CHAPTER 8
A Tiny Sliver of a Mine
Schematic drawing of one of the many hundreds of ore cars used in the Comstock mines, each one of which could contain more than a thousand pounds of ore or waste.
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There are some good mines, and four thousand that are good for nothing.
—“California Gossip,” New York Times, April 23, 1864
The Comstock Lode touched its first high-water mark in the summer of 1863. From there, the tide ebbed, slowly. Industry observers couldn’t explain the price declines of the leading Washoe stocks. Through the rest of 1863 and into 1864, many confident articles appeared in newspapers repeating the sentiment expressed by a Mining & Scientific Press article that stated, “The more prominent holders of both Ophir and Gould & Curry manifest quite an indifference to their market value, having full faith in the mine[s] as permanent dividend paying institution[s].” Such boosterism did nothing to arrest the steady slide. Compounding problems, very little rain fell on California and the Nevada Territory during the winter of 1863–64, extending a drought begun the previous year. Lack of water paralyzed placer mining in the Sierra foothills—and likely ruined Mackay and Walker’s efforts to work the Cedar Hill Float Rock and Surface Mining Company No. 1. Crops and grass withered. Sheep and cattle starved. The economic damage forced people to sell out of their ancillary investments, increasing the downward pressure on stock prices. Many Ophir stockholders had availed themselves of its acceptability as collateral to borrow large sums for speculation in other mines. The skid forced those people to sell stock to cover their other obligations, which contributed to the downward trajectory. By the end of 1863, Gould & Curry “feet” hovered around $5,000, the Savage’s around $2,700, and the Ophir’s around $1,500, all high figures, but a painful pinch on those who’d bought the summer peak.
The Washoe price slip defied bullion production, which continued higher than ever. From one day’s run at the end of December 1863, the Gould & Curry mill cleaned up more than 700 pounds of bullion—worth in the neighborhood of $20,000. The week before, Wells, Fargo & Company had transported Washoe bullion worth $473,000 to the Bay, and although Wells Fargo did the majority of “express” business, it was only one of several concerns handling bullion shipments.
In truth, although bullion production grew in the first half of 1864, Washoe had serious problems. “Adroit and profitable villainy” conducted by mine insiders to manipulate stock prices sapped public confidence. Much investment and development work had been made on the assumption that the Comstock dipped west, into Mount Davidson. The recent discovery that the lode actually dipped away from Mount Davidson put a large amount of that work to waste. Only a handful of mines paid legitimate dividends, every one of them known to own a slice of the Comstock Ledge, while dozens of mines both on and off the Comstock levied assessments. Some assessment monies financed legitimate mine development. Others paid the exorbitant salaries of mine officers. At the Gould & Curry, the president earned $10,000 per year and did very little work. Likewise, Ophir directors who knew nothing about mining drew outlandish salaries. Wanting their mine run on scientific principles, the Ophir hired Walter W. Palmer, an English mining engineer who’d supposedly become expert superintending a mine in Mexico, at $2,500 per month. In the “patio yard” where the Ophir mill located the arastras for working its third-class ores, Palmer insisted that horses and mules trample through the slurry of powdered ore, water, salt, copper sulfate, and mercury, firm in his belief that only an infusion of warmth from the animals’ feet and legs could properly complete the amalgamation process. Adopting “the Palmer Process” made the mine and its directors subject to “a good deal of ridicule”—and lamed many animals—without making a scrap of difference to mill yields. In an article lambasting Palmer’s work pace, which ignored “the present generation altogether” and worked the mine “for posterity,” Podgers of the New York Times thought the Ophir “wretchedly man-aged.” In an age devoid of laws regulating corporate governance, small stockholders unhappy with the mine’s management possessed no leverage to do anything about it. For all of Podgers’s cogent criticism, there was a crucial nugget of information he did not have, or if he was one of the fortunate stockholders in the know, didn’t share—three hundred feet beneath the surface, below the point where the vein had started its eastward dip, the Ophir’s ore body narrowed and dropped in quality.
Voluminous litigation constituted another millstone around Washoe’s neck. Comstock mining claims generated lawsuits like the barrels of the army’s experimental hand-cranked Gatling guns spewed out bullets. The Sacramento Daily Union called Virginia City the lawyers’ “money paradise,” where lawsuits ate up “the substance of the people.” Wags joked that litigation was the lode’s principal industry. Since no mine wanted to invest in developing an ore body it might lose to an adverse court ruling, and perjury, violence, tampering, bribes, and other corruption tainted juries, judges, and witnesses in the territorial courts, the legal wrangling thwarted mine development. Most infamous of the “vampire suits” was the one brought by “The Grosch [sic] Consolidated Gold and Silver Mining Company” in the summer of 1863. Citing the provenance of Hosea and Allan Grosh, the two long-dead brothers who had prospected the Washoe Diggings for silver before the Gold Hill and Ophir discoveries, the Grosch Consolidated Company published a twenty-page pamphlet extolling their claim to 3,750 feet of the Comstock Ledge—including all the productive ground of the Gould & Curry, the Mexican, and the Ophir mines. The Mining & Scientific Press thundered against the lawsuit, calling it a “mammoth incubus” formed “for the simple purpose of levying blackmail.” The suit named Henry Comstock a codefendant, and in March 1864, a territorial court held Comstock in default for “non-appearance” at a time when Comstock was known to be “largely interested” in quartz leads in the Idaho Territory’s recently discovered South Boise mines, in a region that, at least as Comstock told it, exceeded in “extent and richness” anything he’d ever known in his life. Reports reached Virginia City of Comstock crushing Idaho quartz in a rude arastra driven by an overshot water wheel, and lauded the “energy” of “this famous prospector.” Letters from Idaho credited him with playing “an important part in developing the wealth of Idaho,” and told of him on his way back from Idaho with quartz to exhibit and claims “to dispose of.” Most Washoeites thought Comstock had failed to appear for the Grosch Consolidated lawsuit because the summons hadn’t reached him in time. In March 1865, the Twelfth District Court dismissed the lawsuit.
Among the many hundreds of cases that clogged Nevada’s territorial courts, the most significant hinged on a single legal question: Did the Comstock Lode consist of many independent ledges parallel to and separate from one another or was it one great ledge, its valuable ore bodies united in depth but separated near the surface by various “horses” of worthless vein matter? Popularly, Washoeites knew them as the “one ledge” and “many ledge” theories. The Ophir, the Gould & Curry, the Savage, the Yellow Jacket, and the other early locations made along the line of the Comstock expounded the one-ledge theory—its enshrinement would mean that all ore between the footwall and hanging wall of the lode belonged to the original locations. The many-ledge theory held that each different ore seam within the wide mineralized band of the so-called Comstock Ledge was its own unique and distinct geological entity, and therefore subject to the ownership of a separate company since it was commonly held mining law that no company could claim two separate ledges. (However, one company could buy another company’s original location and end up owning more than one ledge.)
Many-ledge advocates considered the one-ledgers evil corporate monopolists; the one-ledge companies thought the many-ledgers were thieves. The weight of underground evidence mounting in favor of the Comstock Lode’s being one single, gigantic fissure vein did little to contain public ire against the ruthless capitalists controlling the leading mines and the legal skulduggery they propagated to strengthen their hold
ings. Shrewd, forceful, politically manipulative mining attorney William M. Stewart cleaned up a fortune representing the leading mines and the one-ledge theory. The Virginia Daily Union called the Ophir Company “The Great Grab-All Company” and its relentless advocacy of the one-ledge theory nothing but “a moneyed effort to cripple and monopolize.” The Yellow Jacket deployed a midnight raid that eradicated all trace of a stump that marked a boundary to strengthen one of its arguments and, according to some, “floated” its original location three hundred feet downhill. The Chollar and the Potosi brutalized each other with bitter, tit-for-tat legal warfare, as they’d done since 1861. Referencing English literary colossus Charles Dickens and his novel Bleak House—without realizing that a legitimate American peer was serving an apprenticeship in their midst—Washoeites nicknamed the Chollar–Potosi case “Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.” Only after the Chollar and the Potosi had squandered $1.3 million in Pyrrhic legal wrangling could the two mines bring themselves to do the obvious and merge their interests.
Mines “in bonanza” spent money as if they had an endless supply. And why not? Most everybody thought Comstock mines bottomless and inexhaustible. Although many Washoe mines played loose with their fortune, none outdid the Gould & Curry. The 921-foot-wide mine led the region—and the entire mining world—in both bullion production and the size of its expense accounts. Gould & Curry superintendent Charley Strong spent the mine’s money like Plutus, the veritable god of wealth himself. The mine’s quartz mill towered above all other Washoe extravagance. The mill sat on a handsome plateau graded from rough and rocky slopes at the intersection of Six and Seven Mile cañons a mile below Virginia City. A massive foundation of dressed granite blocks underpinned the mill’s main building and two projecting wings, which rose into a magnificent two-story edifice with splendid cruciform symmetry and “pretensions to architectural beauty.”
Inside the mill, six large furnaces embedded in fireproof masonry heated three twenty-six-foot boilers that piped high-pressure steam to a 150-horsepower engine turning a drive wheel thirteen and a half feet in diameter. Leather belts passed power from the wheel to various parts of the mill, the largest of which was 160 feet long and 32 inches wide—four inches wider than any belt the Boston Belting Company had ever made. The mill opened with a forty-stamp battery capable of crushing forty tons of quartz per day, then doubled the number of its stamps and crushing capacity. To contain the choking dust clouds rising from dry-crushing ore, airtight compartments enclosed the batteries. Iron pipes fitted with powerful fans attached to the airtight rooms created a vacuum that drew off and collected the metal-rich ore dust—just one aspect of an intricately engineered system designed to keep the establishment free of airborne particulate matter, lessen wear on machinery, promote the health and cleanliness of the workforce, and preserve the dust for subsequent reduction. Elevators raised crushed ore from the batteries to sorting screens from whence too-coarse material was diverted to grinding pans for further reduction and cars carried fine-enough crushings to rows of eight-foot-diameter double-bottomed amalgamating pans designed for steam heating, mercury mixing, and other chemical enhancements supposed to aid and speed the metal recovery. The resulting amalgam, drawn from the bottom of the pans after hours of steady mixing, passed into tubs in the cleaning-up room, where large agitators connected by copper pipes completed the final, custom-modified, and highly secret steps of the “Veatch Process,” supposedly a refinement of the Freiberg Process used in Europe. Ventilators atop the building encouraged the escape of steam, gas, mercury vapors, and other foul airs.
Water pumps, cisterns, and hoses gave mill workers high-pressure fire-fighting capabilities. Paint, varnish, burnish, polish, finished stonework, and other “useless ornament” completed every detail. (Rough stone and unpainted wood sufficed in other quartz mills.) Scattered around the grounds outside the main mill building were fancy offices, state-of-the-art blacksmiths and carpenters shops, stables, graded and paved roads, stone steps connecting terraces carved into the hillside, spacious boardinghouses to lodge the mill’s workforce, a number of arastras for working the old Mexican patio process on low-grade ores, commodious and comfortable outhouses, and arched sewers. Before it all lay a reflecting pond, in the middle of which a statue of three water nymphs and a swan spouted a fountain of water.
By the end of 1863, mill construction had absorbed almost $900,000 of mine proceeds. With 225 employees on its payroll, the mill turned out four or five huge bricks of bullion per day, worth $8,000 to $10,000, and a lady could pass through the mill without soiling her dress. An industry observer wondered “why so much money is expended where it would appear that one-half that amount would do the same work?”
Far worse than the extravagance, the mill didn’t work. Not as intended. The mill produced bullion from ore, yes, but industrial-scale ore reductions discovered that the peculiar and unique Veatch Process didn’t “save” enough metal to justify its fifty- to sixty-dollar-per-ton cost—and it also rendered unprofitable the huge quantities of lesser grade Comstock ores. The Gould & Curry discarded its Veatch machinery and replaced it with the Washoe Pan Process at a cost of another half a million dollars—and even then the mill didn’t work, for the mill site itself had no advantage. The mill was remote from the mine. Hauling ore to the mill was an additional cost. Distant from abundant and flowing water, the mill enjoyed no advantage of cheap water or low-cost power. East of Virginia City when timber companies cut cordwood far to the west, the Gould & Curry mill paid more for fuel deliveries than any other mill. Unable to compete with mills situated and constructed along more practical lines, the Gould & Curry mill was a folly, nothing more.
To most Gould & Curry stockholders, the mill’s failure seemed but a minor setback. A Comstock historian writing two decades later described them as convinced they were “pacing the roof of a fathomless treasure house.” Men on the lode, most of whom had come of age in the wild, happy-go-lucky California gold camps, expected the owners of a successful mine to operate with panache and an open hand. A great mine ought to do things on a grand scale. Stockholders didn’t expect frugality. They demanded output. “Snake it out,” they insisted, almost to a man. And snake it out the mine did, expenses be damned. The Gould & Curry extracted almost fifty thousand tons of ore in 1863 and more than sixty-four thousand tons the following year. On aggregate receipts of almost $9 million, the Gould & Curry paid its stockholders dividends of nearly $3 million, the envy of the world. The mine’s expense accounts attracted a whole lot less scrutiny. They’d spent $6 million for returns more prudent management could have had at much lower cost.
Costs hardly seemed to matter when a publication as respected as the Mining & Scientific Press, writing about the Gould & Curry, said that “the deeper they go in this mine, the richer the ore appears to be. In their lower gallery [at the level of the Lower Adit], the ore surpasses anything yet found in that famous claim, in both quality and quantity.” The item didn’t address a more fundamental question—what was revealed in winzes descending below the Lower Adit? (A “winze” is a mine workings made by excavating down.)
People who spent their lives aboveground had difficulty appreciating the scope and scale of what took place in the underground city. In the middle of 1864, most visitors entered the Gould & Curry through the Middle Adit on D Street. Seven hundred feet long, the Middle Adit’s crude timbering and rough construction testified that it had been driven before discovery of the mine’s full riches. Where the tunnel struck the ledge, a station opened onto an immense cavern. People approached the edge in astonishment. Left and right, up and down, the vast rectangular beehive of square-set timbers supporting the mine faded into midnight gloom. The sickly gleam of a tallow candle barely touched the opposite wall, sixty feet away. Over the edge, a yawning chasm swallowed the candlelight without revealing bottom, more than 200 feet below. The scale of the work was hard to fathom. The gigantic timber lattice filled a void 800 feet long, 300 feet tall, and varying in width between 40
and 70 feet. Contemplating the size of the extracted ore body, the immense quantity of timber replacing it, and the incomprehensible amount of labor expended in both pursuits left visitors in awe of what Comstock miners had accomplished in the last three years. There was more lumber in this one ore chamber than in the entire surface city.
A spiral staircase descended from the edge of the station at the end of the Middle Adit, but ended several levels below. From the bottom of the stairs, visitors unfamiliar with underground conditions struggled to commit themselves to a series of rickety ladders. The void tugged at their heels as they descended into the stygian darkness of the inactive galleries, guarding their candles and lanterns from drafts of air circulating through the mine, sometimes cool, at other times hot and stifling. Creepy, haunting sounds broke the melancholy silence: the splash and drip of falling water; the creaks and groans of timbers straining against the immense pressure of superincumbent earth. Occasional thunder echoed from the distance as a ton of ore clattered down a chute from an upper level to an ore car waiting on the level of the Lower Adit, hundreds of feet below. An explosion shivered the mine—a blast of black powder shattering a stubborn wall of quartz in some distant stope. The sepulchral gloom gave way as the visitors approached a working gallery in the lower levels. Voices, work sounds, and points of light reached out from under a temporary plank ceiling installed to protect the workforce from falling objects. Bright-lit life, business, and energy replaced the murk. The visitors descended into an anthill of activity illuminated by dozens of candles and lanterns. A line of miners working a stope systematically hacked out ore. In the richest concentrations, “clusters of virgin silver” glittered like “frost work” in the candlelight. Cubic pyrites and brilliant quartz flashed “a thousand merry glow-worm twinkles” before falling to the miner’s pick. If this was done right, most fell directly into ore cars on wooden railroad tracks or was easily shoveled into chutes that fed cars waiting below. The well-practiced workforce allowed gravity to do as much of the work as possible. Timbermen hoisted and fixed the rectangular cuboid frames of foot-square post-and-cap timbers into place to fill voids left by removed ore. Carmen pushed trains of five or six ore cars, each one carrying half a ton of ore, down tracks laid in the floor of the two-thousand-foot-long Lower Adit to the enormous ore house built around the adit’s mouth on South I Street.
The Bonanza King Page 22