CHAPTER 6
Revving Up the Boom
Miners loading tons of ore from the Gold Hill mines into the freight wagons for mule teams to haul to the quartz mills farther down Gold Cañon. (The Imperial and the Empire were consolidations of several original small claims.)
* * *
Three years ago, the huge quartz vein known as the Gold Hill lead [that] cropped ten or fifteen feet above the surface, with pines and cedars growing about and upon it, is now a bewildering maze of whims, windlasses, ore bins, and sheds, shoots and car-tracks perched high in the air on their supports of trestlework, smoke-stacks, workshops, and dwelling houses. The sloping front of the hill is cut down, and the perpendicular face walled up, while scarce a trace of the original outline of the croppings of the lead remains.
—“Washoe As It Is,” Daily Alta California, June 20, 1862, citing the Territorial Enterprise
Workers joined the converging strands of the transcontinental telegraph in late October 1861, fulfilling a dream held close by Pacific Coasters since the hoary days of ’49. Morse code clacking through the wire almost immediately stilled the pounding hooves of the Pony Express. (“Alas! No more, a passing cheer to his memory,” wrote the San Francisco Evening Bulletin about the demise of what most everyone on the coast called “The Pony.”) The line was originally intended to terminate in St. Louis, but “rebel disturbances” in Missouri forced the rerouting of the line from Omaha across Iowa and Illinois to Chicago. News began flashing across the continent, transmitted and received within a single day, sometimes even leaping from New York to San Francisco inside a single hour. Technologically, the dots and dashes might span the continent in a single bound, but eight different companies divided the United States into separate telegraph “nations,” and to get from New York to San Francisco, a message had to be repeated across the borders of four of them—at Pittsburgh, Chicago, Omaha, and Salt Lake City. The public paid “roundly” for a service that would have been completed years before had not the separate companies jockeying for advantage in the back rooms of the U.S. Congress stalled construction, much to the detriment of life and business on the Pacific Slope.
According to an early message telegraphed east by a correspondent of the New York Times, women were “the principal element of prosperity” lacking in the Nevada Territory. In the sagebrush country, they couldn’t be had “either for marriage or to do washing and plain sewing,” and the dearth of female companionship caused “the lonely miners . . . an intolerable degree of distress.” Or, as another man noted a month later, with more subtext: “Ladies few; women—in demand.” In Washoe, a young woman of good character was “worth her weight—several times over, in solid silver,” and the miners quipped that if so inclined, such an immigrant could find a good husband “on the day of her arrival.” Women, “neither young nor pretty,” succeeded in bagging spouses if they were so inclined, while the “young, pretty, and virtuous” easily landed husbands with “immense feet.” Indeed, a footless young beau couldn’t “walk into a young lady’s affections.” A humorist quipped that young ladies wouldn’t dream of entertaining a “proposition from any gentleman with less than a thousand feet.”
Same-day transmission of news across the continent eliminated the worst of the agonizing “behind-the-times” nature of dispatches to and from the Far West, but the citizenry in Virginia City and Gold Hill suppressed their urge to “jubilate” the accomplishment, as people said at the time. Many still nursed painful memories of their premature celebration of the transatlantic telegraph. (Three years had passed and the failed transatlantic cable hadn’t yet been replaced.) Only after the transcontinental telegraph had been in routine service for a month and seemed a “fixed fact” rather than another “cable humbug” did Washoeites allow themselves the requisite laudatory spree, ringing bells, drinking whisky, and shooting guns into the air.
They’d have nothing else to celebrate for quite some time, for winter arrived in earnest. A cavalcade of storms rolling out of the Pacific dumped colossal quantities of rain on California and the Nevada Territory in the winter of 1861–62. Noachian floods inundated the Sacramento Valley from its mouth in the San Pablo arm of San Francisco Bay to far above Marysville, a distance of more than two hundred miles. In places, the flood was fifty to sixty miles wide. Only treetops and the peaked roof of an occasional house or barn poked through the surface of the still, terrible waters. A man on a rooftop in California’s “Venice”—Sacramento—noted that the summits of the coast range, thirty or forty miles to westward, were the only spots of dry land he could see from within city limits. Stockton to Sacramento, a distance of almost fifty miles, was “an unobstructed sheet of water.” Steamships navigated a direct line across country between the two cities.
Over the mountains in the Nevada Territory, the precipitous creeks, cañons, and ravines of the eastern slope became western Niagaras. The Carson Valley flooded into “a vast lake” with “houses floating around loose, amidst carcasses of cattle.” Below the floodwater lake, the river stampeded into Carson River cañon, bursting every dam in its course and scouring away quartz mills along the riverbank. Sheds, flumes, corrals, blacksmiths’ shops, businesses, and domiciles joined the mills on “voyages of discovery” down the Carson River to its sink, which swelled into a vast inland sea.
The foul winter paralyzed transportation and prostrated business in both California and the Nevada Territory and curtailed the amount of gold and silver the Pacific Coast remitted east that served the Union cause. Podgers of the New York Times begged his eastern audience not to see it as “a want of patriotism,” but to “make allowances” for the winter of cataclysmic inundations.I
The previous summer, the federal government’s need for money to suppress the rebellion had forced it to issue paper “demand notes” (theoretically redeemable for specie), followed by “legal tender notes” or “United States Notes,” a true fiat currency unbacked by precious metal. These were nicknamed “greenbacks” on account of the green ink used to print the reverse side of the notes, but Americans in the loyal eastern states didn’t fully trust Lincoln’s “shinplasters,” as went the common nickname for paper money. Steady infusions of precious metal from the Pacific Slope to eastern financial institutions did much to soothe anxiety, buttress confidence, and keep the wheels of the Northern economy turning. As the New York Herald noted that summer, “commerce rests . . . on . . . confidence.” The Herald considered it “a matter of national importance that the silver mines in Nevada Territory be fully developed.”
However, on the Pacific Coast, Californians and Nevadans universally reviled the federal greenbacks and tallied a black mark against the character of a person who tried to pass them off in normal business affairs. Greenbacks came into “brisk demand” only later in the year—people used them to pay the new federal income tax, the first ever levied from Washington, D.C.
Floods and war made for a season of gloomy uncertainty in both the eastern and far western regions of the nation. Crowds in San Francisco hung around the telegraph offices, anxious for news of the war “back in the states.” Just eighteen months before, Californians had lived most of an uneasy fortnight waiting for the Pony Express to tell them who’d won the presidential election. In the spring of 1862, most residents of the Pacific Slope had word of a savage battle fought between federal and rebel armies at Pittsburg Landing in southwestern Tennessee within seventy-two hours.II Major General of Volunteers Ulysses S. Grant, a West Point graduate from Ohio who’d been working in a leather store less than a year before, commanded the U.S. forces that bore the brunt of the battle.
For Mackay, the spring of 1862 opened another season of great activity. He made his first recorded transaction in mining ground since 1860, deeding away five feet of the Union mine—presumably selling some of the equity he’d earned with sweat two years before. Hard at work among the “rats of the lower galleries,” Mackay was beginning to make something of himself.III Over the next two years, Storey County re
cords show him receiving or deeding away feet on more than twenty separate occasions. He almost certainly made many other stock transactions that didn’t merit entry in county records. Less than three weeks after recording the Union transaction, Mackay received a modest thirty feet of interest as one of eighteen men relocating a thousand feet of ground west of the Chollar Company’s Back Ledge. The mine had formerly been organized as “the Winters Company,” but before that it had been known as the Buck Ledge—the mine for which Mackay had been digging a tunnel in his spare time, five days a week, for the last two years. (Mackay had deeded sixty feet of “the Winters Co.” to a friend two years before, so he’d likely had a stake in the mine since the summer of 1860.)
Mackay’s resolute competence, unflagging work ethic, and efforts to improve his practical, technical, and geological knowledge marked him as a man suited to greater responsibilities. The trustees of the Caledonia Gold and Silver Mining Company took advantage and made Mackay their superintendent. The Caledonia held ground a few thousand feet down Gold Cañon from Gold Hill and aimed to develop its ledge—and ten others—via a long adit. The Caledonia trustees levied a series of assessments to finance tunnel construction. Mackay threw himself into the venture with characteristic zeal, but the new job didn’t stop the after-hours work on the adit he’d been digging for the Buck Ledge. By the spring of 1862, working alone or with a handful of helpmates, he’d probably driven the Buck Ledge’s adit several hundred feet into the side of Mount Davidson.
The Ophir continued to produce handsomely. By early 1862, the Ophir’s enormous, luxurious, and supposedly state-of-the-art quartz mill in Washoe Valley was “running full time” and known to be shipping “not less than one thousand pounds of gold and silver in bricks” per week. The mill’s phenomenal cost, for both construction and operation, caused little worry to the Ophir’s trustees and stockholders. They rested secure in the knowledge that they owned a bottomless mine. When the trustees declared a dividend of seventy-two dollars per foot in April, the mine’s stock value price jumped on the expectation of permanent dividends. Not to be outdone, with the size of its ore body promising to rival the Ophir’s, the Gould & Curry had an even more extravagant mill under construction at the junction of Six and Seven Mile cañons a mile and a half below Virginia City.
Washoe news continued to be good. The Mexican, the Central, the California, the Gould & Curry, the Chollar, and the Potosi all disgorged ore. In July, one of the little Gold Hill mines hacked into a neglected quartz ledge near its entrance. Neither it nor any of its neighbors had bothered to prospect the lead due to the surface hardness of the quartz. Eight feet down, they struck blue-black ore similar to that found in the Ophir, much of it “sheeted over with silver,” a strong “indication” that the Gold Hill mines and the mines of the established Comstock shared the same “ledge.” Ground in Gold Hill doubled in value.
Experts, such as existed, considered it “a well established fact that where there is found one large and very rich lead, others are apt to be found running in the same direction, partaking in its richness.” In service of that belief, individuals and mining companies had “located” most of Washoe’s “outside” or “wildcat” ledges since the Ophir/Mexican and Gold Hill discoveries of 1859. Anything that could be fobbed off as quartz got located. Too rich to work—by their own accounting—but too poor to hire, many outside owners did nothing, hoping “to procure fortunes by incubation upon their croppings.” Others worked hard to open their claims via shafts and adits, lured onward in the backbreaking labor by will-o’-the-wisp concentrations of metal in the quartz, convinced they’d be rich once they “got down where it came in solid.”
“It is now proven that there is gold and silver in every ledge in the Territory,” a Washoe booster wrote the Daily Alta California. To a certain extent, that was true. Trace quantities of gold and silver did exist in most Washoe ledges. Outside mines often found pockets of profitable rock, which their touts seized upon as strong indications that their ledges shared a “spur of the Ophir” or a “dip of the Gould & Curry,” and although none of them had as yet found an ore body of sufficient size to put a large-scale mining operation on a paying basis, many Washoe miners imagined vast troves of ore hiding in a network of interconnected ledges crisscrossing the innards of Mount Davidson. “There is room for all to work,” crowed another Alta correspondent. “Elbow grease is the great expounder of the quartz question.”
The plethora of lawsuits was Washoe’s only negative indication. The case list ran on for pages. Lawsuits entangled every profitable mine—and every potentially profitable mine. Lawyers “raised” fortunes.
Confronted with the bustle, hum, and ferocious mechanical clatter of the stamp mills in Virginia City and Gold Hill, a wag quipped that “people do not rush about under a fierce sun if they are not making money.” Virginia City had grown into “a brisk and busy place,” filled with first-rate hotels and great stocks of goods. Mines, mills, shops, foundries, houses, stores, hay yards, apothecaries, assay and law offices, livery stables, saloons, hotels, and dozens of other businesses lined the lode, and new buildings were springing up “with the celerity of mushrooms.” Teams of mules and oxen hauling merchandise and machinery, wood, rock, and lumber crowded the streets. Traffic jams developed. A line of freight wagons from California plodding up a grade outside Silver City came nose to nose with a train of ore haulers heading for the Carson River quartz mills. Both sides refused to give way. Tempers flared, and “a general row ensued.” The teamsters fought with whips and stones. Fortunately, no one resorted to knives and pistols, and although “several were badly used up,” none were seriously injured.IV
Nimble stagecoach lines made the trip from Virginia City to Sacramento in less than twenty-four hours. Steamboats racing up and down the Sacramento River between Sacramento and San Francisco made it possible to make the entire trip between “above” and “below” in less than thirty-six hours. Foul-tasting tunnel water flumed to Virginia City’s water works slaked the camp’s thirst. Enterprising businessmen who had laid up ice the previous winter sold it to cool popular midsummer beverages—among them “mint juleps, sherry cobblers, and ice water.” Flatland visitors always marveled at the precipitous slope of the town’s construction. Building entrances on one street were a full flight of stairs above the exits on the next lower street, and visitors standing on the doorsteps on the uphill side of the street looked east over the peaks of the roofs of one-story cottages on the downhill side. The scribe who reported Virginia City’s thronged streets as filled with “smart and fashionable people” didn’t consider the men hard at work in the tunnels, drifts, and stopes beneath his feet. Wearing stiff-brimmed slouch hats, woolen shirts, and sturdy canvas pants tucked into heavy muckers’ boots, the real muscle of Virginia City and Gold Hill labored by candlelight, in shifts working all the hours God made except for a few on Sundays.
Civic organization began to replace the chaos of the camp’s early days. Owners and officers of the mines “in bonanza” installed their families in cozy cottages. Masons, Odd-Fellows, the Sons of Temperance, and other benevolent societies so crucial to the social fabric of the mining frontier established themselves. A Library Association circulated five hundred volumes of “choice works.” More than a hundred ladies “draped with great taste” attended its inaugural ball, where one attendee found it “astonishing” to see “how well a calico dress can look when well made.” Residents contributed to church and school construction. A newspaper boasted that of 417 children in Virginia City and Gold Hill, 109 attended school. The Methodist and Episcopal churches boasted of their many female parishioners, understanding their power to draw men to worship. Hunters sold hares, sage hens, and ducks they’d shot elsewhere in the territory. Knowing Washoeites as “not much inclined to walk when they can ride,” a man carried passenger traffic between Virginia City and Gold Hill in a luxurious omnibus drawn by four fine bay horses. Carpetbagging politicians, eager for office, afflicted the territorial gover
nment. Five hundred spectators gambled on “a grand dog fight.” Law and order seemed to be replacing revolvers and bowie knives. “Such men as boast of the number of men they have slain, as well as their toadies and admirers, have almost entirely disappeared,” reported the Territorial Enterprise.
In less roseate news, a young boy died of smallpox in Carson City. A month later, the scourge killed several in Dayton, including Mary White, the schoolmistress. Unfortunately, Miss White had exposed the whole school full of children before realizing she was infected—with predictably tragic consequences.
Washoe abounded with money-making opportunities, but struggling to develop paying mines from outside claims, mucking out somebody else’s ore for wages, tending a business, or working amidst the thunderous racket and mercury fumes of a quartz mill didn’t appeal to everyone. Laboring men unimpressed with quartz-mining opportunities drifted north to new placer-mining regions discovered on Oregon’s northeastern border with the Washington Territory.V One of them was Henry Comstock, “late of the Comstock Ledge of Washoe silver mines.” He spent the summer of 1862 working a claim on the Powder River. Mercantile failures and an unsuccessful “venture in the matrimonial line” had driven him north. Less than three years before, Comstock had sold out of the Ophir, the Mexican, and his slice of Gold Hill for somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000, hoping he’d never do another day’s mining in his life. In the first flush of success, he’d taken a fancy to the supernumerary wife of a Mormon man named Carter recently come across the desert from Salt Lake. Carter sold his wife to Comstock for $350. Comstock demanded and received a bill of sale and married the woman in Carson City. As absurd as that sounds, one occasionally reliable memory recorded the transaction fifteen years later, and two newspaper articles documented it at the time. In one of them, a letter published by the Sacramento Daily Union clearly identifies the purchaser as “H. P. T. Comstock [sic], the one that discovered and located the Comstock Ledge.” Unimpressed with her new arrangements, Comstock’s bride repeatedly fled the nuptial coop. Comstock retrieved her on several occasions, once from as far away as Placerville, but come springtime, she escaped to California with “a long-legged miner” and “came to anchor in a lager-beer cellar in Sacramento.”
The Bonanza King Page 17