The first westbound Pony Express of 1861 that arrived at Fort Churchill, twenty-five miles east of Virginia City, brought the news that, depending on a person’s sectional sentiments, was either anxiously awaited or long dreaded. Forwarded by telegraph to California, the story broke around the state the next morning. A South Carolina convention had “released” its state from her obligation to the “General Government” two weeks before, on December 20, 1860.
Mississippi joined South Carolina’s exit from the Union on January 9, 1861, proudly proclaiming in its declaration of secession, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.” One after the other, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas resolved themselves out of the Union. By February 1, the entire Deep South had seceded.
One result of the secession directly benefited the miners, businessmen, and ranchers of the western Utah Territory—the departure of the senators and representatives of the Deep South from Congress broke the logjam between free-soil and slave factions that had so long hindered the organization of new states and territories. Bills creating the Nevada and Dakota territories passed the Senate and House, and lame-duck president James Buchanan signed them into law as one of the last acts of his ineffective and unpopular administration.
Forty-eight hours later, President-elect Abraham Lincoln placed his right hand on a Bible and registered his oath as president of the United States. The crisis came to a head six weeks later. South Carolina militia forces attacked Fort Sumter, an island of federal property in Charleston Harbor garrisoned by the United States Army, and precipitated a civil war. Inflamed southern passions sparked the secession of Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Armies mobilized in both North and South.
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While federal and rebel armies lurched toward the bloodbaths that would determine the fate of the American people, the states and territories of the Pacific Slope were a good place to be. “There never were better times all around for everybody in California than today,” Podgers wrote to the New York Times from San Francisco a week after Fort Sumter. “Everybody is either well-to-do or absolutely getting rich.” The spring weather was delightful. As the same man had written, “California is better off . . . than any State in the Union and of course better than any out of it.”
And so it would remain for the duration of the war in both California and the Nevada Territory. Despite occasional rumors of secret secessionist societies aiming to pass the mineral riches of the Nevada Territory to the Confederate government and the avowedly secessionist sentiments of John L. Blackburn, the Virginia City sheriff, the most serious disloyal act in the territory seems to have been the crowd of inebriates stirred up by the saloonkeep who raised South Carolina’s Palmetto flag over Newman’s Saloon on A Street in the first week of June 1861. The widely despised “rag of treason” attracted a crowd, with the well-sprung saloonkeeper threatening to shoot anyone who molested it, but before events came unmoored, other inebriates hoisted the U.S. flag alongside South Carolina’s “obnoxious emblem.” As the citizenry sobered up, passions calmed, and both flags came down.
But despite occasional alarms, disturbances, and frequent brawls, secessionist sentiment never took deep root in the Nevada Territory. To the Southern sympathizers who sneered that “a man is either a Secessionist or an Abolitionist,” the majority always shouted back, “A man is either a Union man or a traitor!”
The non-native settlers of western Utah had almost universally rejoiced at the news that Congress had organized them into a political entity independent of what a newspaper called the “rascal prophets” in Salt Lake. With its capital in Carson City and its center of mass squarely planted in the Comstock Lode, the new territory settled down to the hard, dangerous work of extracting the gold and silver “locked up in the flinty grip of the quartz . . . waiting to reward the industry of the toiling miner.”
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The Gould & Curry claim had incorporated the year before, with George Hearst among the eight incorporators and trustees and four shares for every one of its theoretical 1,200 feet. (Professional surveyors could only ever find 921 feet between its boundary stakes.) The appointed treasurer was William Chapman Ralston, the same sturdy San Francisco banker who’d been serving in that capacity for the Ophir since the end of April 1860. An Ohioan who’d clerked aboard paddleboats on the Mississippi River, Ralston had worked in banking and shipping on the Isthmus of Panama after the gold discovery, immigrated to San Francisco in 1854, and risen to prominence in city financial circles. A principal of the banking firm of Fretz & Ralston in 1861, he also served as a director for diverse other companies. After the Gould & Curry’s incorporation, the trustees had the mine borrow $10,000 from the owner of a San Francisco hotel on the usual Pacific Coast terms of 3 percent interest per month. They’d used the money to finance a shallow adit that crosscut two parallel veins of millable ore at one hundred feet. Developments a hundred feet deeper, at the end of their “Middle Adit,” revealed that they’d struck a significant ore body. Management kept the details secret. Without extracting the ore that would have put the mine on a paying basis, the Gould & Curry trustees levied $166,000 worth of assessments on the mine’s stockholders—who had to pay more than $34.50 cash on every share they owned—and developed the Middle Adit workings with a mind toward speedy extraction. The Gould & Curry started an even longer and deeper “Lower Adit,” aiming to hit the lode 225 feet deeper still (on the 425-foot level), and from the ore the mine did extract, plowed all surplus earnings into construction of a massive mill at the junction of Six and Seven Mile cañons a mile and a half below Virginia City. The assessments without dividends pummeled the mine’s share price and forced many small, cash-poor shareholders to sell out. Considering the magnitude of the ore body later developed through the adits, whispers—and increasingly vociferous complaints—suspected the “San Francisco moneyocratic sharps,” among them George Hearst, who controlled the trustees, of running a “freezing operation” to force small shareholders to sell their stock—which was quickly scooped up by insiders with knowledge of the mine’s true value. With an oblique reference to overgrooming a horse, one man quipped that the San Francisco sharps had “curried [the mine] so slick that there is scarcely a hair left to be rubbed against.”
About twelve hundred feet south of the Gould & Curry, beyond two mines called the Savage and the Hale & Norcross, the Potosi mine drove an adit through a thick body of moderate ore. Unfortunately, the ore body dipped under the boundary of its downhill neighbor, the Chollar, and the two mines were soon bitterly litigating ownership of the ore. Dozens of other mining concerns had tunneling, shafting, and surface-mining projects under way throughout the local districts. Sixteen miles to the west, the Ophir Mill in the Washoe Valley completed its first trial runs and was soon shipping hundredweights of bullion—although the bullion was produced at great cost. Many new mining companies incorporated, including ones that would play important roles in John Mackay’s future—the Hale & Norcross, the Bullion, and the Caledonia gold- and silver-mining companies.
Virginia City itself incorporated. Observant citizens built Episcopal and Methodist churches and schools. A water company laid mains to supply the town with water flumed from adits driven into the flanks of Mount Davidson above the town. Another company ordered gaslighting equipment from the eastern states with the idea of illuminating Virginia City’s main streets. Work commenced to connect the overland telegraph between Fort Churchill and Salt Lake City. Shanties gave way to houses, bunks to bedsteads, and coarse blankets and straw-stuffed bedticks became mattresses fitted with clean, white sheets. Fresh butter, eggs, bread, trout, and such San Francisco luxuries as oysters and champagne became readily available. The Daily Alta California attributed the progress above and below ground to “the vigor, energy, perseverance, and industry of the American people.”
A minor tragedy struck the Nevada Territory on June 17, 1861,
at Chinatown, the Chinese settlement near the mouth of Gold Cañon. A bucking horse threw James Fenimore. Old Virginny may have been drunk. The old miner’s foot tangled in a stirrup, and the animal dragged him across the landscape. Impact with a rock stove in the back of his skull before his foot finally slipped loose. Kind hands carried him to a nearby bed. Fenimore was barely conscious. Blood oozed from his mouth, ears, and nose, and he was so afflicted with violent seizures that his friends had to bind his hands and feet to prevent him from further harming himself. Thus he lingered for three days. At intervals, Old Virginny seemed to recognize the faces and voices of his old companions, but he died on June 20, around noon. Although Fenimore’s name hadn’t appeared in correspondence from Gold Hill and Virginia City as among those pushing Washoe’s mining development since discovery of the Comstock Lode, he was well known and well liked among the territory’s pioneers. The Territorial Enterprise’s bighearted eulogy noted that although Fenimore was “at times dissipated, he bore the reputation of being an unusually kind-hearted and honest man” whose “too social disposition” had made him “the dupe of sharpers,” and although he died with “but little property,” the people of Washoe “universally recognized” him “as the man to whose agency the people of the United States are principally indebted for the discovery and development of the wealth of Nevada Territory.” The next day, in the state that had birthed him, federal and Confederate armies fought the Battle of Bull Run near a town called Manassas Junction, an indecisive Confederate victory that disabused people of any short-war illusions. By year’s end, the North and South had nearly a million men in uniform.
In the new Nevada Territory, people waited “impatiently” for the arrival of “Uncle Sam’s authority”—neither of the judges assigned to the territory, nor Governor James Nye, nor his secretary had yet reached the territory despite the passage of four months. A newly elected Territorial Legislature went into session in Carson City, and it was soon debating a law to ban “foreign capitalists,” meaning moneyed men from San Francisco, who aroused much local resentment, and the creation of a Sunday law designed to calm the chaos of mining camp Sundays by forcing observance of the Sabbath and annulling all contracts made on Sunday except those of marriage. Every person on the mining frontier had either witnessed or participated in bullfights, dog fights, theatrical and musical performances, gambling, dancing, alcohol consumption, and the other “noisy amusements” conducted on Sundays. Religiously inclined persons and other moralizers found such disrespect repugnant. Their representatives in the legislature made long-winded speeches advocating legal methods of calming the Sunday swivets. Theodore Winters, the only member of the original Ophir company who still owned a slice of the mine and was now a member of the new legislature, spoke for many other old pioneers when he said, “It is more annoyance to me to hear a man praying too loud than to hear him hollering when he is drunk.” (A month later, Winters attacked a man with a club during a session of the legislature.) Neither the ban on California capital nor the Sunday law passed the assembly. Virginia City, Gold Hill, and the other camps carried on as always.
Men worked day and night in Washoe’s tunnels, shafts, and open excavations. Rocks rattled through ore chutes at all hours. The roar of the stamp mills never ceased. More than sixty-five were in operation in the territory. Two strings of Bactrian camels carried enormous loads of salt from salt flats near Walker’s Lake and along the Humboldt to the Washoe quartz mills, an oddball experiment that might have succeeded, for each camel could haul upward of eight hundred pounds and grew fat eating the sagebrush and greasewood other animals wouldn’t sniff, but mules and horses panicked when they caught sight or smell of the strange beasts. Construction hands worked to improve many buildings and enhance the quality of the streets. Before the mineral discoveries of 1859, there hadn’t been 800 whites in all of what had become the Nevada Territory. Two years later, there were more than 18,000, around 4,000 of whom lived in Gold Hill and Virginia City. Teams laden with quartz, machinery, merchandise, and produce arrived and departed constantly. One newspaperman guessed that the Washoe trade with California engaged as many as four thousand large wagons. Four years before, “one man on snow-shoes” had conducted the winter commerce of the entire territory. In October, the successes of Nevada inspired a party composed of California governor Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charlie Crocker, “and others” to travel from Sacramento to Washoe “on a visit of business and pleasure.” Considering that they’d recently incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad, hoping to build the western half of a transcontinental line, it’s easy to surmise what business opportunity they were investigating.
Although the California observer who classified the Washoe population of late 1861 as either “dogs” or “gentlemen” would almost certainly have counted John Mackay among the lode’s canine population, those above Mackay in the mining hierarchy began to take notice. They put him in charge of other men. Men recalling his early years on the Comstock said that as a gang boss, shift leader, and foreman, Mackay grew into a good leader of men, as exacting as a supervisor as he was faithful as an employee, loyal to men above him and devoted to those beneath. His competence went unquestioned underground, for every man knew Mackay could do his job as well as or better than he could do it himself. Mackay had no patience for wasted time and inefficiency and he drove his crews hard, but never harder than he drove himself, and in the hazardous environment of underground mining, he never asked a man to do a job he wouldn’t do himself. He was a stickler for detail. Underground, he enforced rules with a direct, frank manner, and not always as a beam of “circulating sunshine.” When he was disobeyed, ignored, or thwarted, Mackay’s ruddy color rose into a burst of Irish temper. If pushed—at all—Mackay enforced his edicts with his fists. Although he seldom said more than a few words, men knew where they stood with John Mackay, which they appreciated. Men liked working for him. Around John Mackay, things got done right.
Believing that tidy conditions made for safer, more efficient operations, Mackay insisted on clean, orderly work zones. He wouldn’t allow detritus to accumulate underground, and in an environment where fire posed the greatest hazard, thousands of feet of huge, dry, compressed timber shored the mines, all the work was done by lantern and candlelight, and no smoking was ever allowed, Mackay insisted his men never neglect a candle and never leave behind a “snuff”—the pooled remains of candle—both for fear of a spark smoldering within and because any carelessness offended his sense of the right way of doing things.
As a leader, Mackay was unpretentious, natural, unaffected. He never “put on the dog” and lorded it over his underlings. He never made himself out to be something he wasn’t. He never pretended to know something he didn’t. John William Mackay was simply himself, always. Reflecting on Mackay’s early years on the Comstock, iron-eyed California capitalist and multimillionaire Darius Ogden Mills recalled Mackay’s “truthfulness” and “sincerity,” his “frankness of manner,” and his “close application to business,” observations rendered more significant by the fact that Mills and Mackay would spend much of the two coming decades as formidable and often bitter rivals. “Everybody always liked Mackay,” Mills remembered. “He owed much of his great success to his straightforward manner of dealing with men.”
The thing was, Mackay enjoyed it. To him, all work was honorable. He believed in the gospel of hard work. As he himself described, he enjoyed “the toil, privation, and hardship.” He’d been happy selling newspapers in New York and learning carpentry in the Webb shipyard. He’d been happy shoveling dirt and gravel through rockers, long toms, and sluice boxes around Downieville, and he was happy wielding pick, shovel, and sledge in the Comstock mines, where, in the opinion of a man who worked alongside him, John Mackay had discovered an environment that “stimulated every fiber of his being.” Mackay never talked of his own plans, but quietly, in a way he wouldn’t cop to but a few times in his life, he’d begun to nurture a mighty ambition. Not even his close
st intimates noticed Mackay studying Washoe’s most successful men. Mackay measured himself against the superintendents, shift bosses, foremen, engineers, owners, and capitalists around him and concluded that he was every inch their equal. He worked as hard as humanly possible, he soaked up practical knowledge, and he saved his money, watching his opportunities. No one on the lode suspected the hardworking, taciturn Irish immigrant supervising the shoring of a gallery or the running of a drift had begun to nurture a burning desire “to win a name as master and manager of the greatest mines in the world.”
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I. The vast majority of American bank deposits wouldn’t be insured until after the widespread bank failures at the beginning of the Great Depression in the early 1930s motivated Congress to pass the Banking Act of 1933 (also known as the Glass-Steagall Act)—one of its provisions created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
II. The ever-increasing volume of “dead work” required to keep enlarging an open pit to extract the ore at the bottom eventually forces a mine to either follow the ore deposit down via a shaft or shafts—if the ore is rich enough—or quit mining altogether.
III. Incidentally, the next year, John Ericsson designed the Union ironclad Monitor with its novel rotating turret, which, in history’s first battle between ironclad warships, fought the Confederate Merrimack to a draw at the Battle of Hampton Roads—a seminal event in the history of naval warfare.
IV. Caloric engines didn’t require notoriously explosion-prone high-pressure boilers, they consumed less fuel (an important consideration in coal-less and treeless Washoe), and didn’t require the oversight of trained, highly paid engineers.
V. The modern tongue wants to say that a mine “caved in,” but the literature contemporary to the Comstock heyday always said that a mine “caved,” or that there had been “a cave” in the such-and-such mine.
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