• • •
Less than a week after the Gould & Curry’s $100 dividend announcement, an unusual pseudonym appeared for the first time in the Territorial Enterprise under a story that began with the line, “I feel very much as if I had just awakened out of a long sleep.” The name beneath read simply, “Mark Twain.”
John Mackay had already come to know the man to whom it belonged.
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I. As of this writing, the winter of 1861–62 still holds the record as the wettest in San Francisco since the gold discovery. Some 49.27 inches of rain fell in San Francisco that winter. In Placerville, one Mr. Henderson measured eighty-six inches of rain. If accurate, that number more than doubles the annual average and exceeds the next closest year since 1873–74 by more than eight inches.
II. Now more commonly known by its southern name, the Battle of Shiloh.
III. The 1862 Directory of the Nevada Territory lists a “Mackey, J. miner, Mexican claim,” which may or may not refer to our man.
IV. Things change: There probably hasn’t been a traffic jam in Silver City in 130 years.
V. The Washington Territory’s share of the area would be organized into the Idaho Territory the following year.
VI. The corporations that compose the modern S&P 500 pay average dividends of about 2 percent per year.
CHAPTER 7
The First Boom, Frenzied and Exuberant
A stagecoach on C Street in flush times, when traffic was so thick that buggies and wagons sometimes had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross the street.
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Our father Mammon who art in the Comstock, Bully is thy name; let thy dividends come, and stocks go up, in California as in Washoe. Give us this day our daily commissions; forgive us our swindles, as we hope to get even on those who have swindled us. “Lead” us not into temptation of promising wild cat; deliver us from lawsuits; for thine is the main Comstock, the black sulphurets and the wire-silver, from wall-rock to wall-rock, you bet!
—“Stock Broker’s Prayer,” Territorial Enterprise, 1863; possibly written by Mark Twain
Powerful gravity drew young men west during the Civil War, especially after North and South began drafting men to fill the ranks of their depleted armies. An obscure Missourian named Samuel Langhorne Clemens joined the thousands who traveled “the plains across” after spending a few weeks riding with a band of Confederate irregulars—long enough to learn that he wanted nothing to do with military service. Despite Sam’s tepid secessionist sympathies, his older brother Orion Clemens was an ardent Republican who had campaigned for Abraham Lincoln. As a reward, the new president appointed Orion secretary of the Nevada Territory. Sam went west with his brother, there being, as his first great biographer would wryly observe fifty years later, “no place in the active Middle West just then for an officer of either army who had voluntarily retired from service.”
The Clemens brothers traveled west on the overland stage and reached Carson City in the late summer of 1861. Orion Clemens took up his official duties while Sam dashed about the territory trying to attach himself to some of its fabulous wealth. (Writing as Mark Twain a decade later, he’d immortalize the experiences in Roughing It, making judicious use of “improved facts.”) Sam Clemens spent the rest of the year mining near Unionville in the Humboldt region 150 miles northeast of Virginia City, and he found the labor “hard and long and dismal,” not to mention dangerous and unremunerative. Passing back through Washoe in early 1862 on his way to try Aurora and the Esmeralda District on the California border some one hundred miles in the opposite direction, the loose, rangy twenty-seven-year-old marveled at an ore pile at the top of the Ophir’s incline worth $2 million. Introduced to an Ophir foreman as secretary of the Nevada Territory, Sam Clemens accepted the man’s offer of an against-the-rules night tour of the mine without pointing out that it was his brother Orion who held the job. One hundred and ninety feet underground, in what he described as “the bowels of the earth . . . where the ledge is 52 feet wide,” Clemens pocketed specimens of first-class ore. A few days later, he included them in a letter mailed to a man whose capital he hoped to interest in sustaining his embryonic mining ventures. Clemens did a fair measure of hard work in Aurora, more than he allowed in Roughing It. One of his letters to his brother told of “blasting, and picking, and gadding” until blisters covered his hands. (In mining, “gadding” is breaking rock or ore from a drift face or stope with a short, chisel-like bar.) As the phrase went, Clemens “owned in” several promising ledges near Aurora, among them the Horatio and Derby, the Dashaway (likely named in honor of his partnership’s poverty-induced membership in the eponymous temperance society), the Flyaway, the Annipolitan, the Live Yankee, and the Monitor. His hopes for riches ran high. Clemens described one ledge to his brother as “a dead sure thing” before adding, realistically, “but then it’s the d—dest country for disappointments the world ever saw.”
Fortunately for American literary destiny, none of Sam Clemens’s ledges came in rich, or anything close. Attempts to levy “assessments” on his brother’s purse became staples of his correspondence. A gifted yarner, Clemens amused his Aurora companions with lively storytelling, and he wrote occasional burlesque sketches, a few of which found their way into the pages of the Territorial Enterprise over the pseudonym “Josh,” a pen name presumably intended as more verb than noun. Like so many others in the Nevada Territory, Sam Clemens was rich in feet, but poor in cash. By July 1862, he was trying to sell writing to the Sacramento Daily Union, the Carson City Silver Age, the New Orleans Crescent, and the Territorial Enterprise, among other newspapers.
Joseph T. Goodman, publisher and co-owner of the Territorial Enterprise, recognized a talent for clear, colorful, humorous writing in the author of the “Josh” letters and offered Clemens a job on his newspaper at twenty-five dollars per week, steady employment that promised to save Clemens from penury. Accepting it meant surrendering his dream of mining wealth. After a week of soul-searching, Clemens resigned himself to the dead sure thing. He laid aside his mining tools and went to Virginia City.
Sam Clemens arrived in mid- to late September. Joe Goodman allowed Clemens tremendous reportorial latitude, and in simple frontier language, the budding but unpolished genius quickly demonstrated a unique ability to use embellishment, hyperbole, satire, caricature, parody, mock-flattery, ribald language, and ridicule to flay bare essential truth. As his voice matured, Clemens’s stories, hoaxes, and brutal sketches grew into something entirely American, encapsulating the terrible whimsy, painful irony, and outrageous hilarity of life on the mining frontier. No conceit, swelled head, or stuffed shirt in California or the Nevada Territory lived safe from the slash of his pen, and the Enterprise soon raised his salary. “They pay me six dollars a day,” Clemens wrote his sister a few months after taking the job, “and I make 50 per cent profit by only doing three dollars worth of work.”
No matter. The readership reveled in his half-day’s labor. Few California editors knew what to make of his journalizing. Most smoked out his more-obvious leg-pulling, like the account of a perfectly preserved petrified man discovered “leaning against a huge mass of croppings” in the Humboldt mountains with its crystallized “right thumb resting against the side of the nose” and the fingers of its right hand “spread apart,” and ridiculed the gullible journals who printed the story “in good faith.” Other Clemens hoaxes, like “A Bloody Massacre,” which described eight gruesome homicides between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s, proved nearly impossible for editors unfamiliar with Washoe reality to comprehend in anything except literal terms. (Among many off-kilter details, Empire City and Dutch Nick’s were one and the same place.) The story of the murders—a pure fabrication—achieved its end, however, for it gulled San Francisco newspapers into reprinting the entire story, line for line, including the cause of the fictitious murderer’s psychotic break—the published advice of the San Francisco Bulletin that had motivated him to move his life sav
ings from mining stocks to an investment in the supposedly safer Spring Valley Water Company in San Francisco. Two Bulletin editors had lost significant sums investing in mine stocks spuriously inflated by “a dividend cooking system.” They’d expended many column inches wailing about financial shenanigans in the Nevada Territory while simultaneously ignoring the Water Company doing the same thing right under their noses. Twain’s hoax therefore tricked them into publishing a self-criticism. That many California editors didn’t cotton to the hoax until after they’d printed serious commentary only increased their distrust and resentment of Mark Twain and the Territorial Enterprise—as well as the coarse bray of laughter echoing across the Sierras.
Sam Clemens took up residence in a B Street boardinghouse with William Wright, aka Dan de Quille, another Enterprise reporter, and he’d become well known about the camps—if not necessarily widely liked—by the time the pseudonym Mark Twain first appeared in the Enterprise. A decade later, Clemens claimed he’d appropriated his by-then-famous nom de plume from a staid Mississippi riverboat captain. However, according to more convincing Virginia City legend, Clemens had acquired the nickname before it appeared in print, derived from his habit of striding into the Old Corner Saloon and calling out to the barkeep to “Mark Twain!” a phrase Mississippi river boatmen sang out with their craft in two fathoms of water, but that in Virginia City meant bring two blasts of whisky to Sam Clemens and make two chalk marks against his account on the back wall of the saloon.
Although later in life, settled into a New England existence, Clemens claimed not to have had “a large experience in the matter of alcoholic drinks,” men who knew him on the Comstock remembered substantial quantities of chalk ground down to a nub on his behalf. Regardless of how he acquired his nickname, one of the Washoeites he’d become acquainted with was the quiet, industrious, up-and-coming, and largely abstemious Irishman who superintended the Milton mine—John William Mackay.
Mackay had the Milton Company’s tunnel in 450 feet at the beginning of February. His mining gangs extracted what appeared to be very rich rock, and although it hadn’t yet been crushed and “proved,” the mine’s stock held firm at $100 per foot, especially after assays made on ore samples taken from four different parts of the mine gave returns of $47, $807, $347, and $316 per ton. If the mine had significant quantities of ore at the three latter figures, the stockholders would reap a fortune.
One day, Clemens visited Mackay in the Milton’s new office, in a recently constructed frame building.I Clemens found Mackay’s situation “rather sumptuous, for that day and place.” Mackay hadn’t been in “such very smooth circumstances” before. His office “had part of a carpet on the floor and two chairs instead of a candle-box.” Perhaps sensing the opportunity for a little fun, needing fodder for one of his fancy sketches, or because he genuinely did want to try his hand at superintending a mine, Clemens proposed they switch jobs. Mackay could have his place on the Enterprise. Clemens would run the Milton.
Mackay considered the offer. Superintending a mine was no small undertaking. It required knowing how to bore, sink, stope, and ventilate underground workings, pump water, and hoist ore. A superintendent needed to understand the basics of static and dynamic mechanics, surveying, mineralogy, and geology, and possess the ability to lead and motivate men. Ever the practical and considerate man, Mackay asked how much Clemens’s newspaper job was worth.
“Forty dollars a week,” Clemens answered.
“I never swindled anybody in my life, and I don’t want to begin with you,” Mackay stammered. “This business of mine is not worth $40 a week. You stay where you are and I will try to get a living out of this.”
In later years, when Mark Twain was the most famous American writer and raconteur in the world, he delighted in the anecdote and the light it shone on his friend, who had by then become, in Twain’s description, “the first of the hundred millionaires.” Most men recognized Mackay’s straightforward, evenhanded, fair manner of dealing with men as a cornerstone of his success. He may also have been more subtle than generally credited. It’s hard to imagine him willing to trust his men and mine to Sam Clemens’s supervision.
• • •
The Gould & Curry’s $100 per foot dividend, announced a few days before “Mark Twain” appeared in the Territorial Enterprise for the first time on February 3, wasn’t the only good news rippling through the mining community in early 1863. Adjacent to the Gould & Curry, the Savage mine furiously erected buildings and installed hoisting works, associated workshops, and first-class steam-powered machinery over and around the vertical shaft it was sinking, a significant technical improvement on previous works. Rectangular, stoutly framed with square-sets, and sealed top to bottom with planks to prevent rocks falling from the walls, the shaft was divided into three compartments, each four feet by four feet in the clear, two for hoisting ore and waste and the third for pumping water. Based on the prospecting drift they’d cut south from the Gould & Curry’s Middle Adit, Savage management knew they were sinking on a substantial ore body, and they not only took time by the forelock, they scalped the old fellow, pushing the work with all possible speed. Before long, the Savage had a pay streak fifty feet wide, and it hoisted ore equal to the Gould & Curry’s best rock. Savage stock shot through the roof.
Washoe miners had raised $6 million in 1862. A few months into 1863, current year projections expected them to raise more than twice that amount, an almost inconceivable $12 million—one-third of the production of the entire state of California from a stretch of ground just two miles long and a few hundred yards wide.II And a single 921-foot stretch of ground produced fully one-third of the Washoe total—the Gould & Curry.
The Gould & Curry reinforced the optimism at the end of February when it issued a second $100 monthly dividend and announced that it anticipated paying twice that amount by year’s end. The communal euphoria skyrocketed the value of Washoe mining stocks. Newspapers crowed about the “inexhaustible” mineral wealth of Nevada Territory. Eager to share the spoils and terrified of missing out, people throughout California and the Nevada Territory clamored to invest in silver mines.
The appetite for feet waxed especially strong “below,” in San Francisco. Brokers’ offices lined Montgomery Street, their display windows festooned with stock certificates, bullion bricks, assay certificates, and ore samples. With the Stock & Exchange Board, two other formally organized mining exchanges, and uncounted numbers of independent brokers flogging mine stock on sidewalks and street corners, Montgomery Street became the mining industry’s Wall Street. People bought and sold feet by the “acre.” The throngs impeded traffic. To make a fortune, it seemed only necessary for a man to “tumble over a boulder,” file articles of incorporation, report that he’d discovered a lead assaying a few thousand dollars per ton, and “sell out at any price he pleased.” Brokers dealt in mines from Esmeralda, Humboldt, the Reese River, the Arizona Territory, Baja California, northern Mexico, the Idaho Territory, and a host of other districts, but atop the list, towering over all other mines, rose the Washoe stocks. Of the twelve most valuable mines in the West, based on value per foot, every single one owned a slice of the Comstock Lode.III In San Francisco, everyone, positively everyone—from capitalists, bankers, and preachers to masons, hod carriers, and housewives—owned shares in Nevada silver mines. By the middle of 1863, wags joked that every San Franciscan carried a stock certificate in a pocket or tucked into a fold of a dress.
And why not? In the words of the Daily Alta California, the bullion raised from the Washoe mines “would have made the Count of Monte Cristo think himself a pauper.” Men from every category of existence had risen to prominence through judicious investments in silver mines. Some two hundred nattily dressed men in long-tailed coats and soft hats lounged around San Francisco, propping up doorframes and lampposts and smoking immense cigars, whiling away their time with no visible means of support other than the fact that they’d bought Gould & Curry stock in the early days and
drew massive monthly incomes from the mine’s dividends. San Franciscans took it as a fixed fact that every man in town wearing a Shanghai coat was “a Washoe man.”
If anything, the stock madness raged hotter “above,” in Nevada. Comstockers had feet on the brain. They talked feet, worked feet, traded feet, jumped feet, ate and drank feet, bought and sold feet, consolidated feet, thought feet, slept feet, and dreamed feet. “Centipedes” and “millipedes” roamed the streets of Virginia City wearing black broadcloth—and the occasional satin dress. No people in history had ever had more feet, and although an occasional person lamented “the wearisome jargon of ‘feet,’ ” most couldn’t abide distraction, not when Gould & Curry feet had advanced 1,260 percent in the last sixteen months. The Savage, the Yellow Jacket, the Crown Point, the Hale & Norcross, the Chollar, the Potosi, and a host of other mines throughout the territory all made similar rises. “Everything—positively everything—is advancing,” raved the Territorial Enterprise. Most Washoeites and San Franciscans believed that investment of sufficient labor and capital could make any Washoe quartz ledge profitable. As Mark Twain described the frenzy in Roughing It, “There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not saleable.”
John Mackay’s “feet” rose with the general market. Although he’d moved his professional shingle to the Milton, he still owned a substantial portion of the Caledonia. The mine produced “considerable ore from small scattered ore bodies,” and although none had proven large enough to put the mine on a paying basis, their existence created hope for better findings. In early April, Mackay’s Caledonia stock took “a stride upwards.” Over the course of the next three and a half months, Mackay’s Caledonia holdings rose 450 percent, and he dealt heavily in the mine, deeding and receiving interest in the Caledonia both to and from some of Washoe’s most prominent capitalists, likely converting a substantial quantity of his quartz feet to solid gold cash. In addition to his holdings in the Caledonia and the Milton, Mackay also still owned a slice of the Union mine north of the Ophir. As a man who “kept his nose underground” with many friends and workmates in the mining community, he was well positioned to make intelligent speculations. Washoe’s rising tide lifted Mackay into a sphere of modest financial prosperity he’d never known in his life. What he didn’t have was an ore body, not in any one of the three mines that held his primary interests. He never relented in his quest to find one.
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