drill told the same story,yet another hundred feet, and the mass appeared to be swelling. When,finally, the 1500-foot level was reached and ore richer than anybefore met with was disclosed, the fancy of the coolest brains ranwild. How far this great Bonanza would extend, none could predict, butits expansion seemed to keep pace with the most sanguine imaginings.To explore it thoroughly was to cut it out bodily; systematic searchthrough it was a continual revelation."
The wealth revealed was beyond believing. This Bonanza, alone, yielded$3,000,000 of silver every month for the first three years.
Yet it was hard to win. Mackay believed in high wages and paid morethan double the wages given to any miners in any place in the historyof the world. All were picked men, who had passed a severe medicaltest. The hours were short. The men worked naked save for a loin-clothand shoes to protect them from the hot rocks. The heat reached 110 deg.Three men, who stepped accidentally into a deep pool of water, werescalded to death. The air was foul. The toil was severe.
Yet ever, the deeper they went, the richer grew the ore. When, atlast, Mackay, Fair, O'Brien, and Flood sold their holdings, theBonanza had yielded more than $150,000,000 worth of silver, one-thirdof which had passed directly into the pockets of the four men.
But what of the first discoverers, McLaughlin and Riley? They hadfound the silver, but the Bonanza was not for them. McLaughlin workedfor a while as a laborer and then was thrown out of the mine by aforeman who said he was too old. He tried a dozen small ventures andnot only lost in everything he touched, but caused his partners tolose, also. Bad fortune dogged him steadily. An old man, worn out andhopelessly dispirited, died in a hospital and was buried in a pauper'sgrave. Later, it was learned that this was McLaughlin.
O'Riley fared no better. He refused to work for others, believing thatluck would turn, and that he, who had once discovered so rich a prize,would, some day or other, discover another. One night, in a dream, heheard what he took to be the voices of the fairies of the mountainbidding him dig at a certain barren spot on the hill-slopes of theSierras, many miles away from the Comstock Lode.
For days, for weeks, for years, he dug, ever hearing the fanciedvoices leading him on, deeper and deeper still. Mackay offered himmoney, but O'Riley refused to accept it, demanding that he be given anequal share in the mine, or nothing. He starved and suffered,sometimes finding pieces of pure silver and pure gold in his tunnel,which he ascribed to his fairies (but which rumor says Mackay hadarranged to be placed there) and, in old age, his tunnel fell in andcrippled him. From the hospital he was taken to an insane asylum,where he died.
Henry Comstock met the fate he deserved. For years he swaggered aboutVirginia City claiming to be its founder and the discoverer of theComstock Lode, living on the charity of luckier men who threw him abar of silver as one throws a bone to a dog, or else selling wild-catshares to greenhorns. More than once he was justly accused of being inleague with the disorderly elements of the city and having taken partin robberies. But a certain rough sense of pity kept him from beingstrung up to a tree as he deserved a dozen times over--and he died, atlast, a suicide.
Boy With the U.S. Miners Page 9