The fire had already killed thirty-seven men, made ten women widows, and orphaned more than twenty children, but it hadn’t claimed its last victim. A gang of Yellow Jacket miners descended to the mine’s four-hundred-foot level. A man among them named William H. Williams felt woozy, as if he wasn’t breathing good air. He asked out. On the cage up, Williams collapsed. His upper body fell outside the cage. A passing timber yanked him off. Williams plummeted five hundred feet to the bottom of the shaft, making another widow and three more fatherless children.
• • •
Not until the warm and sunny last day of April were miners finally able to hoist ore from the Yellow Jacket and the Kentuck—the first since the outbreak of the fire. Miners in the Crown Point tackled a more gruesome task: wrapping the rotten bodies of four more men in canvas shrouds and raising them to the surface. Despite hopes that the mines would be working at full capacity by the beginning of May, the fire refused to die. The Yellow Jacket collapsed its connections to the other mines, effectively ending its problem. Unable to extinguish the fires still burning, the Crown Point and the Kentuck sealed their 700- and 800-foot levels despite the paying ore still remaining in those galleries. There seemed no other way to end the debacle. The bodies of three men were never recovered.
As time gave the Comstock community perspective to reflect on the calamity, many recognized that they had much for which to be thankful. Although only some of those on the 800-foot level survived (because the cage happened to stop there after the fire announced itself) and not a soul in the Crown Point’s 900-, 600-, or 230-foot levels escaped, the fire had erupted right as the day-shift miners went on duty, when the mines were mostly empty. If they’d been as full as they’d have been in the middle of a shift, many times the number of men would have been underground, most of whom would have died.
The lode tried to get back to business as usual. By the first week of May 1869, excitement over the impending connection of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads had largely displaced news of the fire from the California newspapers.
When officials of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads lined up for a “last spike” ceremony at the site of their joining, Promontory Summit, Utah, on Monday, May 10, 1869, San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton, and most of California had already celebrated the event. They’d thrown their parties two days before, on Saturday, so as not to interrupt the working week. “Above,” in Nevada, Comstockers “saved their powder,” preferring not to celebrate until the last rail had been laid and the last spike driven.
When it happened, a terse telegraphic message from Utah clicked into the Virginia City telegraph office: “The last rail is laid; the last spike is driven; the Pacific Railroad is completed.” Of the four special spikes used at the ceremony, the Comstock had contributed one of silver, mined, reduced, refined, forged, and engraved in Virginia City. An attendant ran Old Glory up the flagstaff over the telegraph office, the awaited signal. What once seemed impossible was now an established fact. An iron highway spanned the continent.
The flag’s appearance released everything capable of making a noise in Virginia City and Gold Hill. The jollification persisted through the remaining daylight and concluded after dark with a grand torchlight procession of the firemen.
Construction of “the Pacific Railroad” had taken more than six years. Completion reduced travel time between New York and San Francisco from about twenty-four days via Central America to eight days on the railroad. To the people of California and Nevada, it seemed the capstone accomplishment of a glorious decade, “the greatest industrial achievement of modern times,” and “the dawn of a new era for the Pacific Coast.” Old pioneers considered it the most significant event on the Pacific Slope since the discovery of the Comstock Lode almost exactly ten years before. Most people expected “the great National Highway” of iron rails would open the way to years of expanding prosperity. They could hardly have been more wrong.
• • •
One person benefited from the mine fire—Adolph Sutro, who latched on to it as a means of revitalizing his long-thwarted tunnel project. He laid blame for the thirty-seven or thirty-eight deaths squarely on the Bank of California’s doorstep: If the Bank of California had allowed him to build his tunnel, the miners could have used it to escape.V (The Yellow Jacket never did figure out how many men they’d lost, exactly.)
By August, Sutro had convinced the local Miners’ Unions to buy $50,000 worth of tunnel stock. That wasn’t but a tiny fraction of the money needed to drive his 20,498-foot adit, but it was enough on which to commence work and give “foreign”—meaning East Coast and European—financiers evidence of local confidence in the endeavor. In a packed public meeting at Piper’s Opera House on September 20, Sutro delivered his tunnel screed in his thick German accent and gave the first great public airing of Bank Ring malfeasance. In the aftermath, William Sharon received threats against his life.
Given that Sutro lambasted William Sharon’s Virginia & Truckee Railroad project as nothing but “another gigantic scheme of pilfer,” seeing the rapid progress being made on its construction must have been galling to Sutro. Twelve hundred Chinese laborers pushed the V&T toward completion, smoothing, grading, bridging, and tunneling the convoluted path that would allow steam trains to run between lumber yards around Carson City, the Bank Ring’s quartz mills on the banks of the Carson River around Empire City, and the Comstock mines. Workmen constructed a spectacular bridge over Crown Point Ravine into the heart of Gold Hill. “The Crown Point Trestle” passed directly over the Kentuck mine. Excitement at the railroad’s approach rode high. Nothing symbolized progress in nineteenth-century America more than a railroad.
Sutro had baked revenues for the transportation of ore and supplies to and from the mines into his tunnel company’s projected earnings. The V&T would put those earnings in William Sharon’s pockets instead.
Sutro held a ground-breaking celebration for his tunnel in October. In unpleasant weather, Sutro made an uncharacteristically short speech, turned around, hefted a pick, and struck the first blow. Within ten days, three shifts of three miners had the tunnel in fifty-two and a half feet. More than twenty thousand feet of hard digging lay between them and the Comstock Lode.
William Sharon derided it as “that famous tunnel . . . started the other day on a basket of champagne and four bits.” With his railway nearing completion, he could afford the sarcasm.
The track reached Gold Hill in mid-November. At ten minutes to 5:00 p.m. on the blustery afternoon of November 12, 1869, the engine “Lyon” steamed around the bend south of Crown Point Ravine, Stars and Stripes streaming from both engine and tender. William Sharon rode in the engine with the driver and others prominent in the railroad. Large crowds stood watching. Conscious of all the eyes upon him, the train driver stopped his locomotive just short of the enormous trestle spanning Crown Point Ravine. After a pause, he triggered a “shrill screech” of his whistle and moved out onto the trestle. Every steam whistle in Gold Hill answered the call. Church bells rang, and “General Grant,” the old thirty-two-pound cannon on Fort Homestead, boomed, joined by every other noisy thing in town. At the midpoint of the bridge, eighty-five feet above the ravine bottom, the locomotive shrieked out a succession of “unearthly howls.” Sharon and the others waved their hats, and as “the iron horse” rolled the rest of the way across the bridge onto terra firma and into the crowd of men, women, and children gathered beyond, all the men afoot raised their hats and returned Sharon’s salute with full-throated cheers and shouts. The train slowed to a stop.
Sharon gestured to the “champagne and other liquid refreshments” on a long table and invited all to take a drink. John Percival Jones mounted the engine tender and made a speech praising William Sharon and the railroad. Sharon came forward in response to loud cheers and made a brief speech of his own, in which he praised by name “those who had toiled with him in the planning and execution of this great and good work.”
“Sharon’s iron
mules” went to work hauling previously unprofitable low-grade rock taken from the seven-hundred-foot level of the Yellow Jacket’s north mine, where ore bins dumped directly into the freight cars. Within a week, they’d delivered nearly four hundred tons. Mule-drawn freight wagons had charged $3.50 per ton to haul ore from the Gold Hill mines to the Carson River. The V&T performed the same service for $2. Trains returned with wood, lumber, and shoring timber. The price of a cord of wood dropped from $15 to $11.50, then to $9. Transportation costs for other supplies and comestibles fell in similar proportion. The cost reductions breathed new life into many Comstock mines.
• • •
The Comstock needed the jolt. From 1867’s total product of $13.7 million, the Comstock’s bullion yields had slipped to $8.5 million in 1868 and then to about $7.5 million in 1869—the lowest annual total since 1862. The Bullion mine contributed nothing to those depressing results. Mackay still held the superintendent’s mantle, and he’d taken the mine down to the fourteen-hundred-foot level, where his miners drifted through an immense body of low-grade quartz that filled the entire width of the vein. Not a ton of it would pay the cost of extraction. Mackay had seen the mine from close to the surface down to fourteen hundred feet without finding a single body of profitable ore. Mackay lost interest and ended the connection with the mine he’d maintained for five or six years.
Fortunately for the firm of Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O’Brien, the Hale & Norcross was one of the few Comstock mines that did well that year. The old upper levels produced bullion sufficient to finance the further sinking of the Fair Shaft. Crosscuts on a new level more than a thousand feet below the shaft landing passed through a body of “most excellent” ore filled with rich “black sulphurets and green chlorides,” and varying in width from twenty-seven to forty feet. The Mining & Scientific Press called the ore body the most important development in the mine since 1865.
Under the Firm’s able management, the Hale & Norcross paid $192,000 in dividends in the last half of 1869. Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O’Brien compounded their earnings with the profits of milling ore. John Mackay might not have known it quite yet as 1869 came to a close, but his wife was developing an even bigger bonanza. She was carrying his child.
* * *
I. We moderns call it “The Golden Spike.” People in 1869 referred to it as “the last spike” or “the last rail.”
II. Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier had discovered oxygen nearly a hundred years earlier, and although Priestley also isolated carbon monoxide and the existence of a poisonous gas produced by the incomplete combustion of wood had been known for centuries, miners hadn’t yet identified carbon monoxide as the stifling gas produced in underground fires.
III. The author suspects the three mines worked two ten-hour shifts, 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., one hour off for the shift change, and 6:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., with three hours off between 4:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m.—a much smaller payroll than three eight-hour shifts.
IV. In retrospect, it seems likely that they charged the fire with new oxygen each time they lowered a cage.
V. Whether that was true was open to debate—a steady supply of fresh air might have done nothing but conjure an even more wild inferno.
CHAPTER 12
Jones’s Sick Child
The spectacular Crown Point Trestle of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, which passed directly over the Kentuck mine in the heart of Gold Hill.
* * *
Purchasers of the advanced price will probably lose their money.
—Mary Jane Simpson, “Virginia Gossip, December 1, 1870,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 3, 1870
The Virginia & Truckee Railroad pushed William Sharon’s popularity on the Comstock to the highest level it would ever attain. To raise the money needed to finish construction—and avoid spending his own coin—Sharon had mortgaged the partially completed road. Not until two and a half months after reaching Gold Hill did the railroad lay the last mile of track through to Virginia City. The first train into town kept up a “fierce tooting” as it “passed triumphantly” into a depot near the Gould & Curry hoisting works on January 29, 1870, an inspiring sound of progress to inhabitants of Virginia City long accustomed to the jingling bells of ten-mule teams and the “hi-yah mule” calls of the freight packers. Only after the railroad euphoria waned did the citizenry pause to reflect on the fact that they’d paid for the majority of the railroad’s construction without receiving a share of its ownership. William Sharon kept it all for himself and his Bank Ring cohorts. The uncomfortable realization left many Comstockers feeling conned.
Regardless, the Virginia & Truckee was an impressive engineering accomplishment. The railroad traced six and a half easy miles from Carson City to the quartz mills on the Carson River at Empire City before it hit the steep, convoluted grades that took it up to the Comstock mines and made its reputation. Over the thirteen and a half winding miles beyond Empire City, the engines huffed and puffed up nearly sixteen hundred feet of elevation, bridging ravines and gullies and tunneling through spurs and ridges. Climbing toward Gold Hill from the lower end of American Flat, the course of the road swung through every point of the compass. The curves through the railroad’s twenty-one-mile length summed to seventeen full 360-degree circles, although it wasn’t just the serpentine course of the railway Dan de Quille referred to in 1876 when he called it “the crookedest road in the world.”
Some years later, after the Virginia & Truckee had secured its place in railroad history as the most profitable short line in America, putting more than $2,000 per day of clear profit in his pockets, William Sharon boasted to a friend that he’d “built that road without its costing me a dollar.”
The Virginia & Truckee built spurs to the most important mines and mills and one to Silver City, forcing hundreds of mule and ox teams that had served the mines since the early days to seek opportunities elsewhere in the West. William Sharon and the Bank Ring at last had gained monopoly control of Comstock transportation. The railroad also added a whole new class of hazard to the lode. Hopping Virginia-bound freights as the trains labored uphill through the Gold Hill Station became a popular game among local boys. The railroad superintendent published notices warning parents to keep their children away from the trains, to no avail. Perched on the freight cars, the boys rode in glory into Virginia City. In early January, a seven-year-old boy defied his elder brother’s attempts to stop him and jumped for a flatcar from the end of the platform in the Gold Hill station. He lost his balance and toppled into the gap in front of the following car. The wheels of the next two or three cars nearly cut his little body in half and strung his entrails along a stretch of track. The poor child gasped for a few minutes before expiring.
Despite the reduced costs of timber and transportation, troubles dimmed the lode’s long-run outlook. The railroad couldn’t find new ore bodies, and although there were tens of thousands of tons of low-grade rock in the upper levels of many mines, the Hale & Norcross and the Savage shared the only ore body a thousand feet below the surface. As it had in all previous mining depressions, the Comstock’s future hinged on the discovery of new, high-quality ore bodies going deeper.
California wasn’t having an easy time of it, either. The economic panacea supposed to have been delivered by the new Pacific railroad never materialized. Instead, the railroad brought hard times. California manufacturers couldn’t compete with cheap “foreign” products imported over the railroad from the eastern states. Many businesses failed. Unemployment soared. Real estate values tumbled. Nor had much rain fallen in the winter of 1869–70. Crop yields dwindled. Stunted grasses didn’t fatten cattle and sheep. Price spikes had seen California’s farmers and ranchers through previous droughts, but this time, midwestern foodstuffs rolling west on the railroad satisfied demand. Agricultural prices stayed flat. When a heavy storm finally hit California and the Comstock—too late in the season to make much difference—a depressed man in Virginia City stripped off his clothes, lay down in
a puddle of rainwater, and drowned himself.
In March, a white mob attacked Chinese laborers employed at a quartz mill in Empire City and destroyed their huts and property. Lamenting the “great cost” of a trial and reasoning that one would only inflame “the feeling of prejudice already existing against the Chinese” and acquit the “parties charged,” a grand jury investigation declined to pursue indictments. On March 30, Texas became the last of the former Confederate states readmitted to the Union. That same day, the secretary of state of the United States formally certified the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Eight days later, the “colored citizens” of Virginia City and Gold Hill marched through both towns to celebrate its ratification, for the amendment guaranteed them the right to vote—or at least it guaranteed that right to the men among them. The best efforts of Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women’s rights activists had failed to get the franchise extended to women. The Virginia Brass Band thumped out patriotic airs at the head of the parade. Behind them, the first row of marchers carried a banner with the words “Justice is sure, but slow” around the striding figure of Liberty. Behind impassive faces, any Chinese residents of Virginia City who observed the procession, as well as any progressive-minded women, surely wished Liberty would pick up her gait.
Few Comstock mines did well in 1870. The Yellow Jacket worked ore, but the mine’s assessments exceeded its dividends. In May, the Chollar-Potosi cut a rich and extensive ore body in a neglected part of the old upper mine, but the entirety of the discovery existed above the 400-foot level and did nothing to change the lode’s long-run prognosis.
The only other important mine that did well that year was John Mackay’s Hale & Norcross. With the richness of the mine’s fourteen-hundred-foot level revealed in May and early June 1870, Mackay took his very pregnant wife and daughter Eva to San Francisco. He wanted his wife to have the best midwife in the West, and should it come to that, access to the very best doctors. Nor did Louise have any desire to spend the last two months of her confinement on the Comstock. The family checked into the Grand Hotel on June 9. Three stories tall with four hundred rooms built around a central courtyard roofed in glass, the Grand filled the block at the southeastern corner of Second and Market streets. San Francisco’s newest and finest hotel, the Grand had already acquired a reputation as the preferred home of “the wealthier of the hotel-patronizing families,” a place to “revel in the golden aspect of California,” meet the Washoe nabobs, and join them in “drives to champagne breakfast at the Cliff House.”I Early risers in the best top-floor rooms enjoyed views of the sun lifting free of the Oakland Hills while its first golden rays danced on the waters of the bay. The city around the Mackay family still suffered the hardships of the post-railroad economy, but the Hale & Norcross mine had paid $164,000 in dividends in the first six months of 1870. John Mackay’s share of that probably ranged between $30,000 and $60,000. His share of the Firm’s milling profits during those months probably approached the upper figure and could have been more. Louise was twenty-six years old, full with child, and fresh in the blooming of youth. Stunning fortune and a fairytale marriage had freed her from servile poverty and made her rich. She intended to enjoy it. As for her thirty-eight-year-old husband, what he most wanted was for her to be happy.
The Bonanza King Page 34