The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  Louise’s handsome and promising husband, Dr. Edmund Gardiner Bryant, had appeared in Downieville in the late 1850s. A graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, he probably became acquainted with then major Hungerford through service in the Sierra Guards and possibly through attending leechings and tooth extractions conducted in the major’s barbershop. Dr. Bryant made a name for himself tending sick and injured in Sierra County’s first hospital.

  Louise’s granddaughter Ellin Mackay Berlin, one of most influential writers in the early history of The New Yorker, who went on to marry famed composer Irving Berlin, in 1957 published a novelized account of her grandmother’s life called Silver Platter, in which she gave a charming account of then-fifteen-year-old Louise’s romance with the handsome and promising twenty-three-year-old doctor. They had married on New Year’s Day, 1860, eleven days after Louise’s sixteenth birthday. Louise gave birth to a daughter, Evelyn Julia Bryant, “Eva,” on November 12, 1861, and around the time of their move to Virginia City, to a second daughter, Marie. Louise Bryant was still only nineteen years old.

  A “winsome,” pleasant young woman with “soft and round” features, “large and expressive” blue eyes, and rich brown tresses cascading past her shoulder, Louise made a home for her husband and two daughters at 10 A Street, where the doctor also kept his office. Her parents lived a few hundred yards to the north, in Cedar Ravine. Dr. Bryant’s practice flourished, and several of his mining speculations showed promising “indications” as the market rode toward its June peak. An August 1863 fire that sparked a bloody brawl between two volunteer fire companies consumed the Bryants’ home and the doctor’s consulting office. The Bryants rebuilt, along with the rest of the street. Much worse, their eight-month-old daughter Marie contracted “the septic sore throat.”

  An old friend found Louise tending her sick baby. Dr. Bryant kept his office in the front room of the house. Louise begged her friend to intercede with her husband and convince him to treat their child. The friend made an effort, but the doctor “acted like an insane man” and drove her out with “curses.” For reasons never explained, Dr. Bryant refused to treat his own child. Blistering fever and infection swelled little Marie’s throat shut. She choked to death while her mother looked on, helpless.

  Father Patrick Manogue consoled the bereaved young mother. An Irish giant, six foot three inches tall, Patrick Manogue had paid his tuition to the Saint Sulpice Seminary in Paris, France, with gold he’d raised from four years of mining at Moore’s Flat, in the Sierra foothills about halfway between Nevada City and Downieville. After his 1861 ordination, the Church sent him to minister to the miners of the Nevada Territory, many of whom knew the good father from the California goldfields. His fearsome physical strength, imposing presence, and courage commanded the respect of other men. Women found his tender manner and gentle voice soothing, and he spoke straight, without unction. Even the godless admired his commitment to service. After the death of her baby, Louise Bryant leaned hard on the priest’s broad shoulders. She buried her child in the gravelly soil of Virginia City’s new cemetery, on the camp’s northern outskirts.

  Both Colonel Hungerford and Dr. Bryant dabbled substantially in mining stocks, although neither appears to have ever spent a day underground, and Dr. Bryant’s returns were, if anything, more dismal than his father-in-law’s. By the time of Marie’s death, he’d squandered so much money in ill-fated speculations and saloons that he and his wife couldn’t afford a headstone to mark their daughter’s grave—a failing that only added to Louise’s misery. Black depression consumed her.

  No source has ever revealed why Dr. Bryant behaved so callously toward his own daughter, because professionally, he was managing to hold his medical practice together, at least for a time—in one documented instance performing a difficult and dangerous emergency surgery to repair a depressed skull fracture and save a miner’s life.

  Personally, Dr. Bryant wasn’t doing nearly so well. Fancying himself a man of sound judgment, he continued to hemorrhage money in uninformed mining speculations, he’d developed a noticeable devotion to “the territorial destructive,” whisky, and by early 1864 he’d likely begun a closet relationship with one of the only effective medicines at his disposal—opium.

  The March 11, 1864, issue of the Gold Hill News contained a story titled “Shameless!” that chronicled the dissipation of “a well-known” Virginia City physician, “a most skillful and talented young man” arrested that morning and taken into custody “for beating his wife and smashing the furniture and in other ways conducting himself like a maniac.” He’d been “over-indulging in strong drink,” and his wife said he’d been “taking morphine and other drugs till almost on the verge of insanity.” Nor was it the first time the physician had been “locked up under similar circumstances.”

  The article fingered no one by name, but it jibed with the known circumstances of the Bryants’ lives. Not long after, Dr. Bryant left Virginia City for Austin, in the center of the territory, to see if he could improve his fortunes in the Reese River country. He left his wife and three-year-old daughter without funds, a fate perilously close to abandonment. Her parents also left Virginia City, Colonel Hungerford having lost confidence in the Comstock. With Louise’s little sister, Ada, they removed to modest dwellings in San Francisco. Mrs. Hungerford taught Spanish and French. The colonel returned to barbering and embroiled himself in plotting another bizarre military adventure. Not wanting Louise tempted by the soul-killing but much better paid work readily available to Virginia City’s threadbare young women, Father Manogue found her work sewing for the camp’s well-to-do ladies. Beneath a flickering candle, Louise sewed far into the night. Only in a state of complete exhaustion could she fall asleep without the wind that moaned through the cracks in her clapboard accommodations carrying her thoughts to her baby buried in an unmarked grave in the coarse dirt of the Virginia City cemetery, comfortless soil on which grass wouldn’t grow.

  • • •

  John Mackay worked through the boom with characteristic dedication, bent on getting ahead. He lived in a boardinghouse at 195 South C Street, an easy stroll from the Bryant household at 10 North A Street, and although Colonel Hungerford, Dr. and Louise Bryant, and John Mackay had all come to the Comstock from Downieville and all enjoyed a certain amount of local fame during the flush times, no evidence has ever suggested they associated with one another. Mackay served through 1863 as superintendent of the Milton mine. Among the twenty-four shareholders whose names appeared on the mine’s deed alongside Mackay’s, two became lifelong friends, A. M. Cole and Adolph (’Dolf) Hirschman. Mackay struggled with tight, crabbed penmanship and slow composition in those years, consequence of the formal education he’d missed. ’Dolf Hirschman wrote freely and easily, and he penned many letters on Mackay’s behalf.

  Feeling little attraction to the camp’s dissipations, Mackay used his free evenings to embark on a rigorous campaign of self-improvement and professional study. He stayed up late digesting every piece of geological, scientific, and engineering literature he could lay eyes on, marrying academic knowledge to the tremendous quantity of practical mining experience he’d amassed. Nor did he confine his campaign to subjects of immediate professional relevance. He read newspapers, magazines, history, and literature, tried to improve his command of mathematics, and endeavored to smooth and loosen his handwriting.

  Personally, Mackay was a hard man to know. He kept his own counsel. A man who’d known him before his star rose remembered him as “more difficult to sound” than any man he’d ever known. “Beyond a certain depth, he [was] inscrutable.”

  Mackay didn’t talk much, and when he did, he spoke in methodical, measured tones, still fighting his embarrassing stutter, his uniquely American argot a mix of New York, California mining slang, and “rich Irish burr.” In conversation, Mackay listened far more than he talked, and he said only what was absolutely necessary, a trait that often gave him the last word in professio
nal discussions.

  Taciturn John Mackay certainly was, but he was no loner. He enjoyed the company of his fellows. He particularly didn’t like eating alone and made great efforts to have friends share his table. Mackay found silence comfortable and companionable, and he relished a good story. He just seldom felt the need to talk. He had a sense of humor, he teased his friends, and he made jokes, often at his own expense, with a quick, dry, and occasionally scathing Irish wit deployed in few words. He escaped his cares and responsibilities through near-religious devotion to the musical ensembles and dramatic troupes that visited Washoe, boxing workouts at a Virginia City gymnasium, and occasional games of poker. The flaw in Mackay’s character was his hair-trigger temper. Many old Comstockers remembered flashes of his Irish temper. None could recall ever seeing him drunk. He was handy with his fists, and he didn’t hesitate to use them, particularly when he felt his “good name” assailed.

  Mackay remained devoted to Jack O’Brien and other friends from the old California diggings, one of whom, years later, remembered him as “tolerant of anything except a breach of faith.” He was ever sensitive to the feelings and needs of others. He judged men fairly, and well, and when he had another man’s confidence, he kept it. He had an innate scorn for pretense. His gaze looked through a suit of clothes “to the living character beneath,” and he treated all men equally, whether spotless nabobs rolling down C Street in fancy carriages and fine clothes or grubby miners coming off a tough underground shift.

  Mackay’s leadership qualities developed at the Milton. Miners he bossed appreciated his plainspoken, unaffected manner. Peers, superiors, and subordinates took him seriously. A few friends who’d known him in old California days called him “John.” A few others called him “Mackay.” Most called him “Mr. Mackay.” He strove hard for success and advancement, but above any lucre, he valued the “respect of men.” In an industry bedeviled by dishonest dealings, he kept his good name. As he’d assured Sam Clemens, he never swindled anyone.

  Mackay was happy superintending the Milton, as he had been at the Caledonia and while working as a foreman, timberman, and common miner before that. Unfortunately, the Milton had problems. Claiming the right of prior location, the Milton disputed ownership with the Chollar, its downhill neighbor, then working good ore. Battling the heavyweight legal team of a rich and powerful mine in the venal territorial courts presented a poor prospect of success. Worse, the Milton hadn’t developed an ore body of its own. The promising assay results published in the February newspapers had been made on selected samples. The Milton, like most Washoe quartz leads, had gold and silver in its matrix and, in places, pockets of good ore, but just like the Caledonia, the Milton didn’t have large enough volumes of ore to get itself on a paying basis.

  The implications of the Comstock’s eastward dip recently discovered deep in the Ophir and in the little Gold Hill mines wouldn’t become widely recognized for another year, but the discovery that the lode’s true dip slanted away from Mount Davidson was a profoundly adverse “indication” for the mines located above and to the west of the revealed Comstock—one of which was the Milton. As a superintendent who spent much of his working life underground, Mackay probably appreciated the consequences of that revelation long before they became generally accepted. When an opportunity to join the ownership of a mine with a clear title undeniably located on the main lead presented itself, Mackay seized it.

  A local mine owner named Jonas M. Walker brought Mackay the opportunity. Looking back with the perspective of sixty years, a Comstock historian writing in the 1920s described Walker as “an agreeable man from Virginia, but not a forceful character or a man of much practical ability.” That sentiment probably doesn’t reflect the feelings of the Washoe mining community in 1863. In those days, Walker, like Mackay, must have seemed like someone on the way up. An imposing, handsome man with sideburns and a mustache and wavy hair combed back over his ears, Walker owned substantially in the Bullion Gold and Silver Mining Company, a consolidation of two existing claims formally organized on February 18, 1863. The Bullion held clear, undisputed title to 1,424 feet of the Comstock Lode astride the Divide between Virginia City and Gold Hill. Located between the proven mines of the Chollar and Potosi to the north and the wildly profitable claims on Gold Hill to the south, the Bullion’s prospects seemed superb, especially after the Virginia Daily Union reported the Bullion extracting a large quantity of “good-looking quartz, blue, filled with sulphurets.” Of the fifty-five local miners, businessmen, and speculators who signed the Bullion’s deed (most of whom must have known John Mackay and been known to him), Jonas M. Walker’s name came first.

  Both men were Freemasons. When Walker suggested Mackay buy into the Bullion and merge their holdings into an equal partnership, Mackay accepted. The two men likely sealed their new relationship with a handshake. Walker was a gold rusher with a lawyerly background, and legal experience counted for much in Washoe, where it was impossible to develop a successful mine without waging ferocious courtroom warfare. Mackay had been mining on the lode without interruption since a few weeks after the first discovery. By 1863 and 1864, there can’t have been but a handful of men—if any—with more practical Comstock mining experience than John Mackay. Together, Mackay and Walker made a powerful combination, greater than the sum of their individual parts.

  To effect the consolidation of his and Walker’s interests, Mackay likely “realized” on most of his interest in the Milton and all the remaining feet he held in the Union mine, likely to great advantage. A Mining & Scientific Press report on the Bullion’s annual election in the spring of 1864 named the superintendent as J. M. Walker and mentioned the elevation of a trustee named “J. W. Mickey,” almost certainly a misprint of “Mackay.”

  Among the consortium’s ownership, Mackay and Walker were the acknowledged leaders. As Mackay was always happy to let another man have the official title, Walker assumed the superintendency, but as in every other aspect of their partnership, he and Mackay operated in concert. Determined to find ore or satisfy themselves that none existed, Bullion management—meaning Mackay, Walker, and the other trustees—levied a ten-dollar assessment on each of the mine’s twenty-five hundred shares. They supervised the installation of a forty-horsepower engine, the construction of “the best finished hoisting apparatus in Gold Hill,” and the sinking of a vertical shaft from which to explore the mine’s most promising feature—a huge mass of soft, whitish quartz similar to ones that had revealed valuable ore bodies in other mines. The Bullion was a dry mine, free from the influxes of water plaguing so many other Comstock claims, and therefore easier and less expensive to work. From stations on the shaft, they directed crosscuts and drifts into the Bullion’s quartz mass, everywhere encountering sufficient trace quantities of metal to lure progress forward but nowhere finding an ore body of sufficient size and concentration to pay the costs of extraction and reduction.

  Mackay and Walker had the good sense to diversify their holdings. In mid-December 1863, Mackay acquired feet in the Cedar Hill Float Rock and Surface Mining Company No. 1, a hydraulic mining operation that owned gold-bearing sediments on Cedar Hill at the north end of town. (Mackay and Walker were likely operating in partnership by this date, but as remained true through the duration of their partnership, usually just one of their names appeared on the deeds.) Although the wording of the transfer doesn’t make it clear, Mackay and Walker may have acquired the entire mine. Large amounts of water in a reservoir gave the company the opportunity to wash away the south slope of Cedar Hill “regular old California style,” with a jet of water shot from under a fifty-foot head of pressure. The runoff washed gold-bearing sediments through a long series of sluice boxes. Miners picked ore-bearing chunks of quartz from the tailings and sold them to custom milling operations. During ten weeks of operations during the summer of 1862, the mine had sold 25,500 tons of ore washed from the hillside to custom mills for $25 per ton, and every ten days it cleaned up from $1,000 to $1,500 worth of p
lacer gold from behind the riffle bars of the sluice boxes. Combined, revenues for each ten-week block of operations ran between $19,500 and $23,000. A newspaper article told of a four-pound block of quartz recovered from the mine “thickly encrusted with gold all over its surface” and of “fine threads and spangles of gold” filling the cracks and seams of other quartz chunks. An 1862 report said the Cedar Hill Float Rock Company owned enough ground to last several years, “in which time they should take out a dozen fortunes.” By late 1863, the mine had “hydraulicked” a large gash in the south side of Cedar Hill. Although working the mine depended utterly on the available supply of inexpensive water, if the published reports were accurate, the Cedar Hill Float Rock and Surface Mining Company No. 1 had tremendous potential. John Mackay probably took control looking forward to operating the first profitable Comstock mine he’d ever owned.

  • • •

  Those were good times on the Comstock. As Mark Twain wrote about the flush times, “I thought they were going to last always.”

  * * *

  I. Twain’s tellings described Mackay running a brokerage. There is no record of Mackay having done that, either during “the flush times of silverland” or at any other time in his life. For most of 1863, Mackay served as superintendent of the Milton Gold and Silver Mining Company.

  II. The Comstock’s actual 1863 production exceeded the projection, reaching $12.5 million.

  III. Per foot, the little mines on Gold Hill were most valuable, but they were all privately held, without stock on the market.