As the miners delved deeper, water started to sweat through the walls of the ore body, then trickle. The influx collected at the shaft bottom. To raise ore and “waste” (valueless rock that had to be removed) and dewater the mine, the Ophir used a tank winched up a wooden track laid on the slope of their incline shaft with a hand-turned windlass. Mules hitched to the arms of the windlass and marching in circles arastra fashion soon replaced the men, but by the time their incline reached a depth of fifty feet—still in the richest ore any American miner had ever seen—the “horse-whim” couldn’t keep pace with the water. Progress stalled. To drain the mine, the superintendent cut an adit in from farther down the slope, but the ore body dipped deeper, and the mine walls oozed a greater quantity of water with every foot of added depth. The Ophir decided to mechanize. Machines didn’t protest twenty-four-hour workdays. In San Francisco, the owners ordered one of Swedish-American engine maker John Ericsson’s double expansion twenty-four-inch caloric engines.III The expansive force of heated air drove caloric engines, and although air didn’t provide as much power as steam, caloric engines were much safer and less expensive for light industrial uses.IV The Ophir spent $2,000 freighting the engine over the mountains. The Ericsson engine supplied the turning power of fifteen horses, which the Ophir owners expected would suffice to drive the hoists and raise the bucket until the grand new adit they’d undertaken in conjunction with the adjacent mines hit the lode 180 feet below the surface sometime in the autumn, at the end of a thousand-foot tunnel.
The productive mines still shipped most of their first-class ore to Europe, but first-class ore represented only a tiny fraction of total mine product. The precious metal locked inside the thousands of tons of lower-grade material piled up below the productive mines exceeded the quantity in the first-class ores—if only some practical man could develop a fast, efficient, low-cost, industrial-scale, on-site manner of extracting value from second- and third-class ore. Inability to do it was the single biggest obstacle preventing miners from unlocking the lode’s potential. The man who figured out how to do it would make a fortune—and unleash the power of the nascent American silver mining industry.
Grounded “scientific gentlemen” put their faith in variants of expensive roasting and smelting methods. One of the few dissenting voices belonged to George Hearst’s friend Almarin B. Paul, the Nevada City mill man. The previous autumn and winter, Paul had tested alternative reduction processes on Comstock ores and proved to his satisfaction that he could create a fast and profitable method of milling Washoe ores by combining elements of the traditional but slow Mexican “patio process”—developed in sixteenth-century Spanish America—with more mechanical and faster methods Gold Rush miners had invented to extract gold from California quartz veins.
Paul borrowed a large sum of money, and in late May, during the tumultuous weeks between the First and Second Battles of Pyramid Lake, began supervising construction of a mill at Silver City, a camp that had sprung up around Devil’s Gate halfway down Gold Cañon. He ordered a batch of heavy machinery and engines from a San Francisco foundry customized to suit his purposes. Paul hemorrhaged money pushing the work forward. The success of the enterprise—and his solvency—hung in the balance. Only a strong revenue stream associated with the successful and profitable reduction of ore would stave off his creditors come August. Paul installed a forty-horsepower steam engine—he had no intention of trusting success to a feeble caloric engine. On August 9, less than sixty days after Paul had committed to the project, his engineer fired the boiler, got up a test head of pressure, and let out the furious screech of the steam whistle, the first ever heard on the Comstock. Four days later, the great test began.
Paul’s engine drove the fast-rotating camshafts that raised and dropped the sixteen heavy iron stamps of his “California stamp mill” onto chunks of ore in quick staccato fashion. The deafening clatter of metallic blows rained on rock held in iron pans rattled over the sagebrush. The stamps crushed the ore to a fine dust, water washed the pulverized ore into wide iron pans shaped like enormous gold pans and formed a slurry, called the “pulp,” stirred by heavy iron “mullers” rotating in the pans. Mill men dumped a few ounces of copper sulfate, a pint of salt, and forty pounds of mercury into each three-hundred-pound charge of crushed ore. Tiny gold particles in the pulp amalgamated with the mercury while the copper sulfate and salt reacted with the silver sulphurets to force the silver into a state from which it could also join the amalgam. After a few hours of mixing, Paul’s millers opened cocks in the bottoms of the pans, drained the heavy amalgam, and retorted away the mercury, leaving behind the great prize—a heavy slug of gold and silver bullion—tangible, gorgeous evidence that Paul had developed a fast, effective, inexpensive milling process that could accomplish in four or five hours what the patio process did in a similar number of weeks, a classic example of the can-do ingenuity with which American industrialists captured the world’s attention in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Almarin Paul’s method became known as the “Washoe Pan Process,” or just the “Washoe Process,” and it unlocked the potential of an entire industry.
Mines clamored for his services. Paul employed about one hundred men, set his mill to working around the clock, doubled his stamping capacity, and immediately started plotting to erect a second mill directly below the mines at Gold Hill, a “monster institution” to house sixty-four stamps.
Bullion belonged to the mine that supplied the ore; mills charged a fixed cost per ton reduced and guaranteed to “save” a certain portion of the ore’s assayed value, usually 65 percent. (The remaining 35 percent ran off in the tailings.) With the ability to contract with different mines and fixed fees received, Paul’s fortunes seemed tied to those of the entire mining region rather than to the fate of any one particular mine. That seemed to greatly lessen his risk. Eagerness to grab a slice of the milling pie sparked a frenzy of imitation. The milling boom unleashed forces that would render many mines profitable, facilitate the conduct of mining on a speed and scale never before seen anywhere else on earth, industrialize one of the most inhospitable and fragile landscapes in North America, and environmentally devastate a host of ecosystems yoked to the new industry.
• • •
As the Ophir went deeper, its ore body continued to widen. Overwhelmed with good fortune, wanting to reserve all potential profit to themselves, and desiring an above-ground monument worthy of the world’s greatest mine, the Ophir trustees decided to build a massive mill on the shores of Washoe Lake, twelve miles away in the Washoe Valley between the Virginia Range and the eastern slope of the Sierras. They based the mill on the fanciest and most complicated and intricate processes available, and chose the site because of its proximity to the lake water and the many forested mountainsides the company intended to denude to fire the mill’s boilers and smelters. The Ophir trustees financed construction of a road through the intervening mountains to connect the mine with the proposed mill, and spared no expense in mill construction, convinced they owned a bottomless mine.
As summer turned into autumn, Virginia City and Gold Hill rang with the sounds of hammers and saws and the shouts of workmen erecting more substantial dwellings and businesses. In Virginia City, where there had been nothing but sagebrush the year before, a midsummer census counted more than eight hundred buildings—among which were forty-two general stores and an equal number of saloons—and although a number of residents still lived in “cloth cabins,” the majority resided in houses built of lumber. Construction hadn’t kept pace with the needs of the population, however. The Territorial Enterprise reported the burning of a haystack as a public calamity that “deprived a number of people of lodgings.” Gold Hill doubled in size between May and September. Like so many places in the Far West, Washoe was an overwhelmingly male place. A census counted 2,206 men and only 139 women and girls in Virginia City, and that constituted a much better ratio than that found in Gold Hill, with 605 males and just 14 females. Contrary to the m
yth that most early Comstock women toiled in brothels, saloons, and dance halls and the belief expressed in such mining camp song lyrics as “first came the miner to work in the mine/ then came the ladies who lived on the line,” most of the 111 adult women known to be on the lode in the summer of 1860 weren’t supporting themselves “in the fast life.” Although some “women of the town” probably reported other occupations to the census takers, they were only a fraction of the total. Eighty-three of the 111 women were married. Forty-three had children to look after. Most who worked in the local economy did domestic work for others, mended and made clothing, cooked, ran boardinghouses, and did whatever they could to improve their fortunes. Tough-minded, hardworking, aggressive, and ambitious—just like the men around them—women went to Washoe for the same reason as the men—because it afforded them an opportunity to improve their lives.
One of them was Mrs. Eider, first name unrecorded. In Virginia City, she and her husband owned a house and a lot they rented to Thomas Devins, and by late August, Devins’s rent was ten dollars in arrears. On Monday, August 27, Mr. Eider went to the house he rented to Devins and demanded payment. Devins couldn’t—or wouldn’t—pay, and Eider poured vitriol on his delinquent tenant, “calling him the usual variety of hard names.”
After Eider wandered off, Devins collected four friends. Armed with revolvers, and irrigated with whisky, the five toughs stalked to the Eiders’ home after dark. They stood in the yard and yelled for Eider to come out and account for the insults. Eider was inside with his wife and a neighbor, Mr. Hill. Through his closed door, Eider announced that he didn’t want trouble. He refused to emerge.
Devins and his friends drew their revolvers and shouldered through the door.
Mrs. Eider threw herself in front of her husband and exclaimed, “Will you shoot a woman?”
She got her answer right away. A ball smacked into her thigh, just below the hip, inflicting a severe, bloody wound. Her husband took a shot through the fleshy part of his leg. Another ball hit Mr. Hill in the arm. Among the attackers was a man named Hughes. An errant shot fired by another member of the gang blew a hole in his head. Hughes fell dead. Shocked by the mayhem, Devins and his surviving cronies fled into the night.
Mr. Hill and the Eiders survived. The law, such as it was, captured none of the assailants. Two more shooting affrays rocked Virginia City the following Sunday. In the first, a drunk Mexican “raising a row” in a saloon flourished a pistol. Another patron drew a revolver and shot him in the head and the groin. Later, a man named Spitzer insulted Mr. Smith’s wife. Smith shot Spitzer in the groin. An inquiry acquitted Smith of wrongdoing.
Similar “bloodshed, violence, and strife” riled the Comstock in 1860. The Red Bluff Independent reported that of the first thirty-six people buried in Virginia City and Gold Hill, thirty-five had died by violent means. The grave of John Jessup, the first of them, murdered by William Sides in the spring of 1859, lay right in the middle of Gold Hill’s main street at the lower end of town. Freight teams dodged around it.
• • •
Given the violence and the many disputes over the ownership of mining property, the great want—besides titanic piles of gold and silver—was for properly constituted legal authority independent of the Mormon-dominated Utah territorial government five hundred miles away in Salt Lake City. Almost to a person, the inhabitants of western Utah wanted the federal government to either annex the region to the state of California or legislate it into a new territory independent of Salt Lake. Most gentiles distrusted Mormon suzerainty, the church’s ecclesiastical authorities having used the bloc-voting power of their adherents to control the legislative, judicial, and executive functions of the territory. Considering the bloody pogroms Mormons had suffered at gentile hands since the founding of their religion, the distrust worked both ways. As the influx of gentiles brought to the territory by the mining discoveries threatened to undermine Mormon ballot box dominance and control of their religious destiny, the Saints grew willing to facilitate the separation of western Utah from the main body of the territory.
The Utah government dispatched the apparatus of a court to Genoa, but even though court proceedings promised criminal justice and an avenue to settle without bloodshed the many “vampire suits” filed to “befog” legitimate claims to good mining ground, most gentile inhabitants of western Utah preferred anarchy to judicial processes they perceived as being “under the shadow and shield” of the “Sodom festering” in Salt Lake City. No gentile expected a fair trial against a Mormon litigant.
In the initial claiming rush of the previous year, many claims had been located on the slopes of Mount Davidson both above and below the productive mines on Virginia City’s out-sloping bench. Regardless of the good “indications” they turned up to tantalize potential investors, none had produced significant quantities of ore. Many, however, were perfectly positioned “fighting claims” from which to “float shadows” over the titles of their more prosperous neighbors.
Ignorance of the geological conditions beneath their feet contributed much to the legal chaos. Beyond the walls of the existing underground workings, miners knew very little about the ground they were working. The only obvious thing was the basic north-south orientation of the major quartz croppings. Beyond that, miners didn’t know whether they were working one gigantic V-shaped fissure vein whose croppings rose to the surface in a wide mineralized zone and united in depth or if the croppings of the many independent surface veins stayed separate underground. Even though only about fourteen hundred feet separated the Central-Ophir-Mexican bonanza from a strike recently made on the Gould & Curry claim, the Gould & Curry discovery was considerably higher up the side of Mount Davidson and the character of its paying quartz differed from that of the Comstock Lead, evidence that made it seem possible—even likely—that the ore bodies belonged to different ledges. Consequently, Washoe miners held “a contrariety of opinion” about the precise nature and course of the vein. Most of the ownership disputes hinged on whether they’d struck one great ledge that ran through all the paying claims or a variety of smaller, independent ones. Only time and a great deal of work would reveal the answers. In the meantime, the question itself developed an enormous bonanza for Comstock lawyers.
As the days grew shorter, people began asking one another whether they intended to stay the winter. “You bet” came the most common answer. “If I can make the riffle.” Inhabitants resolved to stay began laying in provisions. Surprising to many Washoeites, quite a number of ladies intended to stick with their menfolk through the winter, rather than return to more civilized circumstances in California. Most expected their presence to improve the camp’s “tone.”
Thanks to the carpentry skills he’d learned during his apprenticeship at the Webb shipyard, John Mackay made his first step that year. The Mexican mine promoted him to timberman. Mackay cut, fit, and installed the posts and lintels that supported the walls and ceilings of the shafts, crosscuts, drifts, and stopes against “caves.”V Decades later, John B. Shaw, an “old Comstocker” who’d spent most of his life working for the local mines, recalled working alongside Mackay in 1860. Every day, the two men ate lunch on the Mexican’s dump. After completing his shift and earning his six dollars, better than the four earned by common miners, Mackay walked a few thousand feet south and did what any other man would have considered a second full day’s work on the tunnel he’d contracted to build for the Buck Ledge.
• • •
Adjacent to the Mexican, the Ophir’s incline shaft descended in the soft, crumbly quartz of the ore body as it angled down into Mount Davidson. The system worked reasonably well while the width of the ore body stayed under fifteen or twenty feet, the maximum width traditional post-and-cap timbering could safely support. Ophir miners “drifted” north and south through shattered quartz on the line of the lode, crosscutting the vein at intervals. Almost all of the excavations were “productive,” work carried out inside the ore body, as opposed to “dead work�
�� done in worthless country rock. However, the vein didn’t behave; it continued widening. Below fifty feet, it exceeded the width that post-and-cap timbering could handle. Only “a continuous sheathing of pine logs”—one foot in diameter, sometimes twice that—lining the walls and ceiling could support the shattered, water-soaked quartz and the soft and crumbly seams of blue-black sulphurets encased within it, but even then, trouble arose whenever the Ophir tried to open a “gallery” or “stope” over a span larger than twenty feet wide or high. Beyond a certain extracted volume, no amount of reinforcement proved capable of preventing the pressure from buckling and snapping the thick timbers. Nor could miners work beyond the boundary of the timbers without causing “caves.” Most refused to do it.
Mines elsewhere in the world seldom dealt with such difficulties. Most worked more solid ground that needed less reinforcement, the dimensions of their ore bodies didn’t exceed the size that traditional timbering could comfortably support, and in those that did, the value of the ore outside their timbered workings didn’t justify the expense and risk of extraction. The Ophir bonanza was different. The size of the ore body greatly exceeded the span that post-and-cap timbering could support, and the quality rivaled the best ever encountered. Abandoning such riches to engineering difficulties was unthinkable.
The Bonanza King Page 14