• • •
Railroads had Nevada’s attention in 1868. When the Central Pacific Railroad reached the Truckee Meadows, landowner Myron C. Lake gave land to the railroad in return for its promise to build a depot. Lake laid out a town site around the depot, named it Reno in honor of a fallen Union officer, and sold town lots at a “spirited” auction that netted him more than $30,000. The Central Pacific’s first passenger train from Sacramento steamed into the new town at 8:10 p.m. on June 18, 1868.
“Hurrah for the Railroad!” applauded the Territorial Enterprise.
Speed mattered in the nineteenth century. In business, speed meant profit and competitive advantage. In personal matters, speed passed correspondence between friends and family in mere days where it had previously taken weeks, or even months. People paid for speed, and two rival concerns set up horse relays, Pony Express style, to bring the latest newspapers and correspondence the last twenty-seven miles from Reno to Virginia City. At the train station, the chargers and riders of the Pacific Union Company lined up against those of Wells, Fargo & Company. The express riders received their pouches tossed down from the train doors and tore off out of town. Comstockers took to wagering on the daily races. “Eager spectators” lined C Street every afternoon and cheered the winning horse into town. Dozens of drinks and hundreds of dollars changed hands. The fastest runs employed eight to ten relays of horses and two or three riders and often carried the mail from Reno to Virginia City in less than an hour and a quarter. A run made by the Wells Fargo ponies in 1869 covered the route in fifty-three and a half minutes.
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The railroad race to unite the two coasts of the sprawling nation captured the attention of the entire country. Citizens of California and Nevada expected “progress” as they labored to raise a modern, “civilized” society from the wildernesses of the Pacific Slope and the Great Basin. William Sharon used those expectations and the railroad excitement to pressure the citizens of Washoe, Lyon, Ormsby, and Storey counties into financing construction of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad. To increase the anxiety of Washoe, Lyon, and Ormsby counties, Sharon commissioned the survey of a route that bypassed them entirely, going north and northeast from Virginia City to the transcontinental line. The survey was the bluff of a consummate poker player. Sharon had no interest in a railroad that wouldn’t link the Comstock mines to the Union mills on the Carson River, but the Central Pacific track building east across Nevada, away from Carson City and the Carson and Washoe valleys, provided the perfect metaphor. Sharon put it to those communities in simple terms: “Do it, and live; or refuse, and die.”
In a remarkable flurry of fund-raising muscle, William Sharon pulled together $1.2 million for railroad construction in less than two months: Ormsby County bonds gave the railway $200,000; Storey County bonds contributed $300,000; Lyon County issues added $75,000; Sharon-controlled trustees of Comstock mines forked over sums that totaled another $700,000. (For credit to their transportation accounts, Yellow Jacket stockholders paid an assessment to finance their mine’s $150,000 contribution.)
By December, the financial details had fallen into place. Sharon summoned surveyor Isaac E. James to his office. “Can you run a road from Virginia City to the Carson River?” Sharon asked without preamble.
“Yes,” answered the surveyor.
“Do it, then. At once!” Sharon said.
• • •
Far removed from the Comstock, Adolph Sutro labored to secure financial and government support for the deep-drain tunnel scheme he refused to abandon. Sutro visited financiers in San Francisco, New York, London, and on the European continent. In Washington, D.C., he again badgered the U.S. Congress for loans and subsidies. At every turn, Sutro found himself thwarted by the tentacles of the Bank of California pulling levers thousands of miles removed from the Comstock.
Remarkably, Sutro, “the indefatigable,” achieved an audience with President-elect Ulysses S. Grant in February 1869, and President Grant’s Inaugural Address showed Sutro’s influence. About halfway through the brief address he’d written himself, President Grant mentioned “a strong box” of precious metals “locked up in the sterile mountains of the far West [which] we are now forging the key to unlock.” When, in his next breath, Grant mentioned that “it may be necessary also that the General Government should give its aid to secure this access,” mining industry people who read the address in the next day’s newspapers supposed Sutro had struck “a favorable lead.” People paying closer attention might have noted a negative indication in President Grant’s emphasis on reducing the national debt. The new Congress gave Sutro’s tunnel no special consideration. When Congress adjourned in the spring of 1869, Sutro stood almost exactly where he had two years before, stymied in every direction by William Sharon, William Ralston, and the Bank of California.
In reality, he’d lost ground, because out in Nevada, in the sweat, grit, and peril of the mines, technological and technical improvements revolutionized capabilities. A new and more powerful explosive, ventilating blowers, and improved hoisting and pumping machinery were making it possible to work the Comstock Lode in depth without the aid of Sutro’s drain tunnel.
• • •
Around the time William Sharon had bragged about pocketing that first cool quarter million in the winter of 1867–68, a letter published by the Daily Alta California reported the lode’s namesake, Henry Comstock, “prospecting for quartz” in the Montana Territory near a remote camp called Butte City. That was just the same as it ever was in news pertaining to Henry Comstock. Obsessed with “finding another Comstock” in Montana quartz, he’d missed out on the phenomenally rich placers exploited at Diamond City, Montana Bar, and Confederate Gulch, where stories told of lucky miners washing $1,000 from single pans of dirt—just shy of four pounds of gold. Although the letter’s author portrayed the famed prospector as still having “a buoyant heart and confident faith in the future,” every miner in every camp knew he’d squandered the best chance in the West. Around cook stoves and campfires, he must have seen it in a thousand pairs of eyes.
More Henry Comstock information surfaced in the Cheyenne Leader six months later, in June 1868. He’d braved the “scalping knife of the crafty and vigilant Sioux” to reach another mushroom town, this time South Pass City, principal settlement in the new Sweetwater mining region four hundred miles southeast of Butte, in the “Dacotah” Territory (as the Mining & Scientific Press spelled it in 1868).
In a letter to the Territorial Enterprise, Comstock claimed he had personally struck the area’s “principal surface diggings.” A June letter from South Pass City reprinted in the Sacramento Daily Union reported “Comstock, of Washoe fame” making “$100 a day” and asked, “What will the doubting Thomases and wise men who said there were no diggings here think of that?”
They undoubtedly thought someone was lying.
The exodus soon began. By September, of the several thousand miners who’d rushed to the new diggings, “not more than 100” were left, many having rushed on to the latest, greatest discovery—White Pine, in eastern Nevada. Henry Comstock was one of the few who stayed behind. A man returning to the Boise Basin from the Sweetwater mines said that Comstock was doing backbreaking labor washing the gravels of a small claim and making about five dollars per day.
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Newly married and profitably divested of a superb mine, John Mackay wasn’t ready to rest on his laurels in 1868. Bullion mine stockholders made John Mackay the mine’s superintendent at their April 1868 election. In that role, he continued the careful, systematic explorations that had characterized the mine since its early days. (Mackay had been involved since 1863 or 1864, and his influence had much to do with its working methods.) The Bullion had the deepest shaft in Nevada, and using “Giant Powder,” the brand name of a new explosive compound produced in San Francisco under license from Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, Mackay directed prospecting drifts from a station at twelve hundred feet. Five times m
ore powerful than black powder and much more stable than nitroglycerine, a substance so dangerous that most miners refused to work in its vicinity, Giant Powder was also known by the name Nobel had given it—dynamite. Using dynamite in place of black powder meant miners could bore smaller-diameter holes to admit the more powerful blasting compound, which in turn moved greater quantities of rock. Dynamite speeded work, lowered costs, and improved the safety of a staggeringly dangerous profession. Using dynamite quickly became standard underground practice.
The Mining & Scientific Press described the bottom of the Bullion shaft as “dry as a lime-kiln and as hot as an oven.” Deep in the Bullion, Mackay’s men drifted through solid, close-grained veinstone that betrayed no sign of ever being broken up, cracked, or otherwise disturbed by geological agitations. It was easy and safe mining, but they found no ore. By year’s end, the Bullion’s shaft had encountered the Comstock’s footwall. To prospect deeper, Mackay and the trustees sank an incline on the dip of the vein from twelve hundred feet to fourteen hundred feet. The mine swallowed immense sums, as it had since its incorporation, and found nothing of consequence.
To spread his risk, Mackay had maintained separate and simultaneous mining ventures since he’d first begun to acquire feet. Chaos in the Owyhee (pronounced O-why-hee) mining districts of southwestern Idaho, 370 miles northeast of Virginia City, attracted him to what seemed like an excellent opportunity to invest at fire-sale prices. Owyhee County was a reasonable place to look, for the region stood second only to Washoe among the silver-producing areas of the United States, albeit a distant second, producing about $1.5 million per annum.
After their discovery in the summer of 1863, the original Owyhee mines made a tremendous showing of shallow ore, but the two boss men of the Owyhee camps overextended themselves acquiring new property, went broke, and failed to pay their workforces. A flurry of forced sales, attachments, litigation, and resentment depressed prices and retarded development. George Hearst toured the Idaho mines in the spring of 1867, scouting for investment opportunities. He judged excellent the prospects of a mine called the Rising Star. In December, Hearst bought it with some San Francisco associates. Less than a week later, an entity called the Boyd Silver Mining Company incorporated in San Francisco to exploit the Rising Star’s first southern extension. George Hearst and William Lent were among the Boyd’s five trustees—and so was John Mackay. (Both Hearst and Lent had been among the Ophir mine’s original incorporators.) By the end of the summer, either the Boyd had merged with the Rising Star (possibly in the mine’s recent recapitalization), or Mackay had bought largely into the latter claim, for his name appeared as a substantial stockholder among those who hadn’t yet paid the mine’s most recent assessment. Among the other delinquents were Lloyd Tevis and George D. Roberts, two prominent San Franciscans with Comstock backgrounds, George Hearst, and an Irish-born San Francisco saloonkeeper-turned-stockbroker named William Shoney O’Brien (who should not be confused with Jack O’Brien, the man with whom Mackay arrived on the Comstock in 1859). Mackay’s friend and neighbor James Fair had gone north to superintend the mine. When the recapitalized or consolidated company elected officers, James Clair Flood emerged as one of the trustees.
By the time they got involved with the Rising Star, James Flood and William O’Brien had been partners for at least a dozen years. Like John Mackay and James Fair, O’Brien had been born in Ireland, of humble parentage, and brought or sent to the United States at a young age. Although ethnically Irish like the others, James Flood was the only one of the four who had been born in the United States, to a pair of Irish immigrants of New York City’s “hard working class.” Although nothing has ever suggested that Mackay, Flood, and O’Brien knew one another before coming to California, the rough streets of New York City’s Irish neighborhoods shaped their formative years. Flood learned the carriage-making trade, but caught the California fever in 1849. O’Brien came down with the same infatuation working in a store. Separately, they sailed to California. O’Brien landed in such penurious circumstances that he had to earn a few dollars helping discharge the vessel’s cargo before he could afford a meal ashore. For the rest of his life, O’Brien told the story of the generous stranger who’d given him the old pair of boots that made it possible to do the job safely.
Both men worked for a year in San Francisco before going to the mines in 1850. In one set of stories, Flood raised $3,000 in the Yuba River diggings; in another, he made it working a gulch on the middle fork of the Feather River with William O’Brien and Jonas M. Walker, John Mackay’s future partner (which, if true, would explain all the connections). O’Brien invested his mining proceeds in a San Francisco liquor distributorship, then sold out and opened a ship’s chandlery near the waterfront. Flood took his gold back to New York and married Mary Leary, whose impoverished father had sold the family cow to fund her move to America. Flood bought a farm in southern Illinois, but didn’t last in agriculture. He returned to San Francisco in 1854, accompanied by his wife, and opened a carriage livery and repair shop near O’Brien’s chandlery. The two became fast friends. San Francisco’s 1855 depression ruined both of their businesses. O’Brien observed that the downturn had done nothing to diminish San Francisco’s thirst. The two men formed a partnership, one that only death would sunder, and opened the Auction Lunch Saloon on a corner of the Washington Market, one of San Francisco’s busiest locations. Vendors of meat, game and poultry, fish, cheese, butter, fruit, and vegetables crowded the market, a spacious hall whose faux-rock-plastered arches fronted on Washington, Sansome, and Merchant streets. The Auction Lunch Saloon was a “bit house” that sold two drinks for a quarter, as opposed to the city’s higher-toned “two bit houses” where twenty-five cents bought only one. Like many San Francisco watering holes, the Auction Lunch provided a spread of savory lunch snacks gratis to its patrons. The partners drew large custom from the market and the auction and commission houses that peppered the district and became famous for sartorial splendor. A kind, jolly, gregarious bachelor, William O’Brien stood out front in a broadcloth suit wearing a high silk hat, chatting with passersby and his many acquaintances and inviting them in to quench their thirst and enjoy a bite to eat. Behind the bar, James Flood mixed the drinks. A naturally fair and stocky man with a short neck, ruddy Irish features, a bushy goatee beard and mustache, and massive muscled shoulders that made him resemble “a retired gymnast,” Flood always wore a high-quality gray suit in place of the barkeep’s usual apron and acquired a reputation as one of the best mixers of cocktails on the Pacific Coast. Aside from their clothes, nothing distinguished Flood and O’Brien from any other pair of San Francisco’s many “shrewd and thrifty vendors of drinks.” Few suspected that Flood’s slow, measured speech and deliberate manner hid an intense drive to succeed.
The Comstock discovery and subsequent boom in the buying and selling of feet presented Flood and O’Brien with opportunity ancillary to the sale of liquid refreshment. The foot-swapping nexus developed one block west of the Auction Lunch Saloon, on Montgomery Street, and in 1862, the San Francisco Stock & Exchange Board opened in rooms at 600 Montgomery Street, just a few hundred feet away.I The Auction Lunch became a popular watering hole for those involved. Tips and insider information flowed over Flood and O’Brien’s bar top. They cultivated relationships with local brokers and speculators and with miners and touts in town from “above.” Flood began making minor stock market investments on behalf of himself and his partner and discovered a latent instinct for stock market operations. They amassed a modest pile. Sometime between September 1867 and October 1868, Flood and O’Brien stepped back from active management of the Auction Lunch Saloon and opened an office devoted to stock trading three blocks away. James Flood handled the stock transactions associated with the dissolution of the Mackay/Walker partnership, and since both Flood and O’Brien on one hand and Mackay and Walker on the other operated as partners, with pooled interests, Mackay must have known both men. Considering the timing of Flood and O
’Brien’s shift to full-time stock market operations, handling the large-scale Mackay/Walker dissolution may have been what gave Flood and O’Brien the courage to make the change. Whatever the case, Jonas M. Walker was so pleased with Flood’s friendship and services that he named a son in Flood’s honor and a daughter in honor of Flood’s wife—James Flood Walker, born in 1868, and Mary Flood Walker, born the following year. (The namings lend weight to the story that Walker and Flood mined together in early Gold Rush days. Not for another several years did Walker name a son in John Mackay’s honor—John Mackay Walker.)
Sources don’t reveal whether Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O’Brien formed a partnership before their Rising Star operations, but ownership and management of the Idaho mine involved all four men. Their go-ahead energy showed in the Rising Star’s steady development. Superintendent Fair’s miners found “beautiful ruby silver” spanning the entire width of a six- to ten-foot ledge, the Mining & Scientific Press admitted several magnificent Rising Star specimens to its prestigious display cabinet, and Rising Star stock appeared on the San Francisco Stock & Exchange Board. The public expected great things from the mine.
A problem lurked in all of that beautiful ruby silver flashing a dark, blood red color from within its crystalline structure. The scientific name of one of the principal varieties communicated the difficulty—polybasite, referring to the many base metals contained within.II Antimony, copper, arsenic, lead, sulfur, and silver all lurked in Rising Star ores,III making them “rebellious” or “refractory,” which in mining terms meant difficult and expensive to reduce. (The Rising Star’s rich deposits of “docile,” easily worked near-surface ores had given way in depth to the more “rebellious” varieties—miners didn’t yet understand this as the result of “supergene enrichment,” an as-yet-unexplained physical process that often concentrated rich ores near the surface in western silver mines.)
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