Virginia City residents held it as axiomatic that “As the Gould & Curry goes, so goes the city.” The mine maintained more than five hundred men on its payroll. Indirectly, it kept more than two thousand persons in productive employment. From the retorts in its grandiose mill down Six Mile Cañon—which the company had finally gotten into operation—the Gould & Curry cast three or four enormous bricks of bullion every day, each worth about $2,500. Excitement mounted in the late spring as the Gould & Curry’s Lower Adit approached the lode, having run 2,000 feet from its opening in the ravine south of Virginia City’s Catholic church, a quarter-mile downslope from the mouth of the Middle Adit. The adit cut the lode in mid-June, 425 feet below the El Dorado surface croppings and around 200 feet below the deepest point from which the Gould & Curry had previously extracted ore. As if on cue, the mine upped its dividend to $150 per foot, “incontrovertible evidence of the permanence and exhaustless wealth of that mysterious depository known as the Comstock,” according to the Territorial Enterprise. The market surged again. In the week that ended on June 27, 1863, Yellow Jacket stock rose to $1,200 per foot, the Belcher hit $1,500, the Ophir touched $2,100, the Savage topped $3,500, and the Gould & Curry reached the phenomenal sum of $6,300 per foot. “We are marching on to prosperity at railroad speed,” bragged the ebullient “local” of the Territorial Enterprise, almost certainly Mark Twain.
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The camps boomed along with the mines. Every branch of business in Virginia City and Gold Hill was “aglow with energy and activity.” People eager to take advantage poured over the mountains from California in “a perfect stampede,” the largest since the spring of 1860. The fever raged with “unabated fury” until “Washoe Widows” were as common in California as “California Widows” had been in the Atlantic states during the early days of the Gold Rush. The “exodus” jammed the trans-Sierran stagecoaches, forcing them to evolve from four-horse teams to six. Every day, the stages deposited about one hundred persons in Virginia City. A few backtrackers returned to California, disillusioned. Others fanned out to various mining camps throughout the Nevada Territory, but about half opted to remain on the Comstock. Virginia City’s population doubled, then doubled again. By the summer of 1863, some twenty thousand people lived in the two camps, and Virginia City, terraced onto a remote desert mountainside, had grown into the second largest city on the Pacific Coast, its population double that of Sacramento and Portland, Oregon, and four times that of Stockton and Marysville. People slept in chairs. The unlucky bivouacked on curbstones and sidewalks. Entrepreneurs had three fine hotels under construction, the fanciest of which, the International, installed a mechanical elevator in its C Street entrance, the first between San Francisco and St. Louis. Newspaper articles throughout the West lauded Virginia City’s wealth, growth, stability, and the “immense and astonishing” volume of business done in the camp. Teamsters freighted in fifty wagonloads of lumber each day and hauled one hundred tons of ore from the mines to the mills. Dozens of other wagons arrived with comestibles and other supplies. An immense volume of traffic jammed the main streets. Buggies on side streets sometimes had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross. In dry conditions, dust swirled everywhere, driven by fierce winds. When it rained, wheels and horseshoes splattered mud and offal on the sidewalks, coating anybody within the blast radius. Miners in work clothes and mucker’s boots paid it no mind. Capitalists, speculators, bankers, brokers, merchants, managers, and members of “the sporting element” in their spotless black broadcloth and spit-shined shoes found it an enormous bother, as did ladies dressed for town. One busy day in the summer of 1863, a man counted sixty-eight teams on C Street, none able to move. Frustrated teamsters holding their “ribbons” (reins) blasphemed the desert air—and their mule teams—then tipped their hats and apologized if they discovered a lady within earshot. As C Street evolved into the camp’s principal business thoroughfare, women of good carriage insisted the town remove the last of its higher-toned cathouses from C Street to digs further down the hillside. Most took station in the camp’s budding red-light district one block below. Farther downhill stood the camp’s “Chinatown” and a small neighborhood of “coloreds.” Advertisements plastered the sides of stores and buildings and covered billboards erected on the neighboring hillsides. Fish taken from Lake Tahoe (ex-governor Bigler’s name having been stripped from the lake due to his Southern sympathies) and transported packed in snow sold at two bits a pound. Saloons sold whisky certified to kill at forty rods for two bits a drink in cut tumblers—and for one bit if consumed from a common glass. One intrepid merchant imported a cargo of San Francisco housecats. When traffic allowed, superintendents and trustees of the important mines rolled through town driving fancy teams. The Confederate commerce raider Alabama delivered the only significant setback Virginia City received in the spring of 1863, when it captured and burned the California-bound merchant ship Commonwealth off the Brazilian coast—among its cargo were all the fixtures for Virginia City’s gaslighting system.
Belowground, a series of floods plagued the Ophir. The first breach of the subterranean reservoir sent men scrambling for their lives. Miners working ahead of the rising waters raced to reinforce the timbers and backfill square-sets with waste rock in worked-out portions of the mine. The flood submerged the bottom eighty feet of the Ophir and drove miners in the neighboring Mexican from a splendid mass of ore. New, more powerful pumps drained the underground lake. Both mines resumed production, but the flood had weakened the deepest galleries of the Mexican. In early July, their ground “started.” Crews worked around the clock to stave off collapse, but no matter the quantity and dimension of timbers braced across the galleries, they couldn’t counteract the immense pressures and stabilize the “working” ground. Some twenty men worked inside the mine on the morning of July 15. Just as the superintendents of the Ophir and the Mexican met in the Ophir’s fourth gallery at about 10:30 a.m., the gallery’s huge support timbers began to crack “like firecrackers.” Dirt and stones rained down from above. The two superintendents dropped into the fifth gallery and raced into the Mexican. Similar “ominous demonstrations” sent them scurrying back to the Ophir. They’d barely reached Ophir ground when a huge crash behind them collapsed the entire Mexican mine from its deepest level all the way to the surface. The blast of wind billowing out from the collapse extinguished their candles and left them in darkness. An overwhelming desire to see daylight and breathe fresh air suddenly possessed everyone underground. The superintendents groped for the base of the Ophir incline and joined the line of workmen scrambling up the narrow stairway toward the surface. Foot-thick support timbers cracking like cannon shots and clods of earth falling from the incline’s ceiling sped their three-hundred-foot ascent. Men reached the surface gasping. Hurried head counts accounted for all men who’d been underground. One of the Mexican’s miners had endured a closer shave than most. The first collapse entombed him in a shallow drift. A subsequent shift opened a crevasse over his head. He wormed up shouting until workmen above could get a hand to him and draw him to safety.
The ground above the mines settled all the way across the Mexican and the Ophir’s south mine. Pressure threatened the Ophir’s incline. To lessen it, the mine deployed workmen to cut back a high earthen bank west of the engine house. Not twenty feet west of the incline, those workmen struck a two- to three-foot-thick vein of soft, decomposed quartz shot through with “pure native silver” and large quantities of gold, which they immediately started sacking for shipment. Within a month, twenty-five Ophir miners worked the new vein. Standing from 20 to 40 feet west of the ore body the Ophir had worked since 1859, it proved to be 5 to 15 feet wide, 300 feet long, and 350 feet deep, and before it played out, it produced more than one million dollars’ worth of bullion.
The first miners to reenter the Ophir found the damage concentrated in shallow areas already worked out in and above the fourth gallery. The cave hadn’t harmed any of the active stopes in the deeper g
alleries. The situation at the Mexican wasn’t so copacetic. The collapse ruined the Mexican’s shaft and portions of its engine house, and although the west vein discovered behind the Ophir also ran into its ground, the cave had ruined its workings entirely, from the 225-foot level all the way to the surface. Engineers deemed the sinking of a new and expensive vertical shaft 125 feet east of the original croppings the most reasonable way of regaining access to the mine.
Sam Clemens had reported from inside the Mexican the day before the cave. Two weeks later, a fire burned him out of his B Street lodging house. Only a windless day saved the whole block. Clemens stood in the street dazed, watching the flames consume everything he owned, including what a friend later described as “an immense amount of ‘wild cat,’ variously estimated to be worth from ten cents to two hundred thousand dollars.” Clemens lost all his possessions except the clothes on his person. Out of nowhere, a complete stranger handed him a packet of “feet.” Downtown, Clemens sold the batch for $200, enough, as he told his mother and sister in a letter written ten days later, to fit himself out again “half as good as new. . . . The unknown scoundrel couldn’t have done me a favor of the kind when I needed it more.”
Sam Clemens never learned the man’s name. Most of the lode’s leading men had helped pioneer California during the Gold Rush years, and such openhanded generosity, “California-like,” was expected of a successful man. Freeloading wasn’t respected, but people helped each other when misfortune touched. Fierce competitiveness and good fellowship went hand in hand. People took part in local events, be they a parade, picnic, fancy ball, theatrical performance, horse race, dog or cock fight, boxing match, or funeral. Among themselves, men swore like sailors and reveled in off-color jokes, prizing laughter like rich ore; in mixed company, they guarded their tongues for fear of offending the ladies. Off-duty, men drank copious amounts of liquor and smoked cigars and pipes, scorning cigarettes as fit only for Mexicans and the “soiled doves” on D Street. “The flush times of silverland” were times of hard drinking, careless living, foolish expenditure, wild generosity, and hair-trigger violence. Most visitors never made more than cursory, guided investigations of the mine workings that underburrowed the two camps and gained little appreciation for the mighty industry of the subterranean city. Their gaze latched on to the aboveground chaos and dissipation that played out amidst the dust, noise, and traffic of the mountainside city. For the most part, the Comstock was a man’s world. Women composed but a fraction of the population, and more than a few of those on the lode had come to get divorced. As the Marysville Daily Appeal quipped, “Do married women go there to exchange their feet?” Many blamed the boomtime mayhem on the absence of “pure, good women.” The men “feed on whisky,” wrote one correspondent, “and that diet causes rowdyism as naturally as turtle soup lays fat on an alderman’s ribs.”
Flush times and porous territorial justice drew hordes of California renegades to Washoe, and with them came a resurgence of the violence that had plagued the camps in earlier times. “Washoe cities and villages are flooded with the most desperate set of wretches that ever disgraced humanity. . . . Dishonest tradesmen, runaway wives, played out gamblers, and the votaries and disciples of every vice . . . flourish ingloriously on the Eastern Slope,” whined the Virginia Bulletin. California editors in need of filler scoured Washoe newspapers for violent incidents. Among many such obscure items, an unidentified gunman shot and killed a murderer named Jack Williams through the open door of a gambling saloon. A butcher named George Gumpert wounded one of Williams’s pistol-toting associates with a knife, and in the “brief artillery duel” that followed, finished him with a shotgun. Coin bought what passed for justice in the territorial courts. Jails couldn’t hold prisoners. Police extorted from saloons, gambling hells, and brothels, and squeezed favors from prostitutes in exchange for “protection.” Women in the fast life sought relief in stupefying patent medicines. Popular concoctions like Godfrey’s Cordial and McMunn’s Elixir all contained the same principal ingredient—opium. Another of that ilk, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, was specifically advertised as a comfort for teething babies. Pie-eyed Charles Henry Bryan, a prominent Virginia City lawyer and former justice of the California Supreme Court, staggered into the Jenny Lind Saloon one March morning, drew a derringer from a coat pocket, and calmly informed a seated German that he intended to shoot him “for luck.” Bryan pulled the trigger, but was so wretchedly inebriated that his point-blank shot merely pierced the German’s shirtsleeve. Incredulous, a Virginia Daily Union reporter concluded that “no ill feeling existed between the parties—indeed, we believe they were strangers.” Nor did the incident damage Bryan’s reputation—six months later, Storey County elected him as one of its delegates to the Nevada Territory’s Constitutional Convention.
Drunk Jack Butler “abused” Juana Sanchez, a “woman of the town.” He drew a pistol and threatened her life. Juana disarmed Butler. When he produced a second pistol, she shot him dead with the first. A woman named Deborah Ann Phillips killed a man with a pistol for calling her “a damned whore” in public. After hearing witnesses testify about her character, an inquiry released her on $1,000 bail. Her trial returned a verdict of “justifiable homicide.” Governor Nye gave her a full pardon.
At a “reception” hosted by Miss Lilly Westlake, Tom Peasley, proprietor of C Street’s Sazarac Saloon, chief engineer of the Virginia City Fire Department, and principal figure in Volunteer Fire Company No. 1, quarreled with Joseph Jenkins, aka Sugar-foot Jack. Jenkins blackguarded Peasley in villainous language. Peasley struck Jenkins in the face. Jenkins retreated to Robson’s saloon on the west side of North B Street and armed himself. Peasley came in for a provocative drink, and Jenkins did nothing. Thinking the matter ended, Peasley retired to Lynch’s saloon further down B Street. Jenkins followed Peasley, however, and he was drawing his pistol when Peasley shot him above the hip, then three times more in quick succession.
The slaying probably increased custom at Peasley’s Sazarac Saloon. As Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It, “To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious.” Rumors constantly circulated about town leaders fed up with ineffective law enforcement cleaning out the ruffian element with that time-honored frontier institution, the vigilance committee. “Sure as there is a God in Heaven, the people will not much longer submit to the existing state of things,” a man wrote to the San Francisco Bulletin. “There is a point in forbearance at which it ceases to be a virtue in a people.” The violence never quite reached that extremity, largely because most of it stayed confined within the ruffian element.
The rampant gambling, drinking, whoring, and violence appalled those moralizers trying to establish “civilization” in the mining camps. An oldtime yon-sider who remembered 1849 California as a “vestibule of hell,” considered 1863 Virginia City “the very throne-room of Pluto himself.” Fiercely pro-Union and renowned Unitarian minister the Reverend Thomas Starr King lectured in Washoe and returned to California describing the Comstock’s big mines, little mines, and whisky mills as “Ophir holes, gopher holes, and loafer holes.”
• • •
Among the thousands of people drawn to Virginia City by the boom were Major Daniel E. Hungerford, his wife Eveline, and their six-year-old daughter, Ada. Hungerford had gone east to serve in the U.S. Army in 1861, received promotion to lieutenant colonel, and seen “the belligerent elephant” during General McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, after which he “threw up his commission in disgust,” resigned from the Army of the Potomac, and returned to the Pacific Coast, possessed with the bizarre idea of raising a volunteer force and attacking Texas through the Arizona and New Mexico territories.
The Hungerfords’ eldest daughter, eighteen or nineteen years old, Marie Louise Antoinette, almost always called Louise; her husband, Dr. Edmund G. Bryant; and their one-year-old daughter, Eva, also succumbed to the Washoe fever and moved to Virginia City during the boom times. Louise and her mother had been on the Pacific Co
ast since 1854, when they came west to join then major Hungerford. Young Louise had made quite a sensation in Downieville. Gold dust was more common than children in the early California mining camps, and the few girls lived in virtual purdah. They weren’t seen except at whatever passed for church services, held close to their mothers’ skirts. One Saturday afternoon when they were about twelve years old, Louise and her best friend, Louise Meyer, had taken it into their heads to dress up and visit the Meyers’ store at the far end of town. As the two young girls came into view, a hush swept over the wild, bewhiskered men crowding Main Street for provisions and weekend amusement. Tears filled the eyes of those from remote camps, some of whom hadn’t seen a child in years, let alone a little girl in weekend finery. The two girls advanced, and the crowd parted. Men looked on in tender amazement until one of them thought to step forward and press a coin into one of the girls’ hands. Others followed his lead. The girls reached Meyer’s Store loaded down with gold coins and nuggets. Appalled, their parents forbade them to ever repeat the performance.
The Hungerfords had only been able to send Louise to St. Catherine’s Academy in Benicia, near the mouth of the Sacramento River, for a single semester late in the decade before the press of penury forced them to return her to Downieville, but testament to the ministrations of her Europhilic mother, Louise spoke French and Spanish well and managed to exude an air of culture and refinement despite having spent most of her childhood in a mining camp.
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