The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  On the home front, Louise and her mother made plain, homemade calico dresses for themselves and their girls. Father Manogue catalyzed a slight improvement to their circumstances when he interceded with the Daughters of Charity—the Catholic order of religious women wearing grayish-blue habits and starched white cornets who’d founded Virginia City’s St. Mary’s School in 1864—and obtained Louise a place tutoring French and music. Mrs. William Mooney lived next door, and she couldn’t help but notice the Hungerford women “having a hard time making ends meet.”

  Another woman who knew Louise at the time remembered her as “beautiful, charming, and accomplished, with a rather small rounded figure, dark blue eyes, chestnut hair, a soft voice, and a radiant engaging manner.” Men still vastly outnumbered women in California and Nevada in 1866, the companionship of a respectable woman being scarcer than gold and silver, and Louise didn’t lack for interested suitors. She did needlework for the Rosener Brothers’ store, one of the lode’s leading mercantile establishments. Camp gossips speculated that when she doffed her blacks she’d marry Harry, the younger brother.

  On the opposite side of Louise Bryant’s house from the Mooneys’ lived an Irish couple recently moved to Virginia City, James and Theresa Fair. Although James Graham Fair stood only five feet eight inches tall, his massive physique impressed every man who met him. Years of brute labor had packed hard mining muscle onto his barrel-chested frame. He weighed well over two hundred pounds, and like Mackay, James Fair possessed a phenomenal capacity for work. The youngest son among the children of a pair of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Fair had been born in the Irish village of Clogher, in County Tyrone, sixty miles west of Belfast, on December 3, 1831, making him all of five days younger than John Mackay. The Fairs emigrated to the United States in 1843 and settled in Geneva, Illinois. Headstrong, cocksure, and determined, adolescent James Fair turned his nose up at opportunities to pursue the law or the printing trade, neither striking him as “the road to fortune.” And as he told a biographer in his later years, a fortune he meant to have.

  The California gold discovery ended Fair’s adolescence. He made the long overland trek to California in 1849, when he was eighteen years old. In August of that famous year, James Fair struck a pick into the auriferous gravels of Long Bar on the Feather River, above Yuba City. He found little gold at Long Bar, but at the placers of Rich Bar, discovered the next year, he “filled his sacks” with the precious needful. In the next two years, he mined at Poor Man’s Creek and Shaw’s Flat and coyoted under the lava beds at Table Mountain, in Tuolumne County. Fair grew into a shrewd, practical man in the diggings, and he filled out his frame, a handsome man with a full beard, dark, deep-set eyes beneath a high forehead, and strong, stern features. Nothing about James Fair betrayed weakness. He had a gruff, manly energy and an eye for the main chance, and he “knew the exact value of a dollar.”

  Fair bought a farm near Petaluma in 1853. Drought wilted his first wheat crop. An overly wet season rusted his second. Mining seemed less risky. Fair leased the ranch and returned to Angels Camp in the Sierra foothills, where he found himself amidst California’s first quartz-mining excitement. The more technical aspects of quartz mining and ore reduction suited Fair’s mechanical inclinations, and he did well. Books, music, natural philosophy, and the arts meant nothing to him. Mining and getting ahead absorbed his entire interest. He constantly tinkered with mine machinery, seeking improvements. At Angels Camp, Fair met Theresa Rooney, an affable, enchanting, and deeply Catholic young widow who ran a boardinghouse in the nearby town of Carson Hills. Fair’s Irish charm worked magic on Theresa Rooney, and they married in 1862. Four years later, James Fair sold his California holdings and moved his family to Virginia City. By that time, he and his wife had a young son. In Virginia City, they would have another son and two daughters.

  Fair’s competence impressed the Comstock. He was superintending the Ophir within a year of arrival. Toward the end of 1866, Fair shifted his shingle to the Hale & Norcross, at the time a much more productive mine, where he operated as an assistant to the superintendent, in charge of major constructions.

  Unsentimental and untroubled by conscience, Fair labored in clear-eyed self-approval, convinced he knew more about mining than anybody else. One of the best “practical miners” in the Far West, Fair tended toward the arrogant and boastful, but he could lay on thick Irish blarney when needed, particularly around a man in a position to advance his career such as John Mackay. The two became acquainted. Fair was much more gregarious than his new friend, full of bonhomie and hail-fellow-well-met. Comparing the two men ten years later, a writer said that Mackay seemed not to trust his “conversational powers.” Mackay and Fair didn’t share much personal warmth, James Fair was, if anything, a harder man to get close to than John Mackay, but in light of their backgrounds, the two Irish-American miners had much in common. They got along well enough, and they respected each other’s professional capabilities. Without doubt, they were two of the Comstock’s best miners. Fair’s wife, Theresa, was a much more genuine person, and in the last half of 1866, she and her husband often invited John Mackay to dinner at their A Street cottage.

  Snows hit the lode in December, the start of a severe winter. The boys of Virginia City indulged their favorite winter amusement—“coasting” down the steep cross streets on sleds, whizzing down from the high side of the camp, shooting across the main streets, and careening down to the next level. Theresa Fair asked John Mackay to join them for Christmas dinner. Unable to resist the opportunity to play Irish matchmaker, Mrs. Fair also invited her widowed neighbor—Marie Louise Hungerford Bryant.

  Christmas at the Fairs’ was a great success. In John Mackay’s own tongue-tied, reticent manner, he swooned for Louise Bryant. Having supported a widowed mother and sister since age eleven, he certainly understood her struggles. Unlike so many others in class-conscious nineteenth-century America, Mackay made no judgments about the menial work she’d done to survive. He admired it. All work was honorable in his eyes. And although Mackay was thirteen years older than Louise Bryant, he began courting the young widow.

  Over at the Kentuck, Mackay kept operating expenses low by ensuring that his mine’s deepest workings never delved below those of the adjoining Crown Point or Yellow Jacket, a trick that forced his larger neighbors to bear the cost of pumping the groundwater to drain the mines. Mackay had the mineshaft down to 485 feet, and as if the wheel of mining fortune hadn’t already favored him enough, in April, Crown Point miners running a prospecting crosscut 150 feet east of their 500-foot station, away from the west stratum, broke into an entirely new quartz mass streaked with lenses of millable ore. Prospecting drifts quickly revealed that just as in the west stratum, the new east ore body pitched all the way through the Kentuck into the Yellow Jacket. Considering the east ore body’s distance from the Kentuck shaft, the best way for Mackay and Walker to work the deposit would be to sink another shaft directly on the ore body—an expensive proposition. The obvious alternative was to work the ore through the Crown Point and the Yellow Jacket, whose shafts were much closer, but that meant negotiating complicated use agreements with Sharon-controlled mines, and Sharon, who coveted the Kentuck’s slice of the east ore body, wasn’t likely to make that easy. Faced with those complications, Mackay and Walker made no effort to work their new ore. They left it in situ, like money in the bank.

  The Kentuck’s monthly returns reached $132,334 in May and stayed well over $100,000 per month through the rest of the summer of 1867, as the neighboring Crown Point passed into William Sharon’s control. Some Kentuck stock had hit the market in May, the first reported sales in over a year. The shares debuted at about $200. By July, they’d risen to $562. For the month of August, the Kentuck paid $80,000 in dividends, and the Mining & Scientific Press published an account of the mine’s operations that included costs of extraction, hoisting, reduction (of 2,657.5 tons of ore), timber (212,623 feet installed), fuel (51.75 cords consumed), and payroll. Such detaile
d reporting came in direct contrast to William Sharon’s regime at the adjacent Yellow Jacket. The same issue of the newspaper reported, “After diligent inquiry in various quarters, we can give no information whatever in regard to the present condition of the mine”—a lament that would frustrate Yellow Jacket stockholders for years to come.

  Complicating matters for John Mackay, Jonas Walker had made a trip to the East in the autumn of 1866. When Walker returned, he told Mackay that he didn’t fancy spending his whole life rooting through the bowels of barren Nevada. Success would seem sweeter if he took his wife and children East and enjoyed it. In addition, Walker had a brother in Virginia touting a spectacular railroad investment opportunity. Walker had always had it in mind that he’d be set for life if he could make a $600,000 “raise,” and in four years of partnership, he and Mackay had amassed assets worth twice that amount. Jonas Walker had reached the point where he wanted to sell out.

  John Mackay and Jonas Walker spent the latter half of 1867 dissolving their partnership, which they effected by selling most of their Kentuck ownership to William Sharon. Walker took his share, embarked on a long European tour, settled in Philadelphia, and made the railroad investments his brother suggested. As Mackay would say years later, “When Walker had $600,000 he thought he had all the money in the world.”

  Between November 1, 1865, and November 21, 1867, dates that encompassed the entirety of their management, the Kentuck had disgorged bullion worth more than $1.6 million. Of that sum, the mine had paid $592,000 to its stockholders in fourteen dividends, a 37 percent yield. Mackay and Walker pocketed a substantial chunk of those dividends and compounded their earnings by privately milling the mine’s ore ($20,000 cash remained in the company treasury). No other Comstock mine had paid out such a large portion of its gross yield.

  To close out the dissolution of their partnership, in late October, Jonas Walker sold his one-third interest in the Petaluma Mill to William Sharon, and John Mackay and F. A. Tritle each conveyed a one-twelfth interest to Sharon. The transaction left half of the Petaluma ownership vested with William Sharon. Mackay and Tritle equally shared the other half. Under a power of attorney, San Francisco’s shrewd Irish stockbroker James Clair Flood executed the Petaluma deed on Walker’s behalf—the earliest documented association between Flood and Mackay, although Flood had likely handled the stock sales associated with the dissolution of the Mackay/Walker partnership.

  The Kentuck’s late-October election reflected the changes. The stockholders elected a new slate of trustees—Thomas Sunderland, Alvinza Hayward, James C. Flood, James W. Bricknell, and William Sharon. The Bank Ring had drawn the Kentuck into its expanding sphere of influence. The end of his partnership with Walker left John Mackay casting about for other opportunities, for unlike his now-former partner, John Mackay wasn’t ready to retire from mining. Not even close.

  • • •

  In 1867, while the Mackay/Walker partnership dissolved, James Fair superintended construction of the Hale & Norcross’s new second line shaft.

  The Hale & Norcross located its new shaft about a thousand feet downhill of the original workings and broke ground around the time that Mackay met Louise Bryant at the Fairs’ house during the 1866–67 holiday season. Built under Fair’s exacting eyes, what became known as “the Fair Shaft” incorporated the most important technical and technological advances Comstock miners had made since the lode’s discovery.

  The Fair Shaft started as a rectangular hole in the ground seventeen feet six inches long and seven feet six inches wide. A stout frame of twelve- to fourteen-inch timbers assembled along the lines of Deidesheimer’s square-sets divided the shaft into three compartments, two for hoisting and one for pumping. (Several of the second line shafts included a fourth “sinking” compartment through which crews did the work of digging the shaft deeper.) Three-inch planks set outside the timber frame completely enclosed the shaft to prevent debris falling from the shaft walls. With each new six or seven feet of downward progress, carpenters added another layer of square-sets (also called “cribs”) to the bottom of the shaft timbers. The cost of the work increased with depth. Enormous pressures applied by shifting, swelling ground often distorted or cracked the shaft timbers, forcing timbermen to remove and replace the disturbed sets—a dangerous job performed over an enormous drop.

  Around the mouth of the shaft on the surface, mine workers built a sturdy masonry foundation to anchor the mine engines, boilers, winding reels, other machinery, and a “gallows frame” or “headframe” of massive timbers rising over the shaft mouth. They enclosed all of it in a “shaft house” with a large landing and engine room, a boiler room, smithy, carpenters’ shop, repair shop, changing room, and other conveniences. Timber and wood yards outside held the mine’s supplies of framing timbers and cordwood fuel, a weighing house for measuring the size of loads carried by freight wagons, and delivery landings for receiving supplies.II

  Chimneys sprouting above the boiler room discharged smoke from the wood-fired boilers that generated the high-pressure steam that powered two large engines—one for hoisting and another for pumping. Gears on the drive shaft of the hoisting engine meshed with gears on two ten-foot-diameter winding reels spooled with flat ropes of braided steel wire about the width and thickness of the extended fingers of a man’s hand. From the winding reels, the flat “wire ropes” passed over enormous “sheaves”—wheels of wood or iron eight to ten feet in diameter—suspended from the gallows frame above the shaft opening and positioned so the wire rope passing over the sheave dropped directly down the center of the hoisting compartment below it. In each hoisting compartment, the wire rope attached to a “cage”—the elevators that gave access to the mine.

  The cages were formed from two simple seven- or eight-foot-tall triangular wrought-iron frames joined at the top by a crossbar and at the bottom by an iron grid supporting a wooden floor. Above the crossbar, a “stem” joined the cage to the hoisting cable. Attached to the iron cage frame at top and bottom on both sides were iron flanges called “ears” that embraced the “guide rods,” four-by-six-inch pieces of wood that ran from surface to sump on opposite sides of the hoisting compartments. (Miners had learned the hard way that wooden guide rods were more forgiving than iron ones, less likely to stick or bind the cages, an occurrence almost always attended by serious consequences.) Both sides of the cages away from the frames and guide rods were left open for working ease.

  Men underground communicated with the engine “driver,” or “engineer,” via a bell wire or bell rope loosely hung hundreds of feet inside a line of iron staples. (Most mines preferred hemp bell ropes to wire ones because hemp didn’t rust and breaks could be quickly spliced.) Sharp tugs on the bell rope rang an iron gong or triangle in the shaft house directly in front of each hoisting compartment’s driver, the number of clangs signaling whether to raise, stop, or lower the cage. (Adjacent hoisting compartments used different bells, with different clang tones.) Miners distrusted newfangled systems that relied on the closing of an electric circuit to power an electromagnet that swung a bar that struck the bell—because it was prone to short circuits that sent false signals and couldn’t be relied on in a wet mine and especially because of the impossibility of sending emergency signals to the surface from points in the shaft between stations.

  Early Comstock cages had been almost entirely devoid of safety features, but the newest cages incorporated many recent improvements, “safety catches” and “safety hoods” paramount among them. The safety catches worked by using the weight of the cage suspended on the cable to hold springs in tension. If the cable broke or the brake on the hoisting reel failed, the released spring pushed sharp iron teeth called “dogs” into the wooden guide rods and caught the cage in place. (In February 1867, thirteen Savage miners aboard a cage equipped with new safety catches being lowered down their shaft came to a sudden stop with so little drama they didn’t realize the cable had detached from the cage. Due to the considerable weight of the cable, ne
ither did the engine driver above in the shaft house. Only cable slack drooping past the iron “safety hood” atop the cage to protect them from falling objects alerted the miners to their close brush with death. They quickly rang for a stop.)

  The best safety hoods were built in two halves that split in the middle and hinged apart, primarily so that long timbers could be sent down the shafts, but also because of what had happened to a pair of Gould & Curry miners accidentally lowered into deeper-than-expected sump water in the bottom of the shaft and trapped beneath an unhinged hood. Only the quick response of the engine driver on the surface to the clanging of the hoisting bell saved the men from drowning.

  In the shaft house at the surface, the engine driver stood at his station with the throttle valve in one hand, the reversing bar in the other, and the brake underfoot. In plain view of the driver, a circular “indicator” calibrated to the winding machinery pointed to depth marks and stations marked around the circumference of the instrument that indicated the location of the cage in the shaft. Operating procedures at well-run mines strictly forbade speaking to an engineer at his station about anything not directly connected to the performance of his duties. All ingress to and egress from the mines was done via the cages and hoisting apparatus—none of the mines provided ladder access to the workings—and engineers were selected and trained as the most reliable and responsible men in the workforce. The lives of everyone underground depended on their diligent attention.

  The most sophisticated shafts equipped with the most advanced hoisting apparatuses—like the one James Fair was sinking for the Hale & Norcross—could raise a loaded cage while simultaneously lowering another as counterbalance in the adjacent compartment. Twelve miners crammed aboard a cage was the normal working load of men. Of ore, the hoists easily raised a ton at a time. Drivers raised and lowered loads of men at about 300 to 400 feet per minute. They moved unaccompanied ore cars at speeds that exceeded 800 feet per minute. Many of the second line shafts increased capacity by evolving to use double-decker cages.