The Bonanza King
Page 26
Many artificially distressed millers swallowed the bait, unaware that their signatures on the loan documents delivered their fates to William Sharon. Ore sufficient to cover the debt never reached the mill. Sharon foreclosed at the first opportunity and took possession. Between capturing the Swansea Mill in May 1866 and June of the following year, six additional mills fell into the Bank of California’s cormorant hands, every one acquired at the sacrifice of a loan less than one-fifth of the mill’s actual value.
The Crown Point’s annual election on June 3, 1867, reflected another Sharon coup. The stockholders—or their proxies—voted out the serving superintendent, president, and trustees and replaced them with five new men: W. B. Johnson, Thomas Sunderland, Alvinza Hayward, Charles Bonner, and Thomas Bell—all close associates of William Sharon and members of what would soon become known as “The Bank Ring.”
That same month, the Bank of California sold the seven mills it had acquired—at the bank’s cost—to a recently formed private company called the Union Mill and Mining Company. The eight individuals who incorporated the new company bore a striking resemblance to the most important stockholders and officers of the Bank of California, and fully half of them were on the slate of new Crown Point trustees: Alvinza Hayward, Thomas Sunderland, Charles Bonner, Thomas Bell, William E. Barron, Darius Ogden Mills, William C. Ralston, and William Sharon. They were already among the richest and most powerful men on the Pacific Coast. The Union Mill and Mining Company racket would make them even more so.
• • •
While Sharon and the Bank of California conceptualized and consolidated their milling scheme, Adolph Sutro made great progress pushing his deep-drain tunnel project. The realization that Sutro might actually succeed in making his colossal Comstock sewer a reality bent Sharon on thwarting the endeavor, for at some point Sharon realized that Sutro’s tunnel threatened to undermine his push to control the Comstock milling industry.
By the time Sharon and Sutro collided in mid-1867, Sutro had devoted well over two years to his tunnel, and although he’d never had the Bank of California’s tangible financial support, for much of that time he’d enjoyed the bank’s benevolent endorsement.
By February or March 1866—more than a year before Sutro clashed with the Bank of California—he had concluded contracts with nineteen leading Comstock mines that would grant his tunnel company a two-dollar-per-ton-of-extracted-ore royalty in consideration of the tunnel’s ventilation and drainage. Most industry experts considered Sutro’s contract generous—drainage, ventilation, and hoisting cost the mines far more. Sutro took his completed contracts, promotional materials, and a slew of expert endorsements to the East, planning to solicit government and financial support in Washington, D.C., New York, and London. Sutro carried a letter of recommendation from Bank of California luminaries William Ralston and Darius Ogden Mills—William Sharon’s superiors at the bank. In Washington, Sutro lobbied his “Sutro Tunnel Bill” through Congress, which, among other benefits, granted Sutro the right to buy two square miles of land at the tunnel mouth.
A year later, in May 1867, Sutro had pledges of financial support from Comstock mining corporations and various private individuals totaling $600,000. With the financial underpinnings finally in place, Sutro was looking toward commencing construction when suddenly, in Sutro’s own description, he watched support for his tunnel project “explode.” Sutro blamed the Bank of California. Within the bank, William Sharon captained the opposition, using mine officers in his thrall. The Crown Point repudiated its $75,000 commitment to Sutro the day after the June 1867 election installed Sharon’s slate of trustees. The Savage reneged on its $150,000 in July. One after another, the other Comstock mines withdrew their support.
In testimony delivered to the Committee on Mines and Mining in the United States House of Representatives six years later, Sutro claimed the bank tried to squash his drain tunnel because he was on the verge of obtaining a federal subsidy that would enshrine him as a Washoe powerbroker. Sutro either hadn’t yet realized why he had incurred Sharon’s enmity, or—much more likely—was masking his own ulterior motivation. Successful completion of his gigantic drainage adit would create circumstances favorable to quartz reduction mills located close to the tunnel mouth, on land owned by Sutro’s tunnel company, where mills would be free of any transportation expenses and the hydraulic force of the water pouring from the tunnel or the nearby Carson River would supply low-cost motive power—a setup that would put Adolph Sutro in control of Comstock milling. All Sutro had to do to enshrine his dominance would be to refuse to sell tunnel company land to any rival concern or offer them only prohibitively expensive leases. Any mills built outside Sutro’s landholding at the tunnel mouth would shoulder the crushing disadvantage of a transportation cost borne by none of the mills built close to the tunnel. Creating circumstances certain to gift Sutro domination of the Comstock milling industry may have been his plan from the beginning. In light of the timing—William Sharon had probably had his Union Mill and Mining Company project in the works for some months before it formally incorporated in June 1867—it seems likely that the deep-drain tunnel’s potential to control the Comstock milling industry was what made William Sharon and the Bank of California such implacable foes of Adolph Sutro in May 1867.
Millions of dollars hinged on the outcome of the contest.
Sutro’s personality didn’t help his cause. In his fixed opinion, he was right and everyone else was wrong. About everything. Comstockers tired of his “insufferable egoism,” and Sutro seriously blundered when he predicted in public that his tunnel would force the entire towns of Gold Hill and Virginia City to relocate to the tunnel entrance. “Owls would roost” in the current towns, he boasted. Every property or business owner on the Comstock heard Sutro promising to destroy the value of their investments. Adolph Sutro suddenly couldn’t raise a cent in California or Nevada.
• • •
While Sharon and Sutro pushed their divergent schemes, the mines matured into steady, productive industry. Like most businesses in other working-class American towns, Comstock mines and mills paid their employees every thirty days, and in the words of a Mining & Scientific Press correspondent who described the scene, the lode throbbed with “feverish excitement” for a few days thereafter. “The toil-stained gold” of the “honest miner” churned through the “whisky shops, hurdy-houses, theaters and red-curtained palaces” of Virginia City and Gold Hill until “he got broke.” The towns then calmed until “old gunny-sacks” rolled around again and paid off the “red-brawned muscle” that made “a monthly fool of itself.”
John Mackay was not one of those men. Having money didn’t make the camp’s seedier entertainments any more attractive to him than they’d been before he made his raise. A man of few indulgences, and fewer words, Mackay’s favorite meal remained the traditional Irish corned beef and cabbage of his youth. He drank sparingly and smoked the occasional cigar, just as he’d always done. Success suited John Mackay, but it didn’t change him, not a whit. He comported himself exactly as he always had.
Mackay either kept a simple room in a Virginia City boardinghouse or lived in the offices of his mine. Friends who dropped by after dinner usually found him poring over a piece of literature, a mining treatise, or a grammar book, still striving for self-improvement. Chief among his pleasures remained the great delight he took in all forms of theatrical performance. He’d religiously attended the plays, concerts, and operas that toured Washoe since he was a four-dollar-a-day miner. Prosperity didn’t affect the regularity of his attendance. It did improve the quality of his seats.
Mackay might not have been able to get one for Virginia City’s prime cultural event of 1866—Mark Twain’s glorious return—but he almost certainly sat or stood among the large and fashionable crowd of eight hundred who attended on the last day of October. Clemens had slunk away from Washoe in 1864 under disgraceful circumstances, having offended the ladies of Carson City with a boorish hoax. He’d spe
nt the last two years loosely based in San Francisco. Clemens had struggled with debt, doubt, and depression since his Washoe absquatulation, but he’d further honed his authorial voice with extensive writings. He prospected literary ore during a sojourn in Jackass Hill and Angels Camp in the Sierra Foothills. The product of one vein, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” published the previous November in New York’s Saturday Press, had sent Mark Twain’s reputation kiting like the stock of a bonanza mine in an era in which writers dominated entertainment. Droll, unique, sublime, hilarious, the story unleashed the voice of the American frontier on the genteel prose of New England and “set all New York in a roar.” American letters would never be the same. Clemens had spent four months in 1866 in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), commissioned to describe life in those magical isles in letters to the Sacramento Daily Union. On the heels of his return to California, Clemens decided to emulate the career of his friend Artemis Ward and deliver public lectures. Mark Twain gave his first in San Francisco, discoursing on his adventures among “the Kanakans” (Hawaiians) before a packed house in the city’s largest venue. “Twain took his audience by storm,” in the words of one critic. Best of all, he made money. Twain launched a speaking tour with appearances in Sacramento, Marysville, You Bet, and Red Dog before his eastward meandering took him across the Sierra. In Virginia City, the Comstock greeted Mark Twain with a “hurricane of applause.” The prodigal had returned, his star ascendant, and in the eyewitness testimony of the Territorial Enterprise, Twain delivered “an entertainment of rare excellence and interest.” The plainer-spoken correspondent of the Daily Alta California called his performance “an immense success.”
Over the course of the next fortnight, Mark Twain regaled captivated, convulsing audiences in Silver City, Dayton, and even Carson City, whose ladies had apparently forgiven his churlish behavior, before returning to give one final triumphant presentation in Gold Hill. Afterward, Sam Clemens trudged back to Virginia City on foot with one companion, fighting a keen wind, on his way to join friends planning an all-night celebratory send-off. Atop the Divide separating the camps, a small, masked man burst from ambuscade and jammed a pistol in Clemens’s face. “Stand and deliver!” he demanded. A half-dozen other mask-wearing “road agents” appeared from the darkness, three of whom leveled weapons at the writer. Using Confederate noms de guerre like “Beauregard” and “Stonewall Jackson,” the highwaymen relieved Clemens and his companion of their valuables. Clemens lost twenty or twenty-five dollars, two jackknives, three pencils, and a gold watch he much prized. The thieves disappeared into the darkness toward Virginia City. When it seemed safe, Clemens and his friend followed after them and joined the all-night party.
The following morning, Clemens jammed aboard the Pioneer Stage, likely nursing a significant hangover. The driver was on the verge of starting the horses when someone leaned in from outside and thrust a package into Clemens’s hands. Inside was his missing money, the lost knives and pencils, and the stolen watch—as well as the masks worn by the six thieves. The whole robbery had been a send-up, “a daring practical joke” played on him by his closest Comstock friends “in order, if possible, to get even on him for former practical deviltries on his part played upon them.”
The ruse had worked. To Sam Clemens, the holdup had been “most uncomfortably genuine.”
The stage driver cracked the ribbons, hi-yahhed the horses, and Clemens was off, leaving Washoe, never to return. Neither John Mackay nor any other Washoeite knew it then, but Clemens took with him what time would prove to be the Comstock’s greatest contribution to nineteenth-century America—Mark Twain’s pencils. Mark Twain would soar to greater heights than any of them imagined, but he had cut his literary teeth in Virginia City, the Queen of the Mining Camps, and for that, they would always claim him as their own.
Although Mackay seldom missed a theatrical event, he also enjoyed poker, his impassive demeanor proving difficult to read at the table, but it was an unwise—and likely poorer—player who failed to note the fierce competitiveness lurking behind his stone facade. John Mackay liked winning, make no mistake, and at his tiny sliver of a mine over in Gold Hill, he was. In early 1867, the Daily Alta California singled out the Kentuck as one of the most valuable properties on the Comstock “as the mine is so small and every foot of it productive.” Bracing for a siege of work, Mackay again upgraded the quality of the Kentuck’s hoisting apparatus and the power of its mine engine. Every day the mine raised around one hundred tons of a “superior class of ore.” With an eye to controlling their mine’s ore reduction, Mackay and Walker were supervising the expansion of Gold Hill’s Petaluma Mill from an eight-stamp affair to one of sixteen. (They bought the mill outright a few months later, with a third partner, F. A. Tritle.) An up-and-comer on the lode in the prime of life, now thirty-five years old, John Mackay had also become one of the Comstock’s most eligible bachelors.
• • •
Not every Washoeite was having such a good time of it. Some months before, Father Patrick Manogue received word that Marie Louise Hungerford Bryant’s errant husband, Dr. Edmund G. Bryant, lay dying of lockjaw—tetanus—at Poverty Hill, a mining camp in the Sierra Foothills ten miles northwest of Downieville. (Medical men had been using syringes to inject opiates for more than a decade; conceivably, the opium-addicted doctor infected himself with an unsterilized needle.) Father Manogue related the bad news to Louise, and she rushed over the Sierras to her husband’s side. She found him gaunt, in a squalid one-room shack, sporting an eerie, endless grin—risus sardonicus, lockjaw’s telltale rictus grin, a sustained contraction of facial muscles that peeled Dr. Bryant’s lips away from his teeth, raised his eyebrows, and held open his eyelids. Unable to speak, Dr. Bryant stared at his wife with eyes that never blinked. Tetanus’s progression of horrors pushed the doctor through fever, profuse sweating, drooling, uncontrolled urination and bloody defecation, jerking, and opisthotonus, another of tetanus’s awful signatures, massive muscle spasms that jolted the doctor’s body into a rigid, back-bending arch. In the most violent episodes, the contractions could fracture bones. Louise stuck with her husband through the ordeal. Eventually, uncontrollable muscle spasms affected Dr. Bryant’s ability to breathe. He suffocated to death on June 29, 1866. Louise, his widow, was just twenty-two years old.I
The doctor died in debt. Fortunately, in earlier days, he’d done good service in the gold camps of Sierra and Yuba counties. Miners passed the hat and discharged his obligations. The leftovers financed a humble funeral.
Dr. Bryant’s death didn’t deter Louise’s father from departing from San Francisco for Mexico less than a month later. Now styling himself General Daniel Hungerford, he sailed south to offer his sword to the liberal republican government of Benito Juárez and prosecute “active operations” against “the usurping invaders of Mexico”—the French, whose bayonets sustained their puppet dictator, Emperor Maximilian I. Hungerford left behind his wife and Ada, their nine-year-old daughter. Mrs. Hungerford and Ada returned to Virginia City and took up residence with widowed Louise and her limping daughter, Eva. The three generations of Hungerford women sheltered together under the roof at 10 A Street.
To earn money, Louise Bryant worked in the Comstock needle trades. Victorian women considered fashionable presentation important, even in a Nevada mining camp. Fashion communicated a woman’s station and cultural sophistication. Comstock women kept themselves au courant with widely circulated women’s magazines and newspaper columns whose authors looked to New York and Paris society for sartorial inspiration. The steam-powered looms of the Industrial Revolution and sweatshop clothing factories had made inexpensive, ready-made men’s clothing available in a variety of sizes, but although fabrics had become much less expensive over the last half century, bringing fashionable display within reach of middle-class ladies, elaborate hats and bonnets and close-fitting dresses defied mass production. They were almost exclusively custom-made.
Milliners—hat makers and trimmers of ha
ts—stood atop the needle trades, the most well-remunerated members of the Victorian fashion industry. They used lace, feathers, flowers, ribbons, and other “fancies” to make hats and bonnets, the capstone details of style. Dressmakers ranked next below milliners. They measured, designed, and cut the bodices, sleeves, and complex layers of draped skirts Victorian dresses required. Seamstresses working at “plain sewing” occupied the bottom rung of the fashion industry ladder. They did the tedious, repetitious, nitpicking drudgery of sewing up finished garments from dressmakers’ instructions. The labor demanded they know hemstitching, running, whipping, tacking and backtacking, herringboning, fine drawing, darning, quilting, overcasting, buttonholing, gathering, ruching, rantering, slip stitching, picking and padding, cross-, chain- and catch-stitching, stoating, blind-stitching, and backstitching, but since the techniques of plain sewing formed an essential component of every woman’s domestic education, the commonplace nature of the skillset kept their wages pinned to the industry’s bottom hem. Louise Bryant was one of them. She “went out by the day” to sew for the lode’s more well-to-do ladies and made extra money taking in piecework from stores and dressmakers. She worked all the hours she could tolerate, often sewing by candlelight deep into the night.