The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  “No use now. Too late,” answered the grim Indian.

  He raised his bow and shot an arrow into Ormsby’s stomach and another into his face.

  About eight miles into the flight, the mule carrying both Joseph Baldwin and the man who’d rescued him began to tire. The teenager slipped unnoticed from the back of the animal, hid in some bushes as the Indians swept past, and fled into the hills after nightfall. The Indians chased the terror-stricken whites for fifteen miles, clear back to the Truckee River bend, killing everyone they caught. Only nightfall saved the vigilante remnants from annihilation. If the battle had started two hours earlier, there might not have been a single white survivor. Fortunately for the whites still alive, the moon didn’t rise until past midnight.

  Baldwin reached Virginia City on the second night after the battle, much to the relief of his parents in Sacramento. He’d been reported dead by the first of those the scathing Sacramento Daily Union correspondent described as “returned heroes” to reach camp, one of whom appeared atop young Baldwin’s mule.

  The last survivor to make it back was Greek immigrant Dr. Anton W. Tjader, a locally popular man. Impaled by three arrows before Indians killed his running horse, he tumbled to the ground and feigned death. The Indians galloped past. When sounds of the chase faded, Dr. Tjader dragged himself to a stand of willows on the riverbank, where he lay hidden for two days, terrified to move for fear of being killed by Indians in the vicinity celebrating victory. Eventually, the doctor seized an opportunity to slink off into darkness. He spent the next seventy-two hours walking back to Virginia City.

  One newspaper tally documented 55 white deaths—23 known dead and 22 missing; another claimed that only 39 whites returned alive, having left 67 dead on the banks of the Truckee. Later historians counted as many as 76 white deaths. The First Battle of Pyramid Lake was the worst loss of white life in an Indian fight since the Dade Massacre in central Florida escalated the Second Seminole War in 1835. No battle would significantly exceed its toll until General Custer’s disaster on the banks of the Little Bighorn sixteen years later. (A roughly similar number died in 1866 during the Fetterman Fight in Red Cloud’s War in what is now north-central Wyoming.) A correspondent of the Daily Alta California, likely Frank Soule, offered a good summary of the debacle. He described the white force destroyed along the banks of the Truckee River as “ill-advised and hasty . . . badly chosen, ill-appointed, and . . . unfitted for the service . . . too numerous for the purposes of peace, and too few for those of war.” And, it might be added, in intellect and temperament, unsuited to either. The Indians had suffered three wounded men and two slain horses.

  • • •

  Initial reports of the disaster reached Virginia City with the first frightened survivors who rode into camp around sunrise the next morning. The story flew over the telegraph wires to Carson City and California—along with shrill appeals for regular and militia soldiers to combat what the most agitated inhabitants of the eastern slope feared was an Indian “war of extermination against the whites.”

  The debacle hit the white civilization of the Pacific Coast like a dropped anvil. Residents could scarcely credit the idea that a hundred rough and ready Californians had been decimated by a band of “digger Indians.” The news set San Francisco “agog.” Huge crowds gathered outside the newspaper and telegraph offices and shoved against the bulletin boards to read each new posted dispatch. Rumors spoke of a white man who had precipitated the war by assassinating Paiute chief Winnemucca and of fifteen hundred Indians arriving from the Salt Lake vicinity to reinforce the fifteen thousand Paiute, Shoshone, Bannock, and Pitt River Indians “in full war paint” at Pyramid Lake determined on “clearing out Carson Valley.” (The Territorial Enterprise estimated fewer than four hundred warriors in the entire Paiute tribe.) “Brigham Young is at the bottom of this matter,” railed a writer in Marysville. With Governor John G. Downey being absent at San Quentin, Secretary of State Johnson Price assumed responsibility, ordered a company of regular U.S. Army artillery and another of infantry to deploy from Fort Alcatraz and Benicia, and set militia units from Downieville, San Juan, Placerville, Nevada City, and Sacramento marching over the Sierras.

  In Virginia City, a militia captain declared martial law, posted pickets, and sent out roving patrols. At around midnight on May 14, a patrol heard noises on the outskirts of camp and sounded the alarm. Some residents barricaded “females and children” inside Pat Riley’s stone hotel and prepared to fight. Others slinked out of town and spent the night secreted on the mountainside, wrapped in blankets with weapons in their laps. Morning investigation revealed a jackass caught in a stand of brush. “It is deplorable, as well as mortifying to see able-bodied men giving way so readily to childish fears,” wrote one of the camp’s cooler heads. A hasty meeting of the mining district passed a resolution that no claims would be voided for lack of the work required to hold them for the next sixty days. As a result, about three hundred decamped for California. Business and mining stopped. One “frightened hombre” prevailed upon a comrade to lower him to the bottom of a mineshaft for the purpose of “preserving his scalp” from the assault of the “noble red men” that he felt imminent. The man who’d done the lowering, perhaps lost in the grip of the well-polished jug, forgot the deed. His friend passed three hungry days at the bottom of the shaft before being remembered and returned to the surface.

  Five days after the battle, the camp cheered the first force of California militia into town. The regular army companies and other militia units reached camp in the coming days, including the Sierra Battalion rallied from the Downieville area and commanded by Major Daniel E. Hungerford. A New Yorker who had been slightly wounded during the Mexican War, Hungerford emigrated to California in the summer of 1849 and failed as a shopkeeper, miner, butcher, auctioneer, blacksmith, merchant, and lawyer before summoning his wife and nine-year-old daughter west from Brooklyn to join him in Downieville five years later.

  “The Major is now in his glory,” wrote his son-in-law, Dr. Edmund G. Bryant, who served as battalion surgeon—or did serve, until, with his father-in-law’s blessing, he hired another man to take his place. Both Doctor Bryant and the major felt it was in the family’s best interests to have Dr. Bryant “look after some of [his] debtors and some mining claims.”

  Although there’s no evidence John Mackay met Major Hungerford or Dr. Bryant during May or June 1860, due to their prominence in the Indian war excitement and the personal attachments all three men shared in the Downieville area, John Mackay likely knew of and recognized the two men.

  Major Hungerford didn’t possess the martial stature to hold the respect, confidence, and obedience of all the different officers of the disparate militia units and the two regular companies, but as luck would have it, the most renowned Indian fighter in the United States happened to be in Virginia City that May—ex–Texas Ranger John Coffee Hays. A man of astonishing personal courage, “Jack” Hays had risen through the ranks of the Texas Rangers fighting Comanches and Mexicans through the entire history of the Texas Republic, from 1836 to 1848. Honored to have such a sterling enemy, Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump sent Hays an engraved golden spoon to commemorate the birth of Hays’s first son. Hays had introduced Samuel Walker and Samuel Colt and the fruit of their partnership—the Colt Walker six-shot .44 caliber revolver—resulted in a massive increase of white firepower in light cavalry fights. Hays commanded a regiment in the Mexican War, and after the war, served a brief stint as an Indian agent in the New Mexico Territory before joining the Gold Rush. In San Francisco in 1850, he became the city’s first elected sheriff and served as surveyor general of the state later in the decade. Forty-three years old in 1860 and a resident of Oakland, Hays had come to Washoe to investigate business opportunities, and he was likely in Virginia City at the time of the Indians’ Williams Station reprisal. If so, the veteran Indian fighter played no part in the Ormsby debacle—likely because he mistrusted the casus belli.

  On May 22,
the militia elected Hays colonel, which many soon regretted, because in addition to being a genius of irregular warfare, Hays was also a notorious disciplinarian. He stopped the militia practice of confiscating horses, mules, and cattle. In one egregious example, a valiant volunteer gentleman walked up to a doctor saddling his horse for a visit to an invalid patient and commandeered horse, saddle, and bridle over “the protestations of the physician and with a full understanding of the case.” The prevalence of such episodes greatly eroded militia popularity among the white settlements, even as Indian raids struck four remote Pony Express stations in the deserts to the east and brought overland mail service to a standstill.

  In late May, Colonel Hays led the combined “Washoe Regiment” into the lower Carson River Valley. They skirmished with a band of Indian scouts, then marched north to a bivouac on the bend of the Truckee River. Before dark, they found the naked body of one of Ormsby’s men, much of his flesh eaten by beasts, birds, and insects, but still wearing a heavy gold ring. Nobody could identify the individual. Rain started about three o’clock in the afternoon and fell all night. After sunrise on June 1, the soaked command slogged four muddy miles downriver, found three more ravaged bodies of ill-fated members of the Ormsby expedition, and camped the night at “Camp Fletcher,” named for a member of the regiment who accidentally blasted most of his throat out the back of his neck with his own rifle. The reconnaissance force Hays kept in front of his main force contacted Indian scouts throughout the day.

  On June 2, Colonel Hays’s forces fought a sharp multi-hour skirmish with a large force of Indian warriors near the site of the first battle. Hays held Major Hungerford and his Sierra Battalion as a reserve force. The Indians gradually gave ground through the long spring afternoon, almost certainly covering the evacuation of their villages near Pyramid Lake. As evening fell, the Indian force withdrew onto slopes above the battlefield, daring the whites to pursue them into a moonless evening. Colonel Hays held his force in check, and the Indians on the slopes above, safe beyond rifle range, rained defiant yells and “the most insulting gestures and abusive language, in both good and bad English” upon the heads of the astonished soldiers.

  Both sides withdrew, the Indians back to Pyramid Lake and the whites to their last camp. The Washoe Regiment had suffered two killed and five men severely wounded. The whites claimed a great victory. An initial newspaper dispatch said they’d killed 160 Indians. More sober subsequent reportage claimed they’d killed 20 to 25 Indians and wounded another 20 to 30 out of a force of about 400. In truth, the Paiute losses were almost identical to those suffered by the whites—4 killed and 7 wounded.

  Two days later, on June 4, Colonel Hays advanced his entire force down the Truckee River to Pyramid and Mud lakes, finding “plenty of sign, but no Injun.” A Paiute rearguard killed a careless white scout, ending the Second Battle of Pyramid Lake. The tribesmen vanished into the mountainous deserts to the north.

  Major Hungerford and his men had spent the campaign one step removed from the tip of Colonel Hays’s spear. Other units did the bulk of the fighting. Not long after the battle, the white volunteers disbanded. Colonel Hays returned to civilian pursuits, mostly in Oakland, and never harried another Indian. The most succinct summary of the entire affair appeared in the Marysville Daily Appeal two weeks after the second battle. “The proportions of the whole thing have been immensely exaggerated, a single act of merited Indian vengeance having been construed into a declaration of general hostilities.” Richard N. Allen, aka “Tennessee,” the San Francisco Herald’s correspondent in Genoa and a longtime resident of the eastern slope, concurred. “I hesitate not to express my conviction that the war was commenced by outrages committed upon the Indians by mendacious whites,” he wrote. John Coffee Hays’s reluctance to push for a decisive engagement might well reflect his concurrence with those sentiments.

  • • •

  As for John Mackay, he seems to have had the good sense to stay out of the Indian war. On May 9, as excitement over the Williams Station “massacre” roiled Virginia City and the camp’s volunteers trotted out toward catastrophe, John Mackay deeded twenty feet of the Union mine to his cabin mate A. E. Kennedy, business as usual.

  Mackay, it would appear, had his eyes on the future, most of which was underground.

  * * *

  I. Loosely, the rush to Washoe over the Sierras on the Placerville Route followed modern Highway 50 east from Placerville to Strawberry, over Echo Summit (Johnson’s Pass) into Lake Valley, then south on Highway 89 through Luther Pass to Highway 88, down Highway 88 past Hope Valley Resort through Woodford’s Canyon to Woodford’s, continued down Highway 88 into the Carson Valley, passed through Genoa and Carson City and then went east on U.S. Highway 50 to Nevada Route 342 and climbed to Silver City, Gold Hill, and Virginia City. All told, it was about 110 miles, Placerville to Virginia City. The author, a rock climber for more than thirty years, has spent many happy days on the crags that line this route—Sugarloaf, the Phantom Spires, Lover’s Leap above Strawberry Station, Woodford’s Canyon, and others.

  II. The telegraph reached Virginia City on March 19, 1860 (“Telegraph to Washoe,” Daily Alta California, March 20, 1860).

  III. The Dashaway Association was a temperance pledge society founded in San Francisco in 1859 by a group of volunteer firemen.

  IV. Conspicuously absent from the transactions is Jack O’Brien’s name, which other historians have taken as evidence of his disdain for hard work. The author thinks it also possible that O’Brien and Mackay were still acting in partnership. Sealed with a handshake, as were most mining partnerships, the agreement would have left no written record.

  V. They camped on the site of modern Wadsworth, Nevada, a few hundred yards north of I-80, thirty-two miles east of Reno.

  VI. They had not—Meredith still had his hair when his body was found three weeks later.

  CHAPTER 5

  Surrounded by Riches—and Unable to Get Them Out

  A carman of the Gould & Curry pushing a load of waste down a wooden track to the dump below the mouth of the Lower Adit; Mount Davidson and the core of Virginia City in the background.

  * * *

  The most wonderful operation in this mine is the timbering. . . . It sustains the superincumbent mountain as firmly as Saint Peter’s does the dome of Michael Angelo [sic].

  —“From Nevada Territory,” Red Bluff Independent

  While snow blanketed Mount Davidson and the peaks of the Washoe Range through the winter and spring of 1860, miners and speculators soothed one another with such platitudes as “silver veins are not solitary.” Where one existed, there could not fail to be others. Moneyed men, mostly from San Francisco, awed by the product of the proven mines and eager to get in on the ground floor, bought claims on hope. Claim holders, without coin and needing to eat and uncertain of the value of what lay underground, sold. The speculative market had raged, but to one observer’s eye, it had been mostly a “swapping of coats.” Values reflected little in the way of genuine mine development.

  Then came the spring thaw. Assayers’ returns from the first scrapings at the exposed quartz ledges revealed that most of what had been supposed ore didn’t hold profitable concentrations of royal metals. If genuine wealth existed farther underground, only significant investment of labor and capital would expose it. The market for feet took “a downward tendency” in early May. The uncertainties attendant to the Indian war hammered it again. “Washoe stock, as it now stands in the market, is a dead letter,” Almarin B. Paul wrote to the San Francisco Bulletin on June 12.

  Afterward, people made more clear-eyed evaluations of the district. They realized that many prospectors located claims without any thought of extracting gold and silver. They only wanted to sell to speculators. People also realized that ownership disputes befogged the title of every productive mine. Developing a successful mine without waging ferocious legal warfare had become impossible—a state of affairs that, although frustrating and expensive, improved o
n the “squally business” of “settling points of law with Colt’s Code of six irresistible arguments.” The fall in the value of “feet” ruined speculators who had borrowed money to purchase claims. Borrowing money on the Pacific Slope cost 3 percent interest per month, with loans typically running a three-month term. (With banks of the era neither as stable nor as widespread as in modern times, cash-rich individuals often chose to “let out money at interest” rather than trust coin to bank deposits—none of which carried any form of insurance.I) As the Sacramento Daily Union joked, many businessmen had “put their foot in it.” The downturn also exposed the sharp practices of many touts.

  “You became victims of your own sublime stupidity and dishonesty,” a self-described “Old Resident of Washoe” gloated in the San Francisco Bulletin. “Fools at your end of the telegraph were deceived by knaves at our end.” Scorched San Francisco investors moaned about Washoe as “a grand humbug,” more “glaring and barefaced” than the Fraser River.

  However, for the proven mines, the speculative discomfiture didn’t represent underground reality. The narrow mines on Gold Hill continued as good as ever. The Ophir, the Mexican, and the Central, those mines working the known Comstock Lead, likewise continued productive.

  With the vein going deeper underground on a forty-five-degree slant or “dip” into Mount Davidson, and an ever-greater quantity of nonpaying “dead work” required to cut back the sides of the surface pits to allow them to go deeper, the Ophir Company stopped trying to work the mine through surface cuts.II Instead, the Ophir started sinking a shaft—a watershed moment in Comstock mining that would culminate twenty-five years later with miners working more than three thousand feet below the original croppings. The Ophir sank the shaft on the forty-five-degree angle of the downsloping lode, in technical parlance, making it an “incline shaft.” At intervals on the way down, Ophir miners “drifted” out to the sides of the shaft to extract ore. (When mining a lode, “drifts” are tunnels that run parallel to the line of the lode or in it; “crosscuts” run perpendicular to the line of the lode or across it.) In places, the Ophir had the treasure vein of blue and black sulphurets three feet wide, cased in a twelve- to fifteen-foot width of soft, crumbly, gold- and silver-impregnated quartz, and the miners supported the “workings” with traditional post-and-cap timbering techniques.