The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  Their prime focus—and, indeed, the overarching objective of all the leading Comstock mines in early 1869—was discovering deep-level ore. The two Irishmen refurbished the Hale & Norcross’s long-neglected upper levels, rebuilt the working stations, and began extracting the low-grade ore previous management had left behind. The proceeds of that efficient, systematic work coupled to lower-cost milling financed their deeper search for ore.

  Making good on Mackay’s promise, the Firm stopped sending Hale & Norcross ore to William Sharon’s mills. They began processing Hale & Norcross ore in mills they privately owned. Although they were self-dealing in the same vein as William Sharon, no accusation of milling waste ever stuck to Mackay and Fair.

  • • •

  Working the Comstock was difficult, dirty, and unpleasant, but lured by the best wages in the industrial world, men had flocked from all corners of the globe to labor in the sweltering mines beneath the streets of Virginia City and Gold Hill. Irishmen, Cornishmen, and native-born Americans constituted the largest national contingents, but significant numbers of Welshmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese, and Paiutes all lent their flavor to the Comstock’s polyglot culture. A small community of “colored” lived in the camps, too, although, as with the Chinese, rampant racial prejudice confined their opportunities to occupations whites considered menial. Miners were the princes of the local working classes. They wore felt slouch hats to keep dirt out of their hair and eyes, and at shaft stations far below the surface, they stripped off their shirts and went to work in trousers and boots. Streaming sweat in the feeble light of candles and lanterns, they drove the work forward with picks, shovels, hand drills, sledgehammers, and the recently invented dynamite and they earned every penny of their four dollars per day, for the work was both physically hard and astonishingly dangerous.

  Enterprise local Dan de Quille marveled at the “new and unheard-of ways” in which miners were “constantly being hurt and killed.” Fatalities, maimings, major injuries, or hair-raising close calls occurred every day. “Hundreds upon hundreds” of accidents occurred in the Comstock mines, and they happened “in every way imaginable.” Miners always thought the accidents ran in streaks, that if they’d had two or three they’d likely have a dozen, up to half of which would prove fatal. On average, the Comstock Lode suffered one death per week and one serious accident per day.

  Nor were the only hazards underground. Mining made the whole district dangerous. Sampling just a tiny smattering of the accidents that had occurred on the lode in the ten years since its discovery: A boulder falling from a drift face in a Gold Hill mine broke a man’s leg and collarbone; a thirsty mill worker took a swig of a clear liquid he supposed to be water and cored out his gullet with nitric acid used by prospectors and assayers to prove the presence of silver. A freight wagon ran over a child. A miner tamping a black powder charge with an iron rod struck a spark that touched off the blast—a rock put out his eye. A collapsing pile of shoring timbers crushed a teamster’s skull. A popular stagecoach driver trying to control a runaway team died when the stagecoach capsized and smashed him beneath. A man trying to drive a buggy through a drove of hogs lost control of his horses, fell from his seat, and broke his thigh. A sill timber being lowered into a mine slipped from its harness and killed a man below. Two men on the surface stepped into an ore bucket attached to a horse whim without noticing that the horse had been detached from the whim. They shot 230 feet to the bottom of the shaft “at the run” and would have died except for the ten feet of water in the shaft sump and the drag of the rope spooling off the whim, which slightly slowed their descent. Coworkers fished them out unharmed. An eight-year-old boy was found dead at the bottom of an abandoned forty-foot shaft. Nine-year-old Freddie Cowles toppled into a privy and drowned. The brake of a loaded ore freighter going down Gold Cañon failed. The runaway wagon crushed and killed four of the team’s six horses. A man working in a Gould & Curry ore chamber fell one hundred feet through the timber sets and died impaled on a collection of picks at the bottom. A mill worker trying to dislodge stuck amalgam poked his finger through a pan’s drain hole and had it chopped off by a passing “muller,” one of the rotating iron bars that stirred the pulp. A surprise jet of steam severely scalded the back of a man adjusting amalgamating pans in a mill. A miner brought home a quantity of amalgam, put it in the oven, then left to run an errand. Mercury vapors killed his child and rendered his wife and their German lodger “insensible.” In the Chollar-Potosi hoisting works in the spring of 1868, a bolt connecting the brake lever to the brake shoe broke. The cage—which didn’t have safety catches—plummeted down the nine-hundred-foot-deep shaft, and the braided iron wire cable spun off the twelve-and-a-half-foot-diameter hoisting reel with “fearful rapidity.” Men tending the equipment scattered for their lives as the immense centrifugal force disintegrated the woodwork frame of the hoisting reel, sending heavy pieces of wood, bolts, and iron banding flying about the hoisting works. The end of the cable whipped off the reel, smashed a ten-foot trail through the ceiling, darted through the shaft house like an angry steel snake, wrapped around the crossbeam of the gallows frame and nearly wrenched it from its foundation, then slithered down the shaft after the fallen cage—which was empty, thank God.

  A cage in the Kentuck crushed a fourteen-year-old pick carrier named Kennedy against the shaft timbers. He survived severe injuries. A boy named Miles working as an engineer’s assistant in the hoisting works of the Yellow Jacket’s South Shaft got his left thumb caught in an engine valve. The valve tore it off.

  John Russell and a gang of other nightshift miners working in the Hale & Norcross shaft in the spring of 1868 dodged a mass of rock and dirt falling from above. Several of them sought safety in different compartments of the shaft. Those sheltering in the pump compartment heard Russell call out, “I’m all right! I’m all right!” But just at that moment a cage came whizzing up. A few seconds later, a man at the station one hundred feet above saw a headless figure atop the passing cage. The man recovered from his fright and rang for a stop. Miners wrestled John Russell’s body to the station. The only evidence of his head was a flap of skin with an ear and some hair stuck to it. Russell’s head had been torn off by the passing shaft timbers somewhere beneath. Adding to the gloomy, candlelit nightmare, searching miners couldn’t find the severed head.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Chauncy Griswold got tangled in the machinery of the Pacific Mill below Gold Hill. A rapidly spinning drive shaft broke his leg and wound his torn and lacerated muscles around the shaft. A setscrew ripped a hole in his abdomen. His body spun around with the rapidly revolving shaft. His head pounding against the floor thwack-thwack-thwack stove in the side of his skull. Griswold was dead by the time his coworkers managed to stop the machinery.

  An eight-year-old boy drowned in a flume conveying water to a mill. A Crown Point miner coming up on a cage narrowly escaped death when a negligent engineer sent the cage “up the sheaves” and crushed it against the gallows frame overhead. A carman named Michael McGuire pushed a loaded car onto the cage at the Kentuck’s four-hundred-foot station. He leaned forward to secure it in place. The cage suddenly started up the shaft and jammed him between the cage floor and the station’s cap timber. The engineer on the surface sensed something amiss and slacked the cable, freeing McGuire. Unconscious, McGuire slipped from the cage, bounced off the front lip of the station floor, and fell three hundred feet to his death at the bottom of the shaft. A twenty-eight-year-old Irish miner named Patrick Price was working in an inclined winze in the Chollar-Potosi when the cave of an insufficiently timbered level beneath collapsed the ground around him. A mass of dirt, rocks, and splintered timbers carried him to the bottom of the incline. The press of earth trapped his hands and feet and the whole of his body, but a group of shattered timbers somehow protected his head. His voice echoed out from inside the collapse. Price begged his companions to dig him out, but no one dared come within twenty feet. Price spoke to his friends nearby
as the ground above his head creaked, cracked, and groaned. The other miners did their best to keep Price from learning the awful hopelessness of his predicament. Loose earth slowly piled up around Price’s face. He bore the ordeal “manfully” for more than an hour, hoping for rescue, until a long moan escaped his lips. A moment later, “one grand crash” collapsed tons of clay, rock, and mangled timbers onto Patrick Price and stifled his voice forever.

  Miners didn’t like working in the vicinity of a dead man. A corpse made a mine feel like a tomb and the work like grave robbing. Repeated efforts to recover Price’s body from the caving ground failed. Not until nearly two years later did two miners running a drift through the site of the collapse strike one of Pat Price’s legs. Rats had flensed the flesh from his bones.

  • • •

  Miners took pride in their work. They did a difficult and dangerous job, they did it well, and they enjoyed their excellent pay. Old hands were blasé about the risks, all in a day’s work, but there was one hazard that terrified them all, and that was fire. Working in mines shored by hundreds of thousands of feet of dry, compressed timber, they lived in fear of it, for an underground fire could suck the oxygen from the atmosphere of an entire mine, fill it with smoke and stifling gas, and inflict a horrible, suffocating death on men far from the conflagration.II Mine fires were also almost impossible to extinguish.

  • • •

  Before sunrise on Wednesday, April 7, 1869, the day-shift miners gathered at the mine heads along the two-mile run of the Comstock as the dawn drove the glitter of stars from the skies of Nevada. All along the lode—indeed, throughout the West and all around the country—talk was of the joining of the two railroads soon expected to take place in Utah that would link both coasts of the burgeoning nation. Bracing themselves for the nerve-racking descent on the cages into the depths of the great vein, they stood outside the shaft houses and the hoisting works sipping bitter coffee and smoking cigars and last pipefuls of tobacco. Strict edicts forbade smoking in the works below ground.

  The dawn gathered no serenity. Massive mine engines belched and hissed along the lode, pumps spouted hundreds of gallons of water (all of it captured for use or sale), and smoke poured from chimney tops above the boiler rooms attached to the shaft houses and the thundering stamp mills. Among the miners slouching around the hoisting works of the Yellow Jacket and the Crown Point that morning were two sets of brothers—Edward and William Jewell, and the three Bickells, thirty-one-year-old George, Richard, aged thirty, and James, their twenty-seven-year-old kid brother.

  That Wednesday, with the exception of a few carmen clearing ore and preparing the mines for the arrival of the day shift, there hadn’t been any miners in any of the three mines since the night shift ended at 4:00 a.m.III Underground, drifts connected the mines on several levels, and some quirk of subterranean architecture gave them a natural “draft.” The South Shaft of the Yellow Jacket was a “downcast.” Air tended to flow down the Jacket’s south shaft, through the tunnel workings connecting it to its two southern neighbors, and up the shafts of the Kentuck and the Crown Point, making them both “upcasts.”

  Forty-year-old John Percival Jones superintended the Crown Point and the Kentuck. Jones’s parents had brought him to Ohio in 1831, at age two, when they emigrated from Herefordshire, on England’s Welsh border. Jones developed into a dark-eyed, powerfully built youth with jutting brows. When he was twenty, he rushed to California with the ’49ers. He mined in Trinity County and served as county sheriff. Elected to the California State Senate in 1863, Jones served until the California Republican Party named him its candidate for lieutenant governor in 1867. Jones stood for statewide election, but lost. In the aftermath, he went to the Comstock, signed on with the Kentuck, and settled in Gold Hill. Jones kept the tops of his cheeks clean-shaven, but beneath a line connecting the base of his nose to the point at the back of his jawbone, he cultivated a splendiferous beard that poured down to his breastbone. Jones proved himself industrious, efficient, and competent, and within a year, William Sharon elevated him to Crown Point and Kentuck superintendent. In charge of well over a hundred miners, carpenters, carmen, mechanics, engineers, blacksmiths, firemen, and other specialists, Jones discharged his duties admirably, pleasing his superiors and earning the admiration of his underlings.

  In accordance with Superintendent Jones’s “tight ship” expectations, the Crown Point lowered its first cageload of miners right on the stroke of 7:00 a.m. that Wednesday. The men aboard grasped the crossbar of the cage for support as they rattled down the timber-framed shaft, careful not to extend a body part beyond the edge of the open-sided cage. The cage dropped fast, and the thick timbers buttressing the shaft blurred past. They swiftly amputated the arm, leg, or head of any man fool enough to allow an appendage to protrude. While they were underground, the cages, the braided wire cables, and the hoisting machinery far above were the only threads that linked them to the surface. The Crown Point cage dropped a pair of miners at the 230-foot level and continued down, unloading men at the 600-, 800-, and 900-foot stations. When the last men were off at the deepest station, someone rang the hoisting bell, and the engineers on the surface raised the cage, leaving about twenty-five men dispersed throughout the mine, including several who worked for the neighboring Kentuck. They traveled through connecting drifts into Kentuck ground. (The Kentuck’s engine and hoisting apparatus usually sat idle, an economizing measure.)

  Among the first group of Crown Point miners beginning their workdays in the feeble light their candles and lanterns cast into the gloomy excavations were the two sets of brothers, Edward and William Jewell, and Richard, George, and James Bickell. A similar scene played out three hundred feet to the north, where about two dozen others rode a cage down the Yellow Jacket’s South Shaft.

  Ascending from the Crown Point’s lowest station, the empty cage took about half a minute to reach the shaft house landing. Another few minutes passed as a foreman organized the second load, a roughly equal mix of Crown Point and Kentuck men. Counting those on the second cage, about forty-five to fifty-five men were inside the mine. A few hundred feet northward, several dozen more dropped into the Yellow Jacket.

  Unbeknownst to any of them, they’d descended into a death trap.

  • • •

  Three hours before, at the end of the night shift, a Yellow Jacket man had violated one of mining’s cardinal rules and left a candle burning unattended on the mine’s 800-foot level, in a twenty- to forty-foot-wide drift 135 feet north of the Kentuck boundary. Behind the departed miner, with its wooden holder poked into a shoring timber, the forgotten candle burned to a nub. The tiny flame caught fire to its holder and spread to the mine timbers. The conflagration blazed briefly, casting hellish light into the empty drift and burning toward a closed wooden door on the Yellow Jacket/Kentuck boundary. The door slowed air circulation and contained the smoke. The fire consumed the majority of the available oxygen and burned down. For the next couple of hours, the fire smoldered in the darkness, building heat as it chewed slowly into the dry, compressed shoring timbers, producing large quantities of odorless, colorless, poisonous carbon monoxide gas as a by-product of the incomplete, oxygen-starved combustion of organic material, an incendiary time bomb ready to detonate the instant it received a fresh supply of oxygen.

  That infusion probably arrived with the billows of air driven beneath the cages that lowered the first loads of day-shift miners. Charged with oxygen, the superheated timbers burst into angry flame that ate into the weakened timbers like a ravenous animal and filled the drift with smoke.

  When the Crown Point cage went up for a second load, the men left underground dispersed through the tunnels toward their assigned work locations. None of them seem to have sensed anything amiss until a powerful explosion rocked the mine—probably the result of a tunnel collapse caused by the failure of fire-eroded timbers and the door burning from its hinges. Like a gigantic bellows, the cave launched a roaring shock wave of smoke and poison
ous gas up the tunnels. The wind and oxygen-depleted air extinguished the miners’ candles and lanterns, plunging them into darkness. Bewildered, coughing and choking in stifling smoke and in complete blackness, many men panicked, blundering wildly through the darkness, desperate to find breathable air.

  A vision of the shaft station flashed through the mind of one terrified miner as he careened off the drift walls toward the eight-hundred-foot station—for working ease, the stations didn’t have safety walls. Suddenly aware that he risked falling into the shaft, the man dropped to his hands and knees and groped forward, feeling for the edge. Other horror-stricken miners didn’t have the same presence of mind. Three men rushed past the crawling man and pitched over the edge. Impact on a metal grating partway down dismembered one man. The other two died at the bottom of the shaft two hundred feet below.

  The explosion came on several Kentuck men with a hellish roar, after they’d crossed into their mine. The blast of compressed air, smoke, and stifling gas extinguished their lights. One of them fought through blackness back to the Crown Point’s eight-hundred-foot station. A second man lost his way, collapsed, and asphyxiated to death. Joseph Glasson decided his best chance lay in running for the Kentuck shaft. He made it, too, but like the three unfortunates at the Crown Point station, he misjudged the distance, ran off the edge, and plunged to his death in the sump.

  John Murphy, the Crown Point’s station man at eight hundred feet, heard the explosion howling toward him seconds before the gale hit the station and extinguished the lights. He sank down and wrapped his head in a coat. To no avail—he briefly passed out. When he came to, he heard a weak voice echo up the shaft from below. “Murphy . . . Send me a cage . . . I’m suffocating.”