The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  Their Arcadian existence was exclusively an immigrant experience. For the natives of the Washoe and Northern Paiute tribes who had inhabited the region for generations, the white-skinned invasion was an unmitigated disaster. The concept that a man could own land to the exclusion of all others just by making squiggles on a piece of paper tucked into empty cans or whisky bottles and affixed to a post or placed atop a stone cairn eluded them entirely. White settlers fenced the best grazing lands, displacing game animals not decimated by indiscriminate hunting; scorned the Washoe and Northern Paiute as savage “diggers” because part of their diet consisted of roots scratched from the earth, apparently finding some moral distinction between roots eaten by Indians and the potatoes, onions, and garlic common to the diet of the eastern states; and reveled in “progress,” unconcerned by the consequences their colonization imposed on the native bands.

  As in placer mining regions everywhere, the best locations in Gold Cañon were found, cleaned up to bedrock, and then reworked until the gold-bearing sediments played out. As time passed, Gold Cañon returns declined, just as they had in California. Many Washoe pioneers suspected the mountainous deserts of the eastern slope and the Great Basin harbored vast mineral wealth, and they launched regular expeditions to search for it. They prospected many locations without discovering anything better than what they had in Gold Cañon, where they continued to work without any inkling that they were within a few miles of underground wealth the likes of which the world hadn’t found since the heydays of the Spanish empire. Ignorance or sloth didn’t delay discovery of the great lode, however. Most of the men mining Gold Cañon had served an apprenticeship in the goldfields of California. They all knew that gold filling a drainage with profitable placer diggings had washed down from somewhere above, and even if they lacked the equipment and capital needed to advantageously work the quartz veins that held the original gold, canny placer miners knew that the most profitable deposits tended to concentrate directly beneath a gold-bearing vein. That knowledge drove them to search for the local mother veins.

  Miners soon recognized that although people washing dirt in Gold Cañon above Devil’s Gate continued to find gold, they didn’t find enough to “make grub.” Experienced miners took that as prima facie evidence that the quartz veins above Devil’s Gate didn’t contain much of “the necessary”—a perfectly reasonable conclusion. They concentrated their efforts in the more profitable placers in the ravines that converged below Devil’s Gate. A thousand feet of elevation higher up Gold and Six Mile cañons, eons of erosion had worn the surface rocks and sediments close to two large ore bodies lurking just beneath the surface in a monster vein hiding in the mountain above, but hadn’t actually exposed either one. Without any surface cues to distinguish it from the other quartz croppings running through the Gold and Six Mile cañons’ watersheds, only striking one of the ore bodies directly would reveal the great lode.

  By the summer of 1857, only the Chinese community and three or four dozen other miners remained in Gold Cañon. Among them were “Old Virginny” James Fenimore, the Irish partners Peter O’Reilly and Patrick McLaughlin, Emanuel “Manny” Penrod, and a man named Henry Tompkins Paige Comstock. The Washoe Diggings wouldn’t survive without fresh discoveries.

  In a letter Comstock wrote to the Saint Louis Republican many years later, he claimed to have trapped in Canada, Michigan, Indiana, and the Rocky Mountains for the American Fur Company, played a part in the Black Hawk War and the Mexican War, and “roved” all over California and Mexico. Comstock’s self-descriptions merited caution, however, as many men who knew him would have warned. Long after Comstock’s death, a man who had Comstock’s acquaintance in the early days described him as “a singular genius, unburdened with virtues,” and “a hell of a liar.” Manny Penrod, his friend and partner, remembered him more fairly, as a “wild and visionary man who would buy anything that was for sale,” paying cash if he had the money or taking possession on credit if he could get it extended.II

  The remaining Washoe miners considered Old Virginny the best prospector among them. Dan de Quille, the pen name of William Wright, one of the region’s leading journalists in later years, described Fenimore as “fond of the bottle,” but “by no means a loafer.” Seasons of “great activity” followed his sprees. Finney hiked up Gold Cañon on one of his hunts in the late spring or early summer of 1857. Near the head of the cañon, he huffed up a rise onto “the Divide” between the Gold Cañon and Six Mile Cañon drainages, then descended slightly onto the out-sloping bench that ran across the eastern base of Sun Mountain. Old Virginny wandered along the angled terrace, across two shallow washes, to the vicinity of a gulch near its far end.

  Downhill, in one of the shallow ravines feeding the top of Six Mile Cañon, Fenimore noticed yellowish dirt similar in color to that which yielded decent dry diggings near the Forks of Gold Cañon. The surface dirt proved to contain profitable quantities of gold. Finney, Manny Penrod, and a handful of others marked out placer claims and systematically worked the ravine’s stubborn, arid ground through the summer of 1857, finding color mixed into a heavy clay that needed to be “puddled”—soaked with water in a box or hole and mashed into a loose, muddy pudding before it could be worked through rockers. Despite the additional hassle and the paucity of water, the diggings yielded about five dollars to the hand per day.

  About the time Old Virginny and others began puddling their first shovelfuls of Six Mile Cañon’s paying clay, two brothers, Allen and Hosea Grosh, came over the mountains from California with a novel idea—to mine silver in the Washoe Diggings. They’d mined there twice before, and their hopes resided in some dark, crumbly rocks they’d picked out of a quartz vein near the Forks of Gold Cañon that they thought contained silver. The Grosh brothers spent the summer of 1857 trying to discover how to get the rock to release the metal. Finally, in a letter to their father, Allen Grosh claimed to have “mastered the rock,” possibly having produced small metallic buttons from a few ore samples—which he and his brother hoped would prove to be silver. Then struck a trio of disasters. Desperados murdered the man who had promised to back their silver-mining venture. Forced to work furiously at placer mining to earn enough to lay in winter provisions before the close of the mining season, Hosea Grosh tore a “frightful gash” in his foot with a pick and died of blood poisoning. Trying to get back to California via a late-season crossing of the Sierras, Allen Grosh frostbit his feet and died of gangrene. With him went whatever knowledge of silver in the Washoe Diggings he and his brother had managed to amass.

  The Grosh brothers were probably the first persons to attempt to wring silver from hard rock ore veins in the Great Basin, a seminal event in the history of American mining, and although they were ultimately unsuccessful, their tragedy marked a rising interest in the possibilities of quartz mining. Nineteenth-century miners didn’t fully comprehend the complex geological and chemical processes that formed quartz veins, but that didn’t change the fact of their existence. Tens of thousands of them striated the mountains and canyons of California and the Great Basin. In broad terms, the veins had formed when hot, high-pressure groundwater carrying dissolved silicon dioxide—quartz, one of the most common mineral compounds—circulated up from deep underground into faults and fissures in the earth’s crust. As the pressure relaxed and the water cooled, the silicon dioxide precipitated out of solution, filling the cracks and crevices with masses of milky quartz. (Although called quartz “veins,” they more closely resembled “sheets” hanging underground, surrounded on both sides by the worthless “country rock”; they presented a visible linear vein only on the surface.) In some instances, other dissolved substances such as sulfur and calcium traveled in the hot water solutions along with the silicon dioxide and, sometimes, so did such common metallic elements as copper, iron, and lead. As they fell out of solution, those dissolved materials formed minerals, most of which weren’t valuable. But sometimes, on rare occasions, the solutions of hot, circulating groundwater forc
ed up from below managed to dissolve, transport, and deposit gold and silver and other elements into complex mineral compounds. If the concentrations of precious metals rose high enough, those quartz veins could be valuable, and in the rarest of instances, they could be extremely valuable. Complicating matters, silver ores, even in spectacularly high concentrations, didn’t at all resemble the “native” metal they contained.

  The Washoe miners of the 1850s had little idea how to recognize mineral ores, let alone exploit them. They knew placer gold, and through years of bitter labor, they’d come to know it well. They also knew that quartz veins in California and Washoe held tiny particles of gold—inside the quartz, gold specks were sometimes visible to the naked eye. The problem of mining quartz was profitably separating the precious metal from the “gangue,” the valueless surrounding matter, either by developing a vein with a sufficiently high gold concentration or by efficient, low-cost extraction of the metal from a lower-grade vein. Either alternative compounded mining’s many risks. Extracting gold from quartz demanded much more investment of time and money than placer mining, and no matter how fabulous the quartz samples that motivated a man to invest in a vein, or “lode,” there was no guarantee that quality ore existed at greater depth. And unlike placer mining, quartz mining paid no immediate return. “Opening” or “developing” a vein required weeks, and sometimes months, of nonpaying dead work. Mining the ore required even more time and money, as did the “milling” or “reducing,” the mechanical and chemical process or processes that extracted metal from the ore. Only when the full reduction process was complete did the true value of an ore reveal itself, and a man had to support himself that entire time. California’s various quartz crazes had bankrupted many miners and investors.

  Undeterred, and inspired by the show of fine gold, plain to the naked eye, mineralized into a milky quartz vein near Devil’s Gate, a group of Washoe miners banded together in 1858 and formed the “Pioneer Quartz Company.” Since the risks and difficulties of quartz mining differed greatly from those of placer mining, they wrote a set of by-laws to cover quartz claims, the first codification of quartz-mining law east of the Sierra Nevada—another watershed moment in American mining history. Unlike a gold placer, in which the metal was diffused—or potentially diffused—through an entire area of sediments, in quartz mining, only the material of the vein or “lode” held any expectation of value. A quartz vein showed just a line at the surface, known as the “croppings.” Quartz claims therefore divided that line—“the line of the lode”—into distinct slices. To offset the much heavier initial expenses of quartz mining, the rules the Pioneer Quartz Company wrote allowed each man to claim and hold six hundred linear feet of ground “on the line of the lode.” (That number was later reduced to three hundred feet and then to two hundred feet per man to spread the wealth—or potential wealth—more democratically.) And since nobody knew a surefire way of telling how a lode might angle—or change angles—beneath the surface of the earth, between the two end lines of a quartz claim, owners had the right to follow the “dips, spurs, and angles” of the lode, or “lead,” wherever it went underground.III

  The Pioneer Quartz Company built an arastra to crush what they hoped would prove to be ore. (By mining definition, it’s not “ore” if it won’t pay.) They dug a circular hole in the ground about ten feet in diameter and eighteen inches deep, and paved the floor and walls with flat stones. They sank a round post in the center, steadied the post with framing timbers anchored to the arastra’s rim that allowed the post to rotate, and mortised timber arms into the center post below the anchor frame so the arms could rotate within the sunken circle. They tied heavy drag rocks to the timber arms with strong ropes or rawhide cords and attached a long sweep to the top of the center post, the end of which extended well beyond the rim of the circle. The company “charged”—meaning filled—the arastra with quartz from their promising vein, added thirty or forty pounds of quicksilver and a dose of salt, hitched a mule and a horse to the long sweep, and started marching the animals in circles. As the animals turned the sweep, the center post and the timber arms rotated, and the drag rocks following behind crushed the quartz against the paving stones. They marched the animals in circles for three weeks to pulverize the quartz and stir the mixture, then rocked out the amalgam with a cradle. Down in Johntown, the company heated the amalgam in a frying pan, taking care not to inhale the fumes as the mercury cooked away. The mass shriveled. The resulting bullion weighed a mere six ounces and assayed at forty-four dollars, a minuscule return for a month’s labor of eight men, and a “cold bath” for the Pioneer Quartz Company. The company dissolved and the men returned to placer mining.

  Although he hadn’t belonged to the Pioneer Quartz Company, Old Virginia took some interest in the local quartz that season. Fenimore claimed a plainly visible quartz “lead” running across the eastern face of Sun Mountain, at the upper edge of the out-sloping bench. When he refused to name the lead, another man named it “the Virginia Lead” in his honor. Fenimore did nothing to develop it, but none of the other miners disputed his claim. (Old Virginia’s quartz lead wouldn’t ever become a profitable mining claim, but in the hands of other men, it would prove to be a perfectly positioned “fighting claim” from which to dispute the ownership of other leads that would soon be located nearby.)

  Many more miners abandoned the Washoe Diggings that year. Only a stubborn handful remained to sweat subsistence wages from the pale, lightweight gold found in Six Mile Cañon through the spring, summer, and fall of 1858. As a mining region, the Washoe Diggings teetered toward extinction.

  Late in the year, a hard freeze stopped the water flowing in Gold and Six Mile cañons and ended the mining season. The men retreated from the cold, high bench to their warmer, less windy, lower elevation accommodations in Johntown. Not until late January did a spell of mild weather start water running in the gulches and ravines of Gold and Six Mile cañons. Fenimore used the improved weather to prospect for new diggings. Exploring the spur east of Gold Cañon with John Bishop and two other men, Fenimore pointed to a low, flat-topped hillock lying inside upper Gold Cañon like a sandbag. Fenimore knew it from previous hunting expeditions. “Boys, I believe there are some good diggings over there,” he said. “In a few days, we will go over and try it.”

  The others deferred to Fenimore’s experience, and on Friday, January 28, 1859, the four men made the three-mile uphill slog from Johntown to examine the hillock. Fenimore took note of the mound’s yellowish dirt, similar to other modestly profitable spots he’d worked in the region. John Bishop kicked dirt into a pan with his boot and carried the full pan to a rivulet trickling from an “Indian spring” in a stand of willows on a nearby hillside. Swirled down to paydirt, Bishop found about fifteen cents worth of flourlike fine gold in the bottom of the pan. Fenimore got good color from dirt scooped from a nearby gopher hole. Other pans the men tested yielded between eight and fifteen cents worth of gold, a “fair prospect” by any local measure. Fenimore rambled up the main drainage and discovered a small spring from which water could be flumed to the little mound. Returning to the others, Fenimore pronounced it a good location. The group staked four adjoining placer claims along the line of the little hill, each one fifty feet wide and four hundred feet long. After measuring the ground, the foursome wondered what to name their new location. Since it was “decidedly not Gold Cañon,” in the opinion of John Bishop, the new ground being a little hill, they settled on “Gold Hill.”

  On Sunday, most of the male residents of Johntown hiked up Gold Cañon to “pass upon” the new location. Nothing about the sagebrush-covered mound impressed them. So-called Gold Hill didn’t seem likely to out-earn the claims they had in the lower canyon. However, a few days later, Henry Comstock, a lapsed Mormon named James Rogers, Joseph Plato, Alexander “Sandy” Bowers, and William Knight added one last fifty-by-four-hundred-foot claim to the Gold Hill mound, assigning ten feet to each man—the group “Comstock & Co.” referred to in the
published May 20 letter that probably contributed to Mackay and O’Brien’s rising interest in Washoe.

  More freezing weather delayed the start of the mining campaign. The original locators constructed a crude lumber flume to convey water to their new claims. At the first thaw, likely in early April, they began washing Gold Hill’s top dirt through their rockers and found themselves making about five dollars a day—a decent return, but nothing spectacular. However, returns improved as the miners dug deeper into the yellowish dirt. Within a fortnight, the men were cleaning up $20 to $40 per working day. Those quantities of “the needful” converted the “Johntown unbelievers.” Almost to a man, Johntown’s thirty or forty residents moved three miles up-cañon to Gold Hill, where they took up residence in hastily erected tents, huts, and shanties or simply cast their blankets on the ground and slept under the stars. Some went to work for the original claim holders; some prospected nearby gulches, ravines, and hillsides hoping to make similar strikes; others opened businesses catering to the needs of the new camp. A few feet below the surface of the flat-topped mound, the miners began encountering crumbly quartz masses shot through with gold flecks. Blows from their hammers and picks easily crushed the quartz. Running the resulting grains through their rockers doubled their earnings again.