The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  Mining’s grueling toil toned hard muscle onto Mackay’s middleweight frame. Mackay had keen, noticing eyes beneath brows that tended to knit together over the bridge of his nose, and although he wasn’t prone to the alcoholic binges that plagued so many of his countrymen, his cheeks often flushed red. He’d grown into a ruddy, powerful, healthy-looking man, and despite the fashion of the much-bewhiskered mining frontier, he kept his cheeks clean-shaven. He was handy with tools, and the carpentry skills he’d learned in the Webb shipyard made him a good man to have in a mining camp. By the winter of 1858–59, John Mackay had “seen the elephant” from the tip of its trunk to the very end of its tail, and he would have stayed mining around Downieville forever but for the problem of declining returns. The average miner’s daily earnings had dropped from $20 in 1848 to $16 the next year and then steadily down to about $5 per day in 1855. By 1858, a miner was exceeding the norm if he gleaned more than $3 worth of gold from a long, hard day of digging and washing. Mackay, his great friend Jack O’Brien, with whom he’d been partnered for years, and four other men spent the 1858 mining season working a claim on Durgan’s Flat, a few hundred yards below the confluence of the Downie River and the North Fork of the Yuba. The six men shared a log cabin nearby. Dozens of miners had worked Durgan’s Flat in 1850, to great profit. Other men reworked the ground a few times through the middle 1850s, for lesser returns. Mackay and his mates worked like rented mules on Durgan’s Flat in 1858, but no amount of labor could find gold where little remained.

  Years later, one of his fellow miners remembered Mackay throwing down his tools in frustration and announcing, “All I want is $25,000. That’s enough for any man. With that I can make my old mother comfortable,” adding that if he “ever got hold of $25,000,” he’d “spend his life loafing.”

  The coming decades would prove the lie of that. But Durgan’s Flat was played out. Mackay’s group couldn’t make grub. The partnership dissolved. O’Brien and Mackay walked over the ridge south of town and hired themselves out for wages felling trees and shaping framing timbers for somebody else’s mine. Reminiscing as an old man, Baruch Pride, who had worked alongside Mackay felling trees, recalled, “Mackay worked like the devil and made me work the same way.”

  They’d probably worked for wages before, since it was common for miners in the middle and late 1850s to spend part of the year hiring out for wages, and to prospect and mine on their own account with the remainder of their time, but the failure of the Durgan’s Flat venture forced Mackay and O’Brien to assess their prospects. Honestly, they weren’t good. Earning wages working for someone else removed the risk of hunger, but only at the sacrifice of their chance of making a raise. In either case, mining or making wages, Mackay couldn’t set aside much money to help his mother, and although he’d helped support her for more than fifteen years, he wasn’t doing anything to build a secure future.

  For years, mining in the Downieville area had grown increasingly corporate—as it had elsewhere in the goldfields, the original rules banning corporations having been relaxed through the years as corporations proved to be the only entities willing to buy claims from men who wanted out. Well-capitalized consortiums could afford to finance the “dead work” of unproductive digging required to reach the more valuable sediments at the bottom of the ancient riverbeds, where the best deposits collected on the bedrock. Mackay had done plenty of underground mining—“drift mining,” “drifting,” or “coyoting” as it was often called—and he’d built a reputation for hard work and competence, but he’d always done it on somebody else’s account, for somebody who could pay the wages and buy the timber and tools opening an underground mine required. The burgeoning technique of hydraulic mining likewise required immense quantities of start-up capital. Mackay and his partners couldn’t finance such endeavors. Downieville itself had shriveled from its halcyon days in the early 1850s. By the end of 1858, Mackay was twenty-seven years old, and despite more than seven years of backbreaking toil in the California goldfields, his existence was every bit as hand-to-mouth as it had been fifteen years before when he was selling newspapers on the streets of New York.

  Thus primed, in the spring of 1859, John Mackay and Jack O’Brien lent their ears to rumors of a strike made more than one hundred miles to the east, in the rugged desert mountains of the western Utah Territory on the other side of the Sierra Nevada, at a new locality with the pompous name of “Gold Hill”—in reality a low mound tucked into the upper reaches of steeply descending Gold Cañon—in a place called the Washoe Diggings (pronounced Wash-o, as in “Tahoe”).

  When the handful of Gold Hill miners had started washing the mound’s top dirt through their rockers, likely in early April 1859, they made about five dollars a day—in line with the steady, unspectacular returns the Washoe Diggings had produced through most of the 1850s. Dwindling supplies of food and drink on the eastern slope of the Sierras likely held more of their attention. Snow clogging the high passes prevented resupply. Mining returns from tiny Gold Hill took a huge upswing through the middle of April. On April 21, a pair of independent reports from the Carson Valley claimed Gold Hill miners were cleaning up as much as $40 per day, per man, and that only meager supplies of water stopped them from earning $50 to $100 per day. A week later, a four-month-old Carson Valley newspaper called the Territorial Enterprise reported the Gold Hill miners doing “remarkably well,” and “as an evidence of their prosperity hold their claims at from $4,000 to $5,000.” By the standards of placer miners on either side of the Sierras in 1859, all those figures represented fortunes. Spring weather opened the Sierra passes, and pack trains hurried over the mountains to resupply the suddenly flush Washoe miners. Many California newspapers carried stories about Gold Hill in May. A letter published in the Territorial Enterprise on May 21 and reprinted in the Sacramento Daily Union on May 30 specifically mentioned the success of a group of Gold Hill miners referred to as “Comstock & Co”—likely the first newspaper mention of a name that would soon be famous the world over.

  The intensity of the rumors jumped another notch in late June and early July when stories shot through the California goldfields of the discovery of a vein of gold and silver ore in Washoe worth more than $3,000 per ton. Silver was something entirely new. A dispatch to the San Francisco Bulletin reported “considerable of a stir” in a cadre of mining men in Nevada City and Grass Valley, two important camps about halfway between Sacramento and Downieville, and “men leaving hourly” for the new strike.

  Conflicting opinions formed. The El Dorado County clerk returned to Placerville from Washoe in the middle of July and told the Placerville Observer that “the diggings are unquestionably the richest ever known on the continent.” Tempering the enthusiasm, among many similar articles, one in the California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences thought it unlikely that anyone would obtain “large quantities of gold” in Washoe, water being scarce and the diggings “not extensive.” Miners began trickling toward Washoe, but the rumors didn’t provoke a general stampede. According to the Sacramento Daily Union, “remembrance of Fraser River exert[ed] a salutary influence.”

  Mackay and O’Brien talked over their options. The stories of extraordinary wealth in a place with such an arid reputation sounded fantastical, but any fool could see that Downieville’s glory had passed. In the end, the decision wasn’t difficult. There wasn’t much upside in working for wages in a dying district, and quite frankly, they didn’t have a lot to lose. Without money to afford a mule or a donkey to aid with the 110-mile journey, there was only one way to make it happen. In late July or early August, Mackay and O’Brien packed their worldly goods into blanket rolls, shouldered their loads, and started walking. They trudged over the Sierras via Henness Pass and descended the eastern slope of the range into the Truckee Meadows, headed south beyond the Truckee River crossing toward Steamboat Springs, then climbed a twenty-three-hundred-foot grade on a trail blazed over the chain of mountains that would come to be known as the Virginia Range. The lon
g trek took them about a week.

  Silver! Mackay knew nothing about mining silver. What if the stories were true?

  * * *

  I. California’s population wouldn’t achieve a natural balance between men and women for a hundred years, not until 1950.

  II. Silver and copper passed for sums under one dollar.

  III. In the 2010 census, Downieville had 282 inhabitants.

  IV. The battle waged in the courts between California’s agricultural and hydraulic mining interests culminated in a landmark 1884 legal decision that identified and defined a “public interest” and banned hydraulic mining as “a public and private nuisance”—one of the first and most important environmental decisions in United States history.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Lure of the Washoe Diggings

  Underground miners “drifting” for a living, always hoping for a rich strike.

  * * *

  The country looks something like a singed cat, owing to the scarcity of shrubbery, and also resembles that animal in the respect that it has more merits than its personal appearance would seem to indicate.

  —Mark Twain, “Washoe: Information Wanted,” Golden Era

  When Mackay and O’Brien reached Washoe, they looked across a shallow ravine to a small hive of mining activity at the base of a knoll. The knoll sat on the north end of an out-sloping bench that stretched about a mile and a half across the eastern base of Sun Mountain. To their right front, the rugged upper slopes of the mountain rose sharply above the bench to its 7,864-foot summit. The left side of the bench angled down to the east, into the upper reaches of what was known as Six Mile Cañon (pronounced just like the English “canyon”). Mackay and O’Brien examined their immediate environs, learning what they could about the local geography. They surely explored the angled terrace, weaving through sagebrush and protruding rocks as they passed along the base of Sun Mountain, pausing to examine whatever haphazard mining activity they encountered. After rambling a little over a mile down the bench, a small rise took them up to “the Divide” between the Six Mile Cañon and Gold Cañon drainages. Beyond the Divide, Gold Cañon dropped steeply. Contained within its walls, not far from where they stood on the Divide, was the long, low mound of Gold Hill—fifty or sixty feet high, four or five hundred feet long, and about one hundred feet wide—and it was another anthill of activity, striped across from end to end with narrow mining claims. Several dozen men—both claim owners and hired hands—worked on the hill, hacking out masses of crumbly red-tinted quartz from the bottom of open pits and crushing the gold-impregnated material in mortars or arastras, a few of which worked nearby. A long, narrow flume built of rough lumber conveyed water to the claims from a small spring higher up the cañon. Miners used the water to wash gold out of the crushed quartz with rockers.

  Below Gold Hill, Gold Cañon sloped south into the Carson River Valley for about two and a half miles to where the drainage passed through a narrow rocky defile called Devil’s Gate. Beneath Devil’s Gate, the cañon bent to the southeast, and several ravines joined the cañon at a place called the Forks. Downhill from the Forks, the cañon ran southeast for another two or three miles to meet the Carson River, named for renowned frontiersman Kit Carson. The Carson River drainage, all of the Washoe region, and the entire eastern slope of the Sierras lay within another piece of monumental western geography named by John C. Frémont—the Great Basin, that enormous two-hundred-thousand-square-mile desert bowl formed from parts of the modern states of Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California, and nearly the entirety of Nevada, from which no rivers escape to the sea. From perches around the Divide, Mackay and O’Brien could see the first few of the succession of north-south mountain ranges that striated the basin. Between the ranges lay desolate lowlands.

  Down where Gold Cañon met the Carson River and the great immigrant road that ran alongside it—the California Trail—gold had been discovered in 1849 and 1850. Perhaps as many as 60,000 gold-crazed men, and a handful of women, stormed down the California Trail in those years. Many of them paused at Gold Cañon to practice the gold-mining skills they’d need in California. Flecks of color generally rewarded their efforts, but in their haste to reach the greater wealth surely waiting on the other side of the Sierras, most simply hurried on. None of them paused to ponder the monumental significance of a gold-bearing cañon in a region geologically unrelated to the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. In any event, the rocky, wind-blasted desert topography north of the Carson River held little appeal compared to the Elysian descriptions they’d heard of California. They didn’t know it, but in their fevered haste, they were rushing past a concentration of mineral wealth greater than anything that would ever be found in California.

  • • •

  Only one immigrant seems to have decided that Gold Cañon merited permanent settlement in 1850—James Fenimore, more commonly known as “Finney,” or “Old Virginia,” in homage to his home state. The clearest early memory of Fenimore comes from John Reese, who led a wagon train west from Salt Lake City in the spring of 1851 and reestablished a store and cattle ranch called Mormon Station at the foot of the Sierras, near where the overland trail began the final climb into California.I According to Reese’s memory, Fenimore ran a trading post until he’d sold his stock to the overland immigrants, then took up mining and “drinking whisky” in Gold Cañon. Reese described Fenimore living in a small dugout about a mile above the overland road, half underground, tented over with “rags or any old stuff” he could scavenge, and having built a reservoir to help wash his paydirt. Discovering that he lived under Mormon administration in the recently organized Utah Territory probably didn’t please James Fenimore—miners were notoriously hostile to Mormons. Although it hardly mattered, because for all practical purposes, Fenimore lived beyond reach of any law. John Reese knew of “no other white man . . . settled within 50 or 100 miles,” the closest likely being on the western slope of the Sierras on the way to Placerville, in California. In the opposite direction, the nearest settled Caucasian lived more than 500 miles away, near Salt Lake City. Around Fenimore lived members of the nomadic Washoe Indian tribe, the native people whose domain encompassed the enormous mountain lake they knew as “Tahoe” some eighteen miles to the west and the rugged mountains above Gold Cañon. (Caucasian immigrants called it Lake Bigler in honor of California governor John Bigler until the Civil War, when Bigler’s objectionable secessionist sympathies motivated a switch to the native name.) Paiute bands roamed the country to the north and south.

  A rough map of the Washoe Diggings.

  Thirty-three or thirty-four years old in 1851, Fenimore had been born in Parkersburg, Virginia. As with one-fourth to one-fifth of Americans in the middle nineteenth century, Fenimore couldn’t read, and he never learned to sign his name. According to persistent rumor, he’d fled to the remote canyons of the western Utah Territory because he’d killed a man in California.

  Assuming John Reese’s memory was accurate, James “Old Virginia” Fenimore must have done reasonably well in Gold Cañon through the winter of 1850–51, because Reese recalled “a good many” miners trickling back across the Sierra to join Fenimore and work through the following year. In a rare gesture of deference to the local Washoe Indian tribe, miners came to know the locale as the Washoe Diggings. John Reese’s cattle thrived in the tall Carson Valley grass, and in exchange for little pouches of gold dust, he and the scattering of other ranchers trying to start cattle stations on the eastern slope sold beef to the Gold Cañon miners at thirty cents per pound. Other settlers, many with ties to Salt Lake City, claimed land in the Carson, Washoe, and Eagle valleys. In late 1854, the Sacramento Daily Union reported about fifty men working Gold Cañon “with good prospects, the dirt paying from the surface to six inches below in some instances fifteen cents to the pan” and counted seven or eight hundred other settlers living in Carson Valley, with “three saw and grist mills, either built or in the process of erection, and forty thousand head of st
ock.”

  • • •

  Through the middle 1850s, miners worked Gold Cañon when sufficient water flowed to slosh worthless silts from their rockers. Most returned to California to find jobs or work other claims when the cañon waters failed. Despite the isolation, aridity, and primitive living conditions, the miners suffered the harsh desert climate—almost always either too hot, too cold, or too windy—because the Washoe Diggings paid steady returns. When the miners had sufficient water, the best Gold Cañon claims often yielded an ounce of gold per working day, but average returns held steady at about five dollars per day. Several dozen Chinese built a camp at the mouth of Gold Cañon (originally—and unimaginatively—called “Chinatown,” at least by others, Caucasian immigrants changed the locality’s name to “Dayton” in 1861) and reworked abandoned placers in the lower cañon. The established Gold Cañon crew left them mostly unmolested.

  In warmer weather, most of the men lived near their claims, either outside, beneath the stars, counting on the tight wrap of a wool blanket to fend off the overnight cold, or in canvas tents or shallow dugouts with canvas stretched over crude walls of brush and stacked stones. During the coldest months, those who stayed in Washoe collected in Johntown, a rough mining camp centrally located in lower Gold Cañon, a mile or so below Devil’s Gate, where they wintered over in smoky, mud-plastered stone or brush huts, and subsisted on a monotonous diet of beans, bacon, and bread, broken occasionally by beef driven over on the hoof by Carson Valley ranchers or by game hunted nearby. One man who worked the Washoe Diggings in those years described it as a life of “Arcadian” simplicity that provided a “precarious livelihood” to those willing to subject themselves to the backbreaking labor. Among the positives, the men existed in wild freedom, beyond reach of governmental, legal, or ecclesiastical authority. In season, if so inclined, they worked six days a week, gleaning what color they could from the cañon’s sediments, their most complicated logistical requirements being “a reasonable stock of whisky and tobacco,” without the latter, the miners’ existence “would have been intolerable.” As for the former, a gallon of whisky that cost thirty-seven and a half cents one hundred miles away in Placerville sold for four dollars in Gold Cañon.