The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  The Washoe migration labored toward the spine of the Sierras at Johnson’s Pass “like a great snake dragging its slow length along.” Descending beyond the pass into Lake Valley, the trail turned south, away from the massive mountain lake called Lake Bigler (now Tahoe), to meet the West Fork of the Carson River. The Washoe rushers followed the Carson down a narrow canyon and continued the long descent north to Genoa, in the Carson Valley.I Although they had the worst seventy miles of the journey behind them, thirty miles yet remained to reach the new mines.

  A strong storm hit the Sierras on April 4 and temporarily shut down the migration. That day, Adolph Sutro, a Prussian Jew who had been in Virginia City inspecting the new mines for the Daily Alta California and would spend much of the next twenty years bidding to control the Comstock Lode, was trying to make it back to California. Sutro and his traveling companions reached the summit of Johnson’s Pass in the early afternoon, pressing toward Placerville, and were stunned to see a lone rider galloping toward them out of the driving snow. They couldn’t imagine what could spur a man to travel so fast through such an awful gale. Only as the rider thundered past did they realize that it was the Pony Express making its inaugural run.

  The first rider had departed San Francisco a few minutes before four o’clock the previous afternoon, taken a steamboat upriver to Sacramento, and galloped off the boat at 2:45 a.m. He made the 45 miles to Placerville in less than four hours and passed the mail off to the next rider—a young man named Warren Epson—12 miles out of town. Epson had done 40 mostly uphill miles when he raced past Sutro in Johnson’s Pass, and he did 47 more before he passed the mail to the next rider in Carson City at 8:36 p.m., having ridden hard for thirteen consecutive hours. From Sacramento to Carson City, the two Pony Express riders had managed 144 miles in just eighteen hours. Newspapers all over California lauded the riders’ astonishing velocity—they’d averaged eight miles per hour over the mighty Sierras.

  The eastward stampede from California to Washoe resumed when the storm spent its fury. Dozens of bedraggled rushers reached the Comstock every day, either afoot, ahorse, or a-mule, heaped into freight wagons, or in stagecoaches making round trips from Carson City. The rough camps at Virginia City and Gold Hill teemed with new arrivals, most appalled to find themselves perched on a desert mountainside in the middle of what one of them described as “a primitive wilderness so scorified, saline, and sulphurous that it would seem to have been rained upon with fire and brimstone, and afterwards sown with salt.”

  Despite the bleak scenery visible from Virginia City’s few rough streets running parallel along the out-sloping bench, unimaginatively named A, B, C, and D streets from highest to lowest (nobody had yet bothered to lay out cross streets), none of the newly arrived Washoeites could fail to notice the tons of ore, worth tens of thousands of dollars, piled up below the Ophir, Central, and California mines. Every man wanted a chance at such riches. They took that chance by buying and selling feet in the mines.

  The heavy expenses of quartz mining forced mining companies or claims without a cash flow to sell feet to raise capital. People bought feet for two reasons: the speculative hope of capital gain—that they could sell the feet at an increase in value sometime in the future—and the hope that the mine would develop a rich strike and find itself with such strong earnings that it paid dividends to its stockholders, the people who owned feet in the mine.

  The camp’s manic speculative energy concentrated along A Street, the uppermost street, called “the Exchange,” directly below the active mine cuts. Wearing red or blue flannel shirts, canvas trousers, and sturdy boots under heavy overcoats, and in a state of great “mental tension” to make hasty wealth, miners, prospectors, speculators, sharps, flats, greenhorns, veteran “yon-siders” (as old California pioneers often referred to themselves), and most everyone else gathered on the Exchange to buy, sell, bull, bear, or trade “feet” in the mines. Men sensed they might never again have such a clear chance to make a speedy fortune, and they acted with “the concentrated energy of those having issues of life and death before them.”

  Walking along A Street on his way to and from the mines, John Mackay watched wildly bewhiskered men peer at mineral specimens through the magnifying glasses or jeweler’s loupes everyone kept tucked in their vest pockets and hash over the dips, spurs, quartz, clay, free gold, assays, croppings, overburdens, clorides, and sulphurets that constituted the quality of a given location’s “indications.” People jangling pockets full of rocks demeaned themselves in their berserk frenzy to get rich. Someone quipped that the Comstock had “corralled” all of the world’s “insane geologists.” A few credulous prospectors desperate for “good tidings from any imaginary Ophir” made locations based on the advice of one Mr. Peck, who boasted the ability to locate underground ore deposits with the aid of a one-hundred-year-old “electro-magnetic” mineral rod, a wand that encased two or three ounces of quicksilver. Mr. Winn, who owned a restaurant on B Street one block below the Exchange, cut a streak of silver ore while excavating the foundation for an oven. He and several friends immediately located a claim, thinking their fortunes made. A correspondent counted about one man in fifty actually at work mining. The rest bought, sold, and talked. The sharps kept on the qui vive, buttonholing each other and whispering mysteriously in corners as they puffed claims and eyed one another for speculative indications. The fact that most couldn’t tell a chloride from a sulphuret or a pick from an adze and had never spent a minute underground surely had John Mackay shaking his head. “Endless chaffering” over the value of feet made the Exchange “a perfect Babel” for eighteen of the day’s twenty-four hours. Female members of the “sporting fraternity” plying their trade openly along the street “made good use of the remaining six.”

  The thickening ore vein in the Ophir and Mexican mines, good indications on the Gould & Curry claim on the line of the lode 1,534 feet south of the Ophir, and the large returns expected once miners opened to sufficient depth the numerous parallel quartz croppings that had been claimed both above and below the Comstock vein all contributed to a euphoric communal confidence in the region’s mining wealth.

  The recently completed telegraph line to Virginia City extended the speculative ruckus to all classes of San Francisco society.II Morse code buy and sell instructions and daily mining news flashing over the Sierras created an “under-current” of speculative energy in San Francisco that proved capable of washing “large amounts of coin from one man’s pocket into that of another,” and created a panoply of opportunity for unscrupulous operators to fob dubious mining schemes on a public obsessed with easy-made wealth.

  One observer lauded the salesmanship of a man who parlayed a cheap pocket watch into stock certificates for thirty feet of an obscure—and almost certainly worthless—Washoe silver mine he subsequently traded for a vacant lot in San Francisco worth $1,000. Back on the Exchange in Washoe, a man watched two or three chunks of ore pass from hand to hand as specimens from the Pine Nut claim. Later, he watched the same pieces circulate as examples from the Gould & Curry, then the Ophir, the Mexican, and finally as morsels of the Rogers claim, a well-regarded mine in the Flowery District five miles east of the Comstock, down Six Mile Cañon. He cautioned those buying into the Rogers to inquire whether they were getting feet in the James F. Rogers or the Uncle Billy Rogers. “It makes a difference,” he said. “The former is a silver lode, five miles east of Virginia City; the latter is a copper claim, at the head of Hope Valley, fifty miles the other way.”

  Nor had mining sharps cornered the market on nefarious business practices. Placerville teamsters fleeced merchants desperate to get supplies over the Sierras. Through the foul weather of winter and spring, the packers promised to haul supplies to Washoe at twenty-five cents a pound. Instead, they dumped the loads forty or fifty miles out of town, returned to Placerville claiming they couldn’t get through the mountains, and made another contract at twenty-five cents per pound with another person and repeated the process. O
nce rates dropped to five cents per pound, the normal summer charge, they hired additional help to haul the supplies the rest of the way. The practice ruined several businessmen whose wares spent months in transit.

  Virginia City had finished March 1860 with ten stone and thirty-one wooden structures in various stages of construction, ninety canvas tents, and an uncounted number of improvised shelters like the one occupied by John Mackay and his companions. In the first two weeks of April, the camp added more than a hundred tents. It added two hundred more in the last fortnight of the month and still didn’t have sufficient bed space to accommodate its booming population—although the Washoe “beds” didn’t amount to anything more than straw-stuffed sacks, even in the canvas-walled structures their proprietors styled as hotels and boardinghouses. Those filled with men happy to pay a premium for comfort. People left over either paid a dollar per night to the owners of tents, shanties, and saloons for the privilege of sleeping on the floor or slept outside, huddled together like sheep through the cold spring nights.

  With little firewood in camp, the population packed the public houses in the evenings and with, as one writer observed, “a view toward maintaining their animal heat, draw largely on the resources of the bar.” Fortunately, whisky remained plentiful, the only abundant item in a camp that in the first week of April was “entirely out of flour, and nearly every other staple of food” besides tough, stringy beef cut from cattle butchered to save them from starvation. The few hardy freighters who had driven mules through the winter passes had imbibed too much ’49er lore. They arrived leading “laboring, panting, staggering” animals with “a cask of whiskey on each side of the pack-saddle, with never a sack of flour for companion.” Frank Soule, correspondent of the Daily Alta California, estimated that mules brought in “ten kegs of whisky to every half sack of flour.” Periodic resupply coupled to the ability of the local whisky casks to emulate Old Testament oil jars gradually converted the Washoe ardent into a “Dashaway beverage,”III devoid of intoxicating properties. So, while hunger abraded the camp’s innards in March and early April and the cost of edible commodities advanced “from one hundred to one thousand percent,” there remained a “superabundance of whisky,” and its price remained standard—“two bits a glass.”

  Mule trains arriving in mid-April brought gastronomic relief. Dark, scudding clouds spitting a wintry mix of rain and snow began alternating with warm, clear, windless days. Far to eastward, dust devil whirlwinds three thousand feet tall sped across the arid flats of the Carson Sink. By far the month’s most glorious achievement occurred on April 12, when the first westbound Pony Express rider galloped past the mouths of Six Mile and Gold cañons on his way up the Carson Valley. The mail pouches reached Carson City, fifteen miles southwest of Virginia City, at 3:30 p.m., eight and a half days after leaving St. Joseph, Missouri. They included a news summary that the local telegraph operator relayed to a California population amazed to be reading news less than ten days old.

  The Daily Alta California spoke for many yon-siders when it contextualized the Pony Express’s accomplishment: “Only those who have toiled wearily over the great deserts between California and the Missouri River will be able to fully estimate what has been accomplished.” For most of them, the journey had taken four or five months.

  • • •

  National news was interesting, but it didn’t capture and hold the Washoe interest like developments pertaining to the local mines, where the mining properties belonged to one of three classes. “Outside claims,” also known as “wildcats,” those locations off the line of the main lode, occupied the third and lowest tier. Based on the strength of their indications, wildcats commanded between 50 cents and $50 per foot, with much concentration at the low end, most of which would prove overvalued. Claims on what men supposed was the line of the Comstock Lode that had not yet produced pay ore constituted the second class. Depending on their distance from the exposed lead and the quality of their indications, speculators valued their stock as high as $500 or $600 per foot. The fact that mining men didn’t yet understand the dimensions and boundaries of the lode complicated matters for many claims, but people recognized the difference between those locations that might own a slice of the Comstock and those that definitely did not. First-class claims had exposed the treasure vein, either in a surface cut or via an adit that had struck the lode at depth. Despite all the wild excitement, there were still just the California, the Central, the Ophir, and the Mexican mines of this class above Virginia City and the many small ones that striped Gold Hill. Speculators fancied them worth from $800 to $5,000 per foot, but most of the owners wouldn’t sell an inch, at any price. The Marysville Daily Appeal reported that well-known lawyer Henry Meredith, who had bought one-twelfth of the Ophir from George Hearst for $10,000 the previous November, refused an offer of $150,000.

  Much of the speculative excitement centered on claims of the second class, those thought to be on the main lode but without proven ore—and therefore without a cash flow. In Virginia City, where $50,000 locations were “plenty as blackberries,” there were also “many very rich men who cannot pay for breakfast.” The perceived future value of the mines they owned represented most of their wealth, and the need to finance mine development—or pay basic living expenses—forced many of them to sell or trade “feet” of their claims. Owners making deals of this nature had several dozen adits under construction in the district, including the one Mackay and his companions had contracted to dig for the Union mine. The adits advanced a few feet per day, and speculators carefully tracked their progress. As an adit approached its anticipated intersection with the vein, excitement grew surrounding its parent mine. Sharps started nosing around the adit’s mouth, ingratiating themselves with members of the work crew, or bribing them outright, in the hopes of being favored with whiffs of news. The speculative fever peaked as the miners chipped into the quartz vein. If the adit struck ore—or even indications—the mine’s price vaulted. If it didn’t, values collapsed. As was the habit of most miners, Mackay likely followed the fluctuating values of the mines, looking for opportunities to capitalize on his underground knowledge if he thought he perceived under- or overvalued ground.

  Sources don’t reveal the exact nature of the arrangements Mackay had with Union ownership or with his workmates. Nor do they reveal on what date Mackay acquired his first feet of the Union mine, likely in exchange for passing a milestone in adit construction, or on what date the tunnel struck the vein, but county mining records do show him transacting feet in the Union mine on four separate occasions in the first half of 1860—the first of which was him deeding feet to another man. Mackay and his cabin mates may have been acting in partnership, with their gains pooled and the recorded transactions reflecting their taking advantage of speculative opportunities, or Mackay may have been bossing the job, receiving and parceling out slices of the mine as members of the crew met various benchmarks.IV

  With the Union only five hundred feet north of the treasure vein exposed in the Mexican, speculators held sanguine opinions of the Union’s prospects, especially after a report circulated that the Sierra Nevada Company immediately north of the Union had struck “ore of rich prospect.” Mackay’s adit approaching the lead must have touched off a frenzy. Depending on the nature of his contract with the Union ownership, that may have provided him with excellent opportunities to trade into other mines and diversify his holdings, or to extract some cash as reward for the months of hard work. Alternatively, he perhaps held all his stock in the hopes of a rich strike. Mackay and his mates must have hit the vein in a lather of anticipation. If the recorded transactions represent all of their acquired feet, their sweat equity had earned a roughly 20 percent share in the mine. “Podgers,” the nom de plume of Richard L. Ogden, a very well-informed California correspondent of the New York Times, may have referred to Mackay’s Union adit on April 20, 1860, when he wrote that “a company owning a claim beyond the Ophir claim, that is to say, 1,400 feet from the fi
rst shaft, have struck the vein, and $400 per foot is offered and refused; two weeks ago it was selling at $50 per foot, the vein not then having been struck.” If the adit developed rich ore, their fortunes were made. Unfortunately, Mackay’s adit crosscut the Comstock Lode through a great mass of low-grade quartz, none of it profitable. Nowhere did Mackay encounter the dense bluish-black ore that yielded such riches to the claim owners a few hundred feet farther south. Its conspicuous absence must have been a major disappointment.

  If so, the letdown did nothing to diminish Mackay’s appetite for hard work—or his budding ambition. Although a socially reticent man embarrassed by his struggles to overcome his stutter, Mackay showed no reluctance to push himself forward through sustained physical effort. In mid-March, almost certainly before completing the Union project, he contracted with the Buck Ledge, a claim between Virginia City and Gold Hill just above the Chollar mine, to run “a prospecting tunnel . . . until he strikes the ledge or pay dirt.” As part of the agreement, Mackay promised to work on the adit “five days in every week till his contract is completed.” Only a man with a work ethic like John Mackay’s could have cleaved to the terms of the contract, because he also took a full-time job, six days a week, working for wages in the Mexican mine. Before completing his Union contract, Mackay might well have worked all three jobs at the same time.

  • • •

  In Virginia City, Gold Hill, and throughout the booming region, miners seemed poised for a season of steady development. That changed on the evening of May 7, when a Pony Express rider urged a lathered horse up Six Mile Cañon, reined up in camp, and gasped out news of an Indian massacre at Williams Station, a none-too-reputable trading post and grog shop on the immigrant road thirty-six miles to the east. The rider said that Indian raiders had killed two of the three Williams brothers and five other white men. He’d heard it from the surviving Williams brother, who had escaped, spurring and whipping one of his two mounts until it collapsed from exhaustion, then outdistanced Indian pursuit on his fresher second horse. Twelve miles west of the bloodshed, he’d reached safety at Buckland’s Pony Express Station and told his tale: He’d returned from hunting a lost mule to find the station burned, one of his brothers dead, and the other dying, but able to gasp out the story of Indian treachery and murder. The Pony Express man carried the story to the nearest sizable white settlement—Virginia City.