The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  Yet there was one problem: the great majority of the wealth of the Comstock rested far beneath the surface of the earth. In California, erosion had laid bare large swaths of the ore bodies, washing them down into the valleys for James Marshall and his successors to find. The winds off the Pacific, however, contained only so much moisture, and each gallon that fell as rain or snow on the Sierras was a gallon less for the lands to the east, in the Sierras’ rain shadow. The work that nature had done in California, in removing much of the overlying rock and hydraulically sifting the heavy metal from the light sand and gravel, remained for humans to do on the Comstock.

  Although the miners on the Comstock applied lessons learned in the quartz mines of California, they soon discovered that the deep ore bodies of Nevada required greater ingenuity and more sophisticated technology than California had ever seen. The miners followed the ore leads down more than two thousand feet into the bowels of Mount Davidson (as Sun Peak was rechristened, in honor of the San Francisco agent of the British House of Rothschild, which invested heavily in the region). There they encountered pressures and strains unlike anything in California. The heat of the rocks at such depth—heat generated by radioactive processes unknown to that generation of geologists, but which the miners were willing to ascribe to the fires of hell—was almost unendurable. “At the depth of from 1,500 to 2,000 feet the rock is so hot that it is painful to the naked hand,” reported Dan De Quille of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. (De Quille’s real name was William Wright, but in the West he adopted the fancier nom de plume—at about the same time that Sam Clemens, a friend and colleague on the Territorial Enterprise, became Mark Twain.) “In many places,” De Quille continued, “from crevices in the rock or from holes drilled into it, streams of boiling water gush out.” Men couldn’t have survived the heat, let alone worked in it, without a constant supply of cool air forced into the mines by steam-driven blowers. But here “cool” was a relative term; even with the blowers ramming mountain air down the shafts, temperatures at the ore faces could be as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Needless to say, the equipment required to dig and ventilate these deep mines, and to hoist the ore a vertical quarter-mile to the surface, was hugely expensive. Yet from the start, capital was never lacking. The Comstock benefited not only technologically but financially from California’s prior experience. As soon as the initial assays revealed the richness of the Comstock mines—Hearst’s secret quickly leaked out—money began pouring into Nevada. Some of the money—Hearst’s, for example—consisted of profits from the California mines. A larger portion came from the financial markets of the American East and Europe. Investors slavered over the stories out of Washoe, and they slathered their capital on this newest bonanza. The early rush to California had required profit-seekers to participate directly; the rush to Nevada allowed them to keep a genteel distance, their participation measured not by miles traversed over ocean or isthmus or plains, and by months in the streams or the dry diggings, but by dollars wired from banks in New York or London to banks in San Francisco, and then forwarded to Virginia City.

  The primacy of capital on the Comstock might have prevented ordinary folks from cashing in on this new rush, but such was the ingenuity of the miners’ moneymen, and such the human capacity for covetous self- delusion, that individuals of the humblest station managed to cut themselves in. Clemens, observing the phenomenon from the city desk of the Territorial Enterprise, explained:

  The city and all the great mountain side were riddled with mining shafts. There were more mines than miners. True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth hauling to a mill, but everybody said, “Wait till the shaft gets down where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!” So nobody was discouraged. These were nearly all “wild cat” mines, and wholly worthless, but nobody believed it then. The “Ophir,” the “Gould Curry,” the “Mexican,” and other great mines on the Comstock lead in Virginia and Gold Hill were turning out huge piles of rich rock every day, and every man believed that his little wild cat claim was as good as any on the “main lead” and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a foot when he “got down where it came in solid.” Poor fellow, he was blessedly blind to the fact that he never would see that day.

  So the thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by day, and all men were beside themselves with hope and happiness. How they labored, prophesied, exulted! Surely nothing like it was ever seen before since the world began. Every one of these wild cat mines—not mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines—was incorporated and had handsomely engraved “stock” and the stock was salable, too. It was bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day. You could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there was no lack of them), put up a “notice” with a grandiloquent name in it, start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. To make money, and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.

  Clemens acquired a stake in the Washoe boom by virtue of his access to print. “New claims were taken up daily,” he recalled, “and it was the friendly custom to run straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty ‘feet,’ and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of it.” What the reporter wrote mattered less than the mere fact of writing.

  We generally said a word or two to the effect that the “indications” were good, or that the ledge was “six feet wide,” or that the rock “resembled the Comstock” (and so it did—but as a general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you down). If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a “developed” one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn’t), we praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out of ecstasies—but never said a word about the rock. We would squander half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of admiration of the “gen tlemanly and efficient Superintendent” of the mine—but never utter a whisper about the rock.

  The reporter’s recompense was a tidy supplement to his salary. “We received presents of ‘feet’ every day. If we needed a hundred dollars or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot. I had a trunk about half full of ‘stock.’ When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its stock—and generally found it.”

  Like others on the Comstock, Clemens grew accustomed to his sudden wealth. “I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of existence—a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness.” He traveled to San Francisco and fell in love with the city. “After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it….I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo.” In a word, he lived like the king he felt he was about to become. “I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars (prospectively) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East.”

  The demand for Comstock shares grew dizzily, then alarmingly. “Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad
; bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was! Gould and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot!”

  And then… “And then—all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The wreck was complete. The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when I gathered together my various debts and paid them.”

  Clemens’s loss was literature’s gain. Forced to earn his daily bread once more, he turned to mining in the Mother Lode country. He found little gold, but gathered impressions and experiences. He met Bret Harte, and guessed that if Harte could make money from stories about the gold country, so could he. He proved himself right with a tale about a jumping-frog contest in Calaveras County, which won him a wide and enthusiastic national readership.

  THE AGE OF GOLD wasn’t confined to America—indeed, had it been so confined, it wouldn’t have been much of an age. California taught the world what gold mines looked like, and what they could do for a country.

  Edward Hargraves, Tom Archer’s shipmate from Sydney, was an apt pupil, which was surprising in that he was an inept miner. Hargraves nearly froze during his first winter in the California goldfields. “Frequently we had to clear the snow from the surface, and break the ice in order to get water to wash the gold with,” he wrote. “But our sufferings at night were far more severe. It was scarcely possible to sleep from the intensity of the cold, and often we had to get up at night to shake the snow off the tent, for fear of its breaking through. For my own part I made a bag of my blankets and rug, and slept in that; but even that was insufficient to keep warmth in my body.” Nor were the pickings sufficiently rich to pay Hargraves for his suffering. Try as they might, he and his partners couldn’t manage to collect more than six dollars in dust a day. “Poor pay indeed for men who had traveled so many thousand miles with the hope of making a rapid fortune!”

  Yet amid his troubles, something was occurring to Hargraves. “Far more important thoughts than those of present success or failure were, from the very first, growing up in my mind, and gradually assuming a body and a shape. My attention was naturally drawn to the form and geological structure of the surrounding country, and it soon struck me that I had, some eighteen years before, travelled through a country very similar to one I was now in, in New South Wales. I said to myself, there are the same class of rocks, slates, quartz, granite, red soil, and everything else that appears necessary to constitute a goldfield.” Hargraves gradually grew convinced that there must be gold in Australia.

  He shared his thoughts with some fellow Aussies. Many laughed; others explained why he had to be wrong, starting with the fact that men far better educated in geology than he was had traveled the outback regions he spoke of and never found gold. Yet Hargraves guessed that geological education was no substitute for practical experience of mining. “It was very possible, nay probable, I thought, that a man deeply read in the science of geology should be ignorant how to wash a pan of earth in search of gold, or where to look for it; just as a great mathematician may be ignorant how to turn an arch, or even lay a brick.” Moreover, with no reason to be looking for gold in Australia, geologists would have been especially unlikely to find it.

  Hargraves’s dream of finding gold down under helped tide him through that difficult winter. (The fact that Australia’s goldfields, if any, would certainly be warmer than California’s made them all the more enticing.) In the spring of 1850 he wrote a friend in Sydney hinting at an imminent return. “I am very forcibly impressed that I have been in a gold region in New South Wales, within 300 miles of Sydney,” he declared. In case this friend got prematurely curious, Hargraves added, “Unless you knew how to find it you might live for a century in the region and know nothing of its existence.” Hargraves would have left at once, but he lacked the money. So he worked that summer with a partner on the Yuba River, where they made an average of about two-and-a-half ounces of gold per man per day. “But the greater our success was, the more anxious did I become to put my own persuasion to the test, of the existence of gold in New South Wales.” In November he traveled down the Sacramento to San Francisco; exchanging his gold for a ticket back west, he departed for Port Jackson on the bark Emma.

  In Australia he learned that his views were held in even less regard than in America. “I made known to my friends and companions my confident expectations on the subject; one and all, however, derided me, and treated my views and opinions as those of a madman.” Whether mad or not, Hargraves was determined, and he headed off, alone, across the Blue Mountains behind Sydney. At irregular intervals he encountered other humans, including an innkeeper at a lonely crossroads who complained at the lack of business. Hargraves sought to console the fellow by predicting obliquely that soon he would have more business than he wanted. “Of course, he only laughed at me.”

  Hargraves’s fifth day of travel found him near the region of his recollection. The landlady of a local hostel, whose husband he had known years before, offered her son as a guide. Though Hargraves was reluctant to tip his hand, he accepted the offer, not least because the boy seemed utterly guileless, and Hargraves wasn’t sure he could find his way unaided to the place he remembered. They set out on the morning of February 12, 1851, under a blazing summer sun. After fifteen miles the terrain began to look reassuringly familiar. “My recollection of it had not deceived me. The resemblance of its formation to that of California could not be doubted or mistaken.” Hargraves was hardly able to contain his excitement. “I felt myself surrounded by gold; and with tremulous anxiety panted for the moment of trial, when my magician’s wand should transform this trackless wilderness into a region of countless wealth.”

  While Hargraves panted for gold, his guide and their horses were panting for water. The summer’s drought had dried up the creek whose bed they were walking. But the boy said there was water farther along, and Hargraves, knowing he would need water to work his magic, consented to continue till they found it. When they did, the boy assuaged his own thirst and that of the horses while Hargraves prepared the crucial experiment. He employed a pick to knock some gravel and dirt off an outcropping; this he troweled into a pan. He took the pan to the water hole and proceeded to wash it, just as he had washed thousands of pans in California.

  The very first trial yielded the telltale flash. “Here it is!” he exclaimed. Hurriedly he washed five more pans of dirt. All but one produced gold.

  “This is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales!” he told his guide. “I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put into a glass case, and sent to the British Museum!”

  Nobility eluded Hargraves and the boy, and the horse escaped taxidermy; but New South Wales experienced everything Hargraves envisioned. Dubbing his find “Ophir,” he broadcast the news to the world, and within months a rush to southeastern Australia was under way. The new rush recapitulated the madness experienced on the Pacific’s opposite shore. Sydney and Melbourne were drained of their populations before argonauts from overseas arrived (many of them, like Hargraves, Australians returned from California). “Cottages are deserted, houses to let, business is at a stand-still, and even the schools are closed,” reported the lieutenant governor of Victoria. As at San Francisco, abandoned ships clogged the harbors; as in the Sierra foothills, towns of two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand souls appeared wherever gold did. The miners of Australia behaved about as the miners of California did. “They are intoxicated with their suddenly-acquired wealth, and run riot in the wildness of the
ir joy,” observed an Englishman, John Sherer, who was bent on much the same behavior himself. As in California, the surge of newcomers overwhelmed the aboriginal peoples; as in California, the explosion of wealth made every man the equal—in prospect, at least, and hence in his own mind—of the heretofore most favored. “As riches are now becoming the test of a man’s position,” remarked Sherer, “it is vain to have any pretensions whatever unless you are supported by that powerful auxiliary.”

  HARGRAVES’S DISCOVERY IN Australia demonstrated that gold in rush-causing quantities wasn’t an American monopoly. California had revealed what gold geology looked like; Australia showed that it could be found in other parts of the world. For centuries before 1848, the search for gold had been a haphazard affair, with lucrative finds so rare as to prevent all but the most desperate or deluded from making a habit of the hunt. But during the second half of the nineteenth century—which was to say, during the first half century of the age of gold—prospectors fanned out across the planet. They found gold (and silver) in Nevada in the late 1850s and 1860s. They found gold along the Fraser River in western Canada during the same period, and along the South Platte near what would become Denver. They found gold in Montana in the 1860s. They found gold (and diamonds) in South Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. They found gold on the Yukon River in Canada and Alaska, and on the beach at Nome, and in western Australia, and in eastern Siberia, during the 1890s.

  George Hearst wandered less far, but had hardly less success. The payouts from his (Nevada) Ophir tempted his neighbors, who brought lawsuits regarding the ownership of veins that, while separate at the surface, entwined underground. The litigation was horrendously expensive; one suit involving the Ophir set the litigants back more than a million dollars. (Hearst’s head litigator alone received $200,000 per year in fees.) Nor were the lawyers the only ones making money. A story that circulated around Carson City almost certainly embroidered the truth but nonetheless caught the spirit of Nevada justice. In a lawsuit between two mines, according to this tale, a lawyer named Cinc Barnes managed to sell his special expertise—jury-rigging—to one side after the other. He alternately persuaded each party that the fix was in, and that a favorable verdict would follow. He simultaneously leaked the information to stockjobbers, driving up the share price of the one company, then the other, and allowing him to make a killing in each. With some of his loot he paid off the jury, by a fittingly frontier method. The foreman of the jury would lower an empty boot from a window of the room where the jurors were sequestered; Barnes would fill the boot with gold, and attach a note identifying the donor as one party to the suit or the other. The jurors weighed the new evidence, literally, as it came in, until they decided they had enough, when they delivered their verdict. (Precisely how they determined the winner is unclear.)