Sturdy iron grates covered the mouths of the hoisting compartments—a feature designed to lessen the almost always fatal occurrence of people falling into the mine shafts. The safety hoods of arriving cages simply lifted the grates from the floor. They dropped back into place when the cage lowered. Sections of track bolted to the cage floors held the loaded “ore cars” or “cars” during the hoists. “Landing attendants” in the shaft house greeted the arriving cars and disposed of their contents as appropriate. They pushed cars of milling ore down a track and dumped them into ore bins where the ore awaited transportation to the mills. They pushed cars of waste onto a track that ran out the downhill side of the shaft house onto a long, raised trestle and spilled the contents over the side onto the “dump.” A large, well-run Comstock mine working a productive ore body beneath powerful hoists with a full complement of men easily raised three hundred tons per day.
The pump engine and pump machinery in the shaft’s third compartment was every bit as elaborate as the mine’s hoisting apparatus. In the Hale & Norcross, a “beautiful and efficient”—but desperately expensive—Corliss beam engine drove the pumps with high-pressure steam piped from the boiler room. That steam pushed a twenty-six-inch-diameter cylinder through a six-foot stroke that turned a drive shaft and rotated a massive iron “pump-wheel” or “drive wheel.” To translate the rotational force of the drive wheel into a linear up-down motion that raised and lowered the pump rod, one end of a large connecting rod called a “pitman” was attached to the outside of the drive wheel. The pitman’s other end joined to the “king post” at the apex of the “pump bob,” a massive wrought-iron isosceles triangle whose long, flat bottom balanced on a sturdy axle. The rotating pump wheel drove the pitman attached to the king post at the top of the triangle back and forth, rocking the pump bob on the axle like a child’s teeter-totter. One end of the triangular pump bob supported the pump rod going down the pump shaft. A huge counterweight dangling from the other end of the bob rocked up and down in the “bob pit,” a large hole dug in the floor of the shaft house to contain it.
The pump rod was constructed from thirty-foot sections of pine trunk, trimmed to twelve inches square by steam-powered saws in the carpenters’ shop, spliced end to end and strapped on all four sides with iron plates twelve feet long, six inches wide, and half an inch thick held in place by one-inch-diameter bolts. “Catching pieces” attached to the massive pump rod at regular intervals averted calamity in the event of a fracture by catching the rod on the guide timbers that contained its rise and fall. The major Comstock mines were too deep for the pumps to raise the water to the surface in one continuous lift. Mines managed the problem by engineering a series of raises between pumping stations dug into the shaft walls at two-hundred-foot intervals.
The deepest pump at the bottom of a mineshaft was always a “lifting pump.” Lifting pumps (sometimes called “sump pumps”) functioned when submerged, and because they worked on the pump rod’s upstroke, they didn’t need to be permanently anchored in place, a crucial feature at the bottom of an actively sinking shaft. The lifting pump drew water from the sump and up a pipe to a discharge into a cistern at the lowest pump station. From that pump station on up the shaft, firmly anchored force pumps powered on the downstroke of the pump rod did the work, pushing water up a pipe to the cistern at the next-highest pump station. The process repeated in 200- or 250-foot leaps until the water discharged either on the surface or into the mine’s deepest drainage adit. The up-down strokes of the pump rod varied in the different mines, from three or four feet to about seven or eight, and a correctly balanced pump rod had enough “real” weight left over from the counterweights to do the downstroke work without help from the engine. Engine power supplied from above raised the rod back to the apex of the stroke. A slowly working pump made three or four strokes per minute, in which time every one of the pumps on the way up the shaft raised about 250 gallons of water. Combating a large influx, the pumps could accelerate to ten or twelve strokes per minute and lift 750 to 1,000 gallons—impressive capacities that still weren’t always equal to floods caused by the breaching of one of the Comstock’s major underground water chambers.
Washoeites considered the hoists, pumps, and machinery of the Comstock’s second line shafts to be marvels of modern engineering. Compared to what would be built in the years ahead, they were but toys.
With Fair pushing the sinking, the Hale & Norcross’s second line shaft progressed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. By early February 1867, Fair’s men had completed most of the surface installations, and his miners had the shaft down 75 feet. In the first week of June 1867, the same week as the Bank Ring’s takeover of the Crown Point, Fair had the shaft at 430 feet, and his miners were adding 42 feet of depth every fortnight. Fair pushed the work through the summer. Unfortunately, Hale & Norcross yields plummeted in August and September. The mine’s stock price fell precipitously, from $3,500 per foot to around $900, and the mine’s trustees canceled the October dividend. When the Fair Shaft reached the 930-foot level, Fair oversaw construction of a shaft station and Hale & Norcross miners began drifting back toward the ledge, hoping to cut into the lower extensions of the ore being worked farther up in the old mine.
• • •
Although mining matters and the unwinding of his partnership with Jonas Walker occupied much of Mackay’s attention in 1867, there was something, or rather, someone who was never far from the forefront of his mind—Louise Bryant. Mackay was always making up reasons to appear at the Fair residence on A Street, hoping to have the opportunity to exchange pleasantries. Theresa Fair lent a hand, too, often including Mackay and Louise at the family table. (Mackay also found time to give some of his good fortune away. In February, he bequeathed a gallon of brandy, a case of wine, 200 pounds of flour, 115 pounds of beef, and an assortment of other items to the Catholic Daughters of Charity.)
Mackay did his awkward best to court the young widow. Very likely, he indulged Louise with trips to the theater, an entertainment that, aside from the pleasures of the performance, didn’t tax his conversational powers. In the spring of 1867, the theater company of actor John McCullough, one of the great tragedians of the age, gave a month of performances in Virginia City. The company mostly did Shakespeare—Hamlet, Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Richard III were among the company’s standards—sprinkled with Edward Bulwar-Lytton’s Richelieu (“The pen is mightier than the sword”), Virginius by James Sheridan Knowles (“I hear a sound so fine there’s nothing lives ’twixt it and silence”), Camille, The Fate of a Coquette by Alexandre Dumas, and Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth. The Territorial Enterprise raved about McCullough’s Othello, and claimed his departure from the Comstock would be “more generally regretted than that of any actor who ever visited Virginia, not more for the esteem in which his professional qualities are held than the regard which is entertained for him personally.” William Sharon had sponsored McCullough’s Comstock run, but John Mackay carted off the biggest prize—a genuine friendship with the great actor that endured for the rest of McCullough’s life.
Things progressed just as well between John Mackay and the widow Bryant. After a suitable period of courtship, he proposed.
For her part, Louise was more cautious. John Mackay wasn’t as handsome as James Fair, nor did he ooze affable Irish charm. In both characteristics, Mackay probably also lagged behind her departed husband. Louise had developed a warm personal affection for the unpolished, stuttering miner, but he wasn’t an educated man. Louise worried about matching herself to a man who couldn’t manage to break himself of such uncouth phrases as “me and Fair.” However, she took his measure. Mackay exhibited none of the weakness that had unmanned the late Dr. Bryant. After much deliberation, Louise decided that, although still young, she might go farther and fare worse. She accepted Mackay’s proposal.
Worried about losing his suit, at some time during his courtship, Mackay supposedly blurted, “I am a rich man and can give you eve
rything you want.”
If so, it was a promise he kept for the rest of his life.
Father Patrick Manogue married them on November 25, witnessed by James and Theresa Fair. To commemorate the event and to assure favorable press coverage, Mackay sent champagne to the local newspapers—a case of Krug to the Territorial Enterprise, a case of Carte d’Or to the Daily Trespass, and “a superabundance of sparkling wine” to the Gold Hill News.
Pleased with the gift, the Gold Hill News published “a pleasant memento of remembrance on the occasion” and added “greetings to the newly wedded” and wishes of joy and love. The Daily Trespass had “an old acquaintance with the couple” and knew them “worthy of each other.” The Territorial Enterprise waxed most effusive. Likely it was local reporter Dan de Quille, who probably gushed, after loosening a cork, which he did far too often: “It is seldom that as brief an announcement affords us so much gratification, or that a case of Krug honors the chronicling of as happy an event. The union of so estimable a couple and the devotion of a thousand worthier friends make every wish of joy and prosperity which we could utter superfluous; and so we simply offer the congratulations which all who know them must extend to two so worthily mated that none can say which made the better choice.”
A few days after the wedding, the Hale & Norcross fired James Fair. The way Fair always told it, having completed the hard and technical task of sinking the mine’s new shaft beyond nine hundred feet, he’d been shoved aside to make way for the less competent relative of one of the mine’s trustees. In the other story, he’d been fired for insubordination. Both versions probably contained elements of truth. Whatever the case, James Fair’s unemployment and the dissolution of Mackay’s partnership left both men at loose ends in the primes of their professional lives.
• • •
As one of her first acts after their wedding, Louise had a headstone installed over the grave of Marie Bryant, the infant daughter she’d lost to the septic sore throat four years before. She could finally afford it. Her husband bought a lot on the corner of Virginia City’s Howard and Taylor streets for $5,000 and commissioned construction of a cottage with a gabled roof, a picket fence, and enough space to house his new wife, daughter, mother-in-law, and ten-year-old sister-in-law. Louise decorated it with brocade, polished oak, and a Turkish carpet. For her, the parlor—a parlor!—was the most wonderful detail. For young Marie Louise Hungerford Mackay, ashamed of the menial work she’d had to do in Virginia City, burdened by painful memories of a dead child and a failed and possibly abusive marriage, and with no love of western Nevada’s awful beauty, it wouldn’t prove nearly enough. She’d begun to nurse a vision of existence that leaped far beyond the alkali dust and mechanical clamor of the Comstock.
* * *
I. Although tetanus was one of the terrors of the nineteenth century, the United States averaged fewer than thirty cases per annum between 2001 and 2008. Most cases occurred in people who had not been properly vaccinated. Thirteen percent of the afflicted died.
II. The photo on the jacket of this book is of the shaft house of the Hale & Norcross’s Fair Shaft.
CHAPTER 10
The Irish Coup
In the deep levels, men worked dripping sweat in the sweltering, oxygen-depleted atmosphere.
* * *
Entrusted with the management of property belonging to others, [the Bank Ring] grew rich from its plunder.
—“Stock Swindling,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 21, 1872
By the end of 1867, bloc voting the shares for which the Bank of California held proxies had firmly enthroned William Sharon as the most powerful man on the Comstock. He used that muscle to fortify a vertical monopoly. Sharon elected the trustees at most of the Comstock’s productive mines, among them the Crown Point, the Kentuck, the Yellow Jacket, the Alpha Consolidated (formed from several of the small original claims on Gold Hill), the Chollar-Potosi, the Savage, the Gould & Curry, and the California. Through the trustees—always well-compensated Bank Ring associates—Sharon controlled the mine superintendents, and through the superintendents, he controlled the mines’ supplies and services contracts and wielded decisive influence over everybody who worked in them. William Sharon’s insistence on restrained, businesslike management eliminated much of the excess and frivolity and some of the redundant effort that had plagued the Comstock’s early years, and in that regard, he did the lode a service. However, his private ownership in the Union Mill and Mining Company divorced his personal interests and those of his Bank Ring co-owners from those of the shareholders in the mines they controlled. Mining dividends no longer overly concerned William Sharon. His fortune and the fortunes of the other Bank Ring insiders hinged on the nonstop pounding of the Union mills’ stamps, and to make sure that happened, he wasn’t above having his superintendents dilute ore with unprofitable rock.
On Sharon’s instructions, “his” mine officers sent ore only to reduction mills owned by the Union Mill and Mining Company. Surviving independent mills offered to undercut the Union mills’ charges for equal bullion recovery—to no avail. Over the next two years, ten more independent mills fell into Sharon’s hands. He specifically targeted mills around Empire on the banks of the Carson River. Those mills had freely available hydraulic power and were close to the most practical railroad route that might one day link Virginia City and Carson City to the transcontinental railroad then cutting its way across the Sierras.
By the end of 1867, average Comstock milling charges had fallen from the $30 per ton they had been in the early years to around $20 per ton. Mills still guaranteed a return of 65 percent of an ore’s assayed value—that figure hadn’t changed even as mill efficiency improved a few points. The mills kept the difference. In a square transaction, from a ton of ore assayed as containing $90 worth of gold and silver, a mill extracted about $60 worth of bullion. The other $30 ran off in the tailings. (An efficient mill might keep $5 or $6 extra for itself, but even then, the quick and dirty Washoe process lost $24 or $25 worth of metal in the tailings. The tailings could be reworked at a profit, and often were, but the mines never saw a dime when it happened.) So, in that square transaction, of $60 worth of “saved” bullion, $20 paid the mill’s reduction charge, and $40 returned to the mine.
The Comstock mines contained many tens of thousands of tons of low-grade quartz that held gold and silver, but not in concentrations sufficient to pay the cost of extraction and milling. Squarely run mines left that stuff underground in the hopes reduced costs would one day render it profitable. However, not all mines operated on a straight string. Mixing a ton of valuable ore with a few tons of unprofitable rock reshaped the economics. That same ton of $90 ore mixed with two tons of $9 rock and sent to a reduction mill returned bullion worth about $70. Since that bullion reduced from three tons of rock instead of one, the mill earned $60 where it should have earned $20. Of the original $70 worth of metal, only $10 ever reached the mine, just enough to show a positive mill return in the ledgers. The mine received $10 where it should have gotten $40, and the mill earned $60 instead of $20. For a mill owner, the arrangement was excellent. For mine stockholders, it was a disaster—one they didn’t know was occurring. Mining had evolved into a very technical profession. Although anyone with a little experience could identify the rich black sulphurets or greenish chlorides of first-class ores, things weren’t so obvious at the other end of the value spectrum. No veteran miner’s casual glance into an ore bin could tell $15 rock from the $30 variety without the aid of professional-caliber assays.
In late 1867 and early 1868, Comstock mines sent in excess of five hundred tons of rock to the mills every day. In a few cases, Sharon-controlled mines diluted their ore with such large quantities of unprofitable rock that bullion returns didn’t suffice to pay the milling charges. When that happened, William Sharon had his trustees impose an assessment on the shareholders to discharge the debt. Sharon held proxies. He and his Bank Ring cronies usually held very few shares in their own names,
especially before they levied an assessment. Assessments therefore cost them trivial sums. They made money as long as the Union mills kept pounding. Stockholders made and lost money from assessments, dividends, and the rise and fall of their share prices. Sharon’s racket was more or less a sure thing; the option left to the stockholders most definitely was not.
The Yellow Jacket provided the most egregious example of Sharon’s management. In the fall of 1867, after months of lamenting the poor quality of the Yellow Jacket’s official advices, the Mining & Scientific Press reported “a reliable source” who told them the Yellow Jacket was milling twelve-dollar ore, which would show “a deficit of at least $40,000.” Stockholders who missed the brief report’s implications didn’t realize they were being robbed. Yellow Jacket stockholders paid an “Irish dividend”—an assessment—to make up the difference.
Under Sharon’s management, the Yellow Jacket worked ore from 1866 to 1872 and every year it paid dividends. The Jacket also levied a nearly equal sum of assessments. For most of that time John D. Winters served as superintendent, at $500 per month. Winters quarreled with Sharon in the end and confessed to friends that he’d lost his self-respect feeding Sharon’s mills. “I’ve mixed waste rock with Yellow Jacket ore until it would scarcely pay for crushing,” he said.
The Bonanza King Page 28