Sharon took care of people who served him loyally. Sharon paid good salaries, and although ruthless in business, he found any man injured or crippled in his employ a job commensurate with his reduced physical capabilities and kept him on at his accustomed earnings—as long as the accident hadn’t resulted from negligence or drunkenness. Nor could Sharon abide the ill-treatment of beasts. “No offence was more certain of being followed by dismissal from his employment than ill-treatment of some dumb brute.” Socially, Sharon quoted widely from Scripture, poets, and the plays of William Shakespeare, and he plowed much of his personal profits into San Francisco real estate. He became a regular player in high-stakes Comstock poker games. And he continued to win.
“Tight” money contributed to the stagnation of the Comstock mining economy in the last half of 1864. A cartel of Virginia City and Gold Hill banks fixed their loan rate at 5 percent interest per month—a whopping 60 percent annual rate. William Sharon and the Bank of California shoved themselves to the forefront of the financial market and shattered the cartel by opening their Virginia City doors and offering to make loans at 2 percent per month. Mine and mill owners stampeded to the Bank of California to avail themselves of the “easy” money. They hailed William Sharon and the new bank as saviors.
In what was seen as a further service to the mining community, Sharon accepted mill and mine property as loan collateral. He even went so far as to accept mine stock as collateral. However, whenever Sharon took stock as security, he insisted on receiving a proxy to vote the shares in the mine’s stockholder elections, ostensibly because he wanted the Bank of California’s voice heard in efforts to improve and streamline the management of the Comstock mines. And since many people in Virginia City and San Francisco addicted to mine speculation wanted to use their existing stock holdings as collateral to borrow money for further mining speculation, Sharon agreed to make the loans only when he was given proxies for both the collateral stock and the newly purchased shares. He quickly accumulated influence.
Whether that would prove important was an open question as one after another, the Comstock mines found the bottom of their ore bodies. The stock market kept sliding. Unemployment mounted. Thousands of people left the Comstock. Many went to a “new Comstock” at Summit City near the spine of the Sierras. Others sought fortune in the mines of Idaho, Montana, Colorado, the Reese River, and elsewhere in Nevada. Virginia City’s population shrank from about ten thousand to around four thousand. Property values plummeted. The market value of the Comstock mines shriveled, from the high they’d reached of about $40 million in the summer of 1863 to $12 million in the summer of 1864. On the positive side of the ledger, the depression drove most of the town’s gun-slinging desperadoes to seek fresh pastures elsewhere in the West.
As the mining depression deepened, Sharon, Ralston, and the Bank of California continued pouring resources into the Comstock—a phenomenal risk. The Comstock would fail without further ore discoveries, and if the lode went barren, loans would default and the bank would end up owning a pile of worthless collateral property. Sharon wasn’t just gambling on faith and feeling, however. He hired mining experts and geologists, and they convinced him that the Comstock was “a true fissure vein” that likely contained more ore at greater depth.
Sharon’s sources held the prospects of the Yellow Jacket in particularly high regard. It was the only Comstock mine making new discoveries. Sharon launched a campaign to seize control of the mine.
At the August 4, 1864, Yellow Jacket shareholder meeting, a month before the Bank of California formerly opened its Virginia City branch, William Sharon held 14 of the mine’s 742 voting shares. Three of his Bank of California associates—Thomas Bell, Alvinza Hayward, and Charles H. Wakelee (the man who had joined Fry in advancing Sharon the money that secured his appointment)—owned another 33 shares. That meeting produced no notable changes in the mine’s management, but the Yellow Jacket meeting in February 1865, a few months after the Bank of California commenced its Virginia City operation, showed evidence of the bank’s rising influence—the company treasurer resigned, and the stockholders elected William Ralston’s brother James to the position. At a meeting in March, Yellow Jacket stockholders elected William Sharon as one of the mine’s trustees. In May 1865, the Yellow Jacket paid a $100-per-foot dividend, making it Washoe’s leading dividend producer. Sharon resigned his trusteeship at the July meeting, and although he personally owned only 8 of the mine’s shares, he held proxies for 285 of the mine’s 711 shares that cast ballots. Treasurer James Ralston transferred the Yellow Jacket’s accounts to the Bank of California’s new Gold Hill office. A year later, in July 1866, Sharon had proxies for 540 of the mine’s 774 shares that voted in the election, and what would become known as “The Bank Ring” or “The Bank Crowd” held firm control of the mine. Bank Ring influence at the at-last-combined Chollar-Potosi described a similar trajectory, and the Crown Point was rapidly falling under Sharon’s sway.
William Sharon never revealed how or when he conceived his far-reaching, sub-rosa plan to seize control of the Comstock Lode, quash competition, and extract monopoly profits from every aspect of the mines and their supporting industries, but in gaining control of the management of the leading mines he took the first step toward making it happen. Although at best morally dubious, in an age of outrageous corruption largely devoid of corporate oversight and governance regulation, Sharon saw no reason to resist the temptation. If the lode continued in depth, whoever had the guts and the gumption to subjugate the Comstock would become the most powerful man on the Pacific Coast.
• • •
Considering the size of the prize, William Sharon wasn’t the only person scheming to rule the Comstock. Although it wasn’t initially apparent, another path to dominance existed in the worsening problem of underground floods, which stalled progress in many mines in 1864. As the leading mines delved beneath the deepest adits, pumping costs increased with every foot of added depth. Mine managers found it easy to envision a day when the cost of hoisting and pumping would exceed the milling value of the ore. Hoping to head off that fateful day, companies formed to run deeper adits that would drain the lode to the 700- and 800-foot levels. Adolph Sutro gazumped their momentum with an exponentially more audacious plan. Sutro announced his intention to build a 20,498-foot-long adit from the Carson River Valley that would cut the lode at a depth of 1,800 feet, more than 1,000 feet below the deepest of the current workings. In pamphlets, book publications, newspaper articles, meetings, political circles, and into the ears of any citizen who would lend him attention, Sutro promoted his “Grand Drain Tunnel” with a gusto that many thought tipped into obsession, prepared, as he said, “to devote, if necessary, the whole balance of my life to the execution of this one work.” Sutro insisted that his tunnel would put the Comstock mines in a position from which they could be worked profitably, economically, and extensively “for a century to come.” All he asked in return was a modest two-dollar-per-ton royalty on all ore extracted, with no company to pay anything unless it took out ore.
Physically massive and imposing, pontificating in English with a thick German accent, and as persistent as a termite, Adolph Sutro wasn’t a popular man. Returning to California through a snowstorm from a Washoe fact-finding assignment in the spring of 1860, he was the correspondent who’d encountered the first run of the Pony Express. Sutro had been involved in Washoe affairs as a miner, miller, and industry gadfly ever since. In a “Letter from Dayton” published in the Territorial Enterprise, Mark Twain pegged him as a man unable to enjoy a laugh at his own expense. Sutro constantly carped about the lack of “system” employed by the Comstock mines. He intended his deep drain tunnel to provide the missing organization. The downsides of Sutro’s deep drain tunnel was its $3 million projected construction cost and the many years it would take to build.
In early February 1865, the Nevada legislature granted Sutro and his associates an exclusive fifty-year franchise to construct and operate the Comst
ock drain tunnel. Sutro threw himself into the necessary organization, working to raise construction funds and secure contracts with the Comstock mines. For reasons that hadn’t yet become widely apparent to anyone besides Adolph Sutro, the deep drain tunnel also held the power to give him control over the mines and all their attendant industries.
• • •
News of the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Rebel Army of Northern Virginia broke in California and Nevada on the morning of April 10, 1865, triggering wild, spontaneous rejoicing. In Virginia City, “justly popular” actress Matilda Heron sent a “trusty messenger” racing to the flagstaff on the summit of Mount Davidson with a new American flag to replace the old one tattered by the zephyrs of the past winter. The spanking new banner and its thirty-five stars broke forth from the liberty pole and fluttered over Washoe as the news spread.I The Comstock erupted in patriotic pandemonium. Church and fire bells clanged. The steam whistles screeched through the cañons. Blacksmiths pounded their anvils. Rifle and pistol shots cracked into the air. Teamsters left their teams, dirt-crusted miners poured from the tunnels and shaft houses, grime-streaked mechanics and engineers abandoned their posts in the hoisting works and mills. Men embraced each other in the streets and undertook a colossal demolition of ardent fluids, toasting Lincoln, Grant, the Army of the Potomac, the flag, the United States of America, and the Union, the blessed Union, preserved at such terrible cost. Women on balconies flung confetti on the crowds below. People cheered each new flag and banner strung across the streets. Two cannon boomed. Bands paraded up and down the streets, battering out patriotic songs. After dark, bonfires blazed in the streets while skyrockets and Roman candles arced over Six Mile Cañon. With the staffs of the Virginia Daily Union and the Territorial Enterprise given over to the jubilation, both newspapers missed their Tuesday issues. San Francisco and every other town on the Pacific Coast celebrated the victorious end of the war with similar zeal.
The euphoria didn’t last. Hangovers had hardly faded four days later when, at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 15, the flag at the Daily Alta California’s office at 536 Sacramento Street suddenly dropped to half-mast. Immediately after, a bulletin posted outside their office brought the street to a standstill—President Lincoln was dead, felled by an assassin’s bullet fired by an actor, John Wilkes Booth. A rapid succession of dispatches clicking into the telegraph office confirmed the “fearful truth.” Within twenty minutes, every business on Montgomery, Sansome, Battery, Front, and Sacramento streets had shuttered its doors and windows. The courts and the stock exchanges adjourned, and the bell on City Hall commenced a slow, mournful tolling. Bells of churches and fire companies around the city joined the dirge. Vessels in the harbor tethered their flags at half-mast, as did the fortifications at Alcatraz, Fort Point, Angel Island, and the Presidio. Minute guns boomed from Fort Point and Alcatraz. Restaurants and saloons closed. Theaters and amusement halls canceled their entertainments. Strips of black cloth banded the hats and arms of most citizens, most of whom were shocked to realize that two brothers of the assassin had formerly resided in San Francisco and played in the local theaters. By 2:00 p.m., black and white mourning sheets draped nearly every building in downtown.
News of President Lincoln’s assassination struck the Comstock Lode simultaneously with its arrival in San Francisco, and as it had done “below,” the tragic news paralyzed the camps. Crowds in the streets discussed Lincoln’s murder in “low tones . . . expressive of mingled grief and wrath” devoid of “drunkenness or bluster.” Stores, banks, saloons, whisky shops, theaters, and courts draped black cloth from their doors and windows and closed in mourning. The stamps in the quartz mills slowed to a halt. The mullers in the amalgamating pans ceased their endless rotations. Engineers running the hoisting engines over the deep shafts raised the men on shift from the mines, hissed away steam pressure, and let their engine fires cool. A silence dropped over Washoe, the first in years, broken only by the slow, mournful toll of the church bells. Lincoln’s murder was the capstone tragedy of a terrible war. Lee’s surrender and the president’s assassination were the defining events of the generation.
• • •
For Marie Louise Hungerford, abandoned wife of Dr. Edmund G. Bryant, the war’s end brought no comfort. With her husband elsewhere in Nevada and her surviving daughter Eva to support, circumstances pressed hard. She continued sewing for other Virginia City women to earn money. Father Manogue arranged additional part-time work for her teaching French and music classes at St. Mary’s School for Girls. Her husband’s return brought no relief. None of Dr. Bryant’s Reese River schemes had borne fruit. He came back irascible, erratic, owing people money, and in no condition to rejuvenate his Virginia City practice—“very dissipated,” in the words of someone who knew him. Sources don’t reveal for certain whether his treatment of Louise and his three- or four-year-old daughter Eva tipped into outright abuse, but one afternoon while Louise was out working and Eva was in Dr. Bryant’s care, the child “fell down a stairwell” and fractured her hip. (Six decades later, in 1929, Mrs. Louise Meyer Howland, the friend with whom Louise had paraded down Downieville’s main street collecting gold nuggets when they were girls, said Dr. Bryant inflicted the injury when he kicked Eva in a drunken rage.) Either in disgrace or in an effort to pull his life together or both, Dr. Bryant went to San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared. Louise stayed behind in Virginia City, nursing Eva. She had no idea where he’d gone, but she had more immediate problems on her hands—Eva’s broken bone hadn’t knit properly. The local doctors expected her to limp for the rest of her life.
• • •
Peace didn’t improve Washoe’s fortunes, either. The mining depression lingered. As the Daily Alta California said a few weeks after Appomattox, only “one thing is now certain . . . the deeper the miner sinks on the Comstock ledge, the poorer and more disappointed he gets”—the exact opposite from almost everything that had been said or written about the lode prior to the summer of 1863.
The mines hung on, working low-grade ore in the upper ore bodies. John Mackay and Jonas M. Walker had every reason to number themselves among the downhearted, for they had the shaft of the “far famed and oft struck it” Bullion down 573 feet and had drifted in every conceivable direction—to “no visible effect.” They could have easily taken the proceeds of the successful speculations they’d made during the flush times and joined the many of their brethren who abandoned Washoe to seek opportunities elsewhere on the mining frontier. But Adolph Sutro and William Sharon and the Bank of California weren’t the only Comstockers with the courage to move aggressively into the downturn. Mackay and Walker also did likewise, albeit backed by much less capital and government leverage.
In 1865, as the Yellow Jacket replaced the Gould & Curry as Washoe’s leading mine, Mackay’s and Walker’s attention was caught by an obscure ninety-three-and-two-thirds-foot sliver of a mine wedged between the Yellow Jacket and the Crown Point—the long-neglected Kentuck. The stillness of Appomattox had hardly fallen over the exhausted nation when Jonas Walker crossed the entire continent in an attempt to gain control of the forgotten mine.
• • •
As recently as October 1863, the Kentuck had received no mention in an otherwise comprehensive and meticulous list of Comstock mines published by the Sacramento Daily Union, a north-to-south survey that catalogued every inch of Comstock ground from the Ophir’s north mine to an obscure claim far south of Gold Hill. The list flowed directly from the Yellow Jacket to the Crown Point with no mention of a claim existing between. Anyone reading the article would have assumed the two mines shared a boundary. Neither did the Kentuck appear in a Daily Alta California story two months later that speculated on the course of the Comstock vein south of the little Gold Hill mines. The Alta item discoursed on the Yellow Jacket, the Crown Point, and the Belcher in detail but said not a word about the Kentuck, and despite discussing Crown Point and the Yellow Jacket developments in virtually every single one of its
issues between the fall of 1862 and the spring of 1865, the Mining & Scientific Press included not a single blurb about the Kentuck.II Maps of the Comstock Lode published in 1864 and 1865 showed the Crown Point adjoining the Yellow Jacket. It was as if the Kentuck didn’t exist.
The Yellow Jacket and the Crown Point must have desperately wanted to rid themselves of the Kentuck, but neither mine could wish or lawyer it out of existence because the Yellow Jacket’s original location specifically mentioned “the Houseworth Claim” as one of its boundaries. Indisputably, Houseworth’s claim antedated the Yellow Jacket.
Valentine A. Houseworth was one of the Gold Cañon miners on-site when the Gold Hill and Ophir discoveries were made in 1859. During the first wild months before miners had much appreciation for the true value of what they’d found, Houseworth managed to buy, trade, or sweat his way into portions of the Yellow Jacket and some of the small Gold Hill claims, and he’d owned one-twenty-fourth of the Ophir. He’d sold that first season, winning $3,000 or $4,000 for mining ground that would have netted him $500,000 a few years later, and returned to his people in the East.
Somehow, the Houseworth Claim passed into the hands of John “Kentuck” Osborne, another of the original Gold Cañon miners, and the claim became known, in his honor, as “The Kentuck.” Like Houseworth, he acquired interests in other claims, but parted with them for a few thousand dollars. Unfortunately, like many of his fellow Gold Cañon pioneers, sudden wealth made “Kentuck” Osborne a profligate and open-handed man. He parted with money freely and easily, and by 1864, he was living in “modest circumstances” in Silver City, near Devil’s Gate. Osborne fractured a limb, the break failed to mend, and he died that year, his end “hastened,” an old friend would write a dozen years later, “by grief arising from an unreciprocated attachment unwisely cherished for a young woman.”III
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