Operating on the belief that they had something deep in the Con. Virginia that might spill over into the neighboring mines—but without ever tipping the stock market to their intentions and provoking battles for control—Flood and O’Brien bought enough stock to give the Firm control of the Best & Belcher, and the Gould & Curry, which also freed them from having to pay a Sharon-controlled mine for use of its shaft. (The stupendous quantity of ore coming out of the Belcher mine and the success of the V&T railroad tipped Sharon’s interests away from needing to control individual mines—all the mines paid to use the railroad.)
The stock market remained unimpressed. Con. Virginia shares opened 1873 worth about half of the peak value they’d reached after its miners had hit the cross-fissure in September. That strange feature continued to lead Mackay and Fair northeast, away from the Comstock Lode. But the fissure widened as they drifted down it, and its prospects improved, validating the decision to follow it. Two hundred eighty feet down the cross-fissure, Con. Virginia miners made a crosscut that revealed the feature had grown to forty-eight feet in width, much of it filled with profitable ore.
Below, in San Francisco, James Flood and William O’Brien started to crow. They bragged about “very rich rock” in the Consolidated Virginia and said they’d soon show the world “what the Comstock could produce.” The stock market thought it was puffery. Con. Virginia shares fell almost 15 percent, despite what the Daily Alta California described as “growing rumors of strikes in the Virginia mines, particularly Chollar and Con. Virginia.”
One of those strikes wasn’t worth the ink that announced it. The other was the tip of the most valuable precious minerals discovery ever made in the United States.
On March 9, 1873, the long-dreaded epizootic, a virulent equine influenza that originated in Canada, hit Virginia City. The New York Times had reported its appearance in mid-October, when all the horses and mules in Toronto got sick. Within a week the epizootic was in Montreal and Buffalo. The disease raged down the line of the Erie Canal through Rochester and Utica to Albany. Two days later horses were sick in New York and Boston and the illness was spreading through the rest of New England. Coughing, wheezing animals didn’t have the strength to pull empty wagons, let alone canal barges or loaded wagons, and the New York Times was contemplating the terrible consequences of “the withdrawal of the horse power from the nation.” Everywhere it appeared, the epizootic completely paralyzed horse- and mule-dependent transportation—and the entire nation’s transportation network depended on horses and mules. The disease wreaked economic havoc. Colliers couldn’t move coal from storage yards to steam-powered railroads and riverboats. Farmers couldn’t get their autumn harvest to market. Animal-dependent Erie Canal barges sat in slack water, heaped with produce. The horse-drawn street railways and omnibuses that handled most urban mass transportation stopped. Taxis, hackneys, jitneys, and hansom cabs normally available for private hire disappeared from the streets. Mortality stayed low, 1 to 2 percent, except among animals whipped to work—many of those beasts died—but diseased animals were totally useless for two to three weeks, and needed up to two to three months to recover their full strength. The worst cases incapacitated animals for six months. The epizootic swept through all the eastern states. In late January 1873, the disease reached the mining camps of eastern Nevada. Virginia City teamsters first noticed “the peculiar coughing of stricken animals” on March 9, and the disease spread “like a prairie fire” through the Comstock towns. By two o’clock the next afternoon, none of the livery stables in Virginia City and Gold Hill had a single healthy animal, and local transportation was paralyzed. Abandoned wagons lined the streets. Merchants and grocers couldn’t get goods from the train depot to their stores, butchers couldn’t get fresh meat from the slaughterhouses, milkmen couldn’t distribute their product. Mail, express, and staging services stopped throughout the state. Mines like the Con. Virginia that didn’t have a railroad spur extended to their premises couldn’t get supplies or ship ore.I
Con. Virginia stock had behaved like a stricken horse over the last month regardless of the optimistic reports from the mine. The mine’s stock finally jumped during the morning session of March 17, 1873, “under the influence of the important development in the mine.”
The San Francisco Chronicle credited the rise to stories circulated by Flood and O’Brien—“All of which we advise our readers to receive with many grains of allowance.” The Chronicle’s “Stock Sharp” saw it as “a first-class job” being put up in “this most promising of barren mines.” Several outside “experts” gained access to the mine on March 19. When they emerged, they pronounced it “the most important development made on the Virginia end of the Comstock for years.”
Con. Virginia stock plummeted the next day, a fall the Chronicle took as prima facie evidence of how “unscrupulous operators manage to become rich at the expense of innocent outsiders who are drawn into purchasing at high prices . . . under the influence of quasi-official reports.” The Chronicle hounded Con. Virginia management for the rest of March.
John Mackay fired Sam Curtis. Characteristically, Mackay never discussed the move with anybody outside his ownership group, but he never would tolerate slights to his good name. Considering the small-town nature of the West, where a man was seldom more than one person removed from anybody else, a man’s reputation carried much weight. Mackay considered his of utmost importance. The Chronicle said Curtis had been fired for talking too much and allowing friends to inspect the mine despite express orders to the contrary. The “experts” admitted to the mine on March 18 or 19, whose reports stirred such subsequent vitriol, may have been those friends.
Ironically, as the Chronicle’s criticisms became increasingly savage, underground developments in the Con. Virginia made it ever more apparent to Mackay and Fair that they had a good mine. How good they didn’t yet understand, but an official advice from the mine on March 23 said they’d crosscut 28.5 feet of ore in the 1,167-foot cross-fissure. By the end of March, the face of the 1,167-foot drift was well over 1,000 feet from the Gould & Curry shaft, having passed through several bends, and ventilation had become a debilitating problem. Conditions in the prospecting crosscuts became so atrocious that it was impossible to work them more than a few feet from the main drift. The mine couldn’t be developed properly until the shaft connected to the 1,167-foot level drift and effected a circulation of breathable air. Mackay and Fair decided to focus efforts on making that connection without paying much attention to prospecting their strike.
To speed the process, they put four six-hour shifts to work at the shaft bottom and they sank only two of the shaft’s three compartments, reasoning they could reach 1,200 feet sooner sinking just the two. They’d have crews dig out the third working up from the bottom. Doing it without bullion proceeds meant levying assessments, however, and the Con. Virginia levied one in April and another in June, both of which sent the Chronicle into apoplectic paroxysms against what the editorial board perceived as the greedy manipulations of the four Irishmen. The Firm had levied—and spent—$318,000 worth of assessments since taking control of the mine, most of which came from their own pockets, but they were still operating a publicly traded company, which made them vulnerable to criticism.
• • •
In addition to the massive—and massively expensive—push to prospect and develop the Con. Virginia mine in the spring and summer of 1873, the four Irishmen also pushed their even more expensive water project toward completion. They’d been aggressively advancing the project since hiring hydraulic engineer Hermann Schussler the year before. Operating through their control of the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Company, the Firm borrowed more than $1 million to finance construction of the reservoirs, flumes, pipeline, and other installations required. During the winter of 1872–73, the Gold Hill News prodded the Water Company to “push the work as rapidly as possible, as water is likely to be a scarce article during the coming season.” The Water Company did exactly that.
In accordance with Schussler’s instructions, the Risdon Iron Works of San Francisco fabricated seven miles worth of high-pressure pipe from 1.15 million pounds of wrought iron and shipped it over the Sierras. Workers installed the first sections in June 1873, laid the last pipe on July 25, and joined the inverted-siphon pipeline to diversion dams, flumes, and reservoirs to make an aqueduct twenty-one miles long. Schussler had designed drain valves at the bottom of each depression in the pipeline to allow sediment to be drawn from the pipe and blow-off cocks for the top of every rise to blast out compressed air. When Schussler turned water into the pipe, Dan de Quille of the Territorial Enterprise witnessed the event. He described tracing the progress of the water across Washoe Valley by the explosive venting of the blow cocks, compared to which, he wrote, “the blowing of a whale was a mere whisper.”
Comstockers drank glasses of pure, fresh, good-tasting Sierra water and celebrated the water’s arrival with a typical jollification. Bands in the streets pounded out triumphal music. Citizens hurrahed. When that night’s issue of the Enterprise went to the presses at 2:00 a.m., four cannon were still booming and the whole town was in a state of “unbounded hilarity.” All persons connected with the Water Company were “jubilant.” James Fair lit bonfires in his yard and shot up skyrockets.
The seven-mile inverted siphon withstood a drop of 1,720 feet from its high point and maximum interior pressures nearly twice as high as any other pipeline in the world. The system delivered more than 2 million gallons of water per day once it operated at full capacity—ten times the Comstock’s previous supply. The fact that the desert towns of Virginia City and Gold Hill had a plentiful supply of pure mountain water became an enormous point of pride. As the preface to the Storey County directory boasted two years later, “Thus it is, that while other places, especially San Francisco, are endeavoring to solve the question of the water supply, Virginia City and vicinity has it solved for all time to come, and, in a land of barrenness and drouth [sic], has a full supply of better water than any of them.”
The directory had it right. More than 140 years later, the system still serves Virginia City.
• • •
John Mackay wasn’t on the Comstock to enjoy the triumph. With Hermann Schussler to tend to the engineering of the aqueduct and James Fair to oversee Con. Virginia development, Mackay had returned to Europe to see his family earlier in the summer. The San Francisco Chronicle noted his presence among other “Pacific Coasters” in Paris on Independence Day, identifying him as “one of the precious quartet who manipulate the Hale & Norcross Mine,” and making a cruel joke about his uneducated French accent. A month later, the Chronicle reported Mackay and his family ensconced at the Hôtel Splendide.
Very little news escaped the Consolidated Virginia while Mackay was away, and most of what did was redundant: sinking and drifting, nothing new to report. Most of the mining industry was distracted by the astonishing developments emerging from the thirteen-hundred-foot levels of the Crown Point and the Belcher. No similar mass of ore had ever been revealed. Square-set timbering alone couldn’t support the enormous stopes. The incredible pressures bearing down from above forced the mines to fill the square-sets with tens of thousands of feet of additional reinforcing timbers and backfill with waste. Between them, the two mines had raised $9 million in 1872. For the month of June 1873 alone, the Crown Point paid $1 million of dividends and the Belcher did even better—it paid $1,040,000. The running total of the two mines’ dividends since the start of the year exceeded $8 million, and experts estimated that the two mines had between $20 and $40 million worth of ore “in sight,” more than 50 percent of which seemed likely to end up in the pockets of the stockholders. According to the normally staid Daily Alta California, the deep ore body shared between the Belcher and the Crown Point made all previous mineral discoveries—anywhere in the West—seem like mere “surface lumps.”
A mile and a half to the north and 1,200 feet below the streets of Virginia City, Con. Virginia miners working the long drift north from the Bonner Shaft of the Gould & Curry battled worsening conditions. The heat grew more intense. The air got harder to breathe. They fought swelling clay and an influx of hot water. Water pouring through the drift face and washing debris into the drift stopped work in late July. Con. Virginia miners mucked out the drift for three weeks without making notable progress. A mid-August attempt to detour around the sodden ground proved a perfect failure.
Not long thereafter, the Gold Hill Daily News reported being “reliably informed” that the 1,167-foot-level drift was “being run in the ore vein,” and that the ore extracted therefrom was “equal to any rock produced for years on the Comstock.” A few days later, the News noted a “considerable quantity of high grade ore,” $150 to $200 to the ton, emerging from the Gould & Curry shaft.
John and Louise Mackay, Eva, young Willie, and a nurse arrived in New York from Liverpool aboard the SS Adriatic on October 4. Louise hadn’t set foot on American soil in two and a half years. Two days after the Mackay family landed, the San Francisco Chronicle commented on the feverish activity that had ruled at the Con. Virginia for the last year, but even confronted with carloads of evidence, the newspaper still couldn’t bring itself to credit the mine with an actual ore body. “Whether it is all for a purpose—to run the stock up on the strength of appearances and expectations, or whether the management really believes all that it asserts and expects dividends soon—is even more than the CHRONICLE stock sharp can tell.” The Chronicle credited Flood and O’Brien with “a brilliant operation” that had sent the stock up from $100 to $250 over the last fortnight and for orchestrating a five-to-one stock split that increased the number of shares to 108,000, but still couldn’t bring itself to admit that the mine was on to a good thing.
The outside world got its first look at the mine on October 28, 1873, when Mackay and Fair allowed Dan de Quille of the Territorial Enterprise to examine the “long-forbidden lower level” of the mine. Everything about the construction and operation of the mine impressed the lean reporter: the hoisting apparatus, the engines, and the organization of the shaft house. The smooth and speedy descent of the shaft made an impression—it happened without “the slightest jar.” As James Fair boasted to the reporter, they’d built everything “as neat and handy as a duck’s foot.”
Two hundred and fifty feet south of the 1,200-foot station, Fair showed de Quille the miners working the ore body. Stripped to the waist in the heat, they stoped out ore on all sides and installed square-sets. They’d been at it “regular mining style” for only thirteen days, and they’d already expanded the stopes six to nine sets in all directions and had opened four levels above the main drift. The east wall was clay, but in all other directions, including the floor and ceiling, the men worked “ore of excellent quality.” Prospecting drifts and crosscuts revealed the ore body angled from southwest to northeast over a distance of 200 feet, averaging 30 to 50 feet in width. The key question was, “Did it go?” Did it extend in depth? Mackay and Fair had what they called the north winze down 50 feet below the main drift, and it was in “very rich ore” the whole way. Although Dan de Quille quite reasonably reminded his readers that he couldn’t see any farther into the mine than the openings already made, he did venture his impression that he was in the middle of a “very large body.” In his judgment, in the Consolidated Virginia, “a first class mine [was] fast being developed.”
Mackay wasn’t so sure. To him, although in places rich, the rock appeared “dead,” almost completely devoid of the tiny crystallization apparent elsewhere on the lode. He’d never seen anything like it in the fourteen long years of his Comstock experience. The ore looked “close” and “soggy,” as if it had been dissolved in water and afterward hardened. Mackay puzzled and worried over the unfamiliar rock, having no idea what it portended.
• • •
As Mackay and Fair directed the opening of drifts, crosscuts, winzes, upraises, and galleries, rats followed the miners into the Con. Virginia
’s new workings. Rats had infested the Comstock mines since the early days. Healthy little fellows, they’d grown “fat and hearty” on the candle drippings, scraps of lunch, and miners’ offal common underground. Rather than look upon them with revulsion or as annoyances or pests, miners looked on the rats with favor, feeling a kinship to “the rats of the lower galleries,” a phrase they often used to describe themselves. Some men even went out of their way to leave them offerings, and all miners were glad of the rats and paid them attention, believing they could detect warning of an impending cave from the rats’ behavior. Crown Point miners told convincing stories of narrowly escaping death by following rats out of a threatened gallery moments before it collapsed. The author of a letter about Comstock conditions that appeared in the Mining & Scientific Press warned his readers not to attempt to kill any rats in the mine unless they wanted “to try their skill in fighting miners.” And so it was that a singular accident befell two Cornish miners at work at the bottom of the Con. Virginia’s north winze three weeks after Dan de Quille’s inspection. Working beneath a hand-turned windlass, they had the winze down 92 vertical feet below the 1,167-foot level, all the way in good ore, when “a frolicsome rat” attempted to jump across the top of the winze. The creature misjudged its landing and fell in. The doomed rat made a “slight humming noise” as it tumbled, which caught the attention of one of the men. He looked up, and the falling rodent hit him square in the forehead. The rat exploded blood and guts all over his face. The man reeled against the side of the winze, thinking himself mortally wounded by a falling rock. His companion leaped to his aid. The stricken man scraped “a handful of the bloody debris” from his forehead and face, stunned to discover himself mostly unharmed. Only after discovering the mangled remains of the rat at the winze bottom did they comprehend what had occurred. The story quickly made the rounds of the lower levels, provoking “much merriment.”
The Bonanza King Page 40