The engineer cast off the painters that secured a small boat to the Bullion and rowed toward Ralston. Although he told the Daily Alta California reporter that day that he seized Ralston by the hair and wrestled his body over the gunwales with “considerable difficulty,” his inquest testimony described Ralston’s flesh quivering when he first touched him, his certainty that Ralston was still alive and doing what he could to save himself, and the stricken banker’s much more dignified entry into the rowboat (likely to help Ralston’s widow receive his life insurance payout, because it supported the contention that he wasn’t a suicide). The engineer pulled for the beach as fast as he could, calling for help. He reached the shore a few minutes before four o’clock. Helping hands hauled Ralston’s stout body from the boat and laid him on the sand.
When a Daily Alta California reporter arrived on the scene about forty-five minutes later, he found a few boys, sailors, longshoremen, and bareheaded women gathered around Ralston. Five men “energetically manipulated the body with the purpose of winning back the almost flown spark of vital fire.” Three of the men massaged Ralston’s lower limbs and flexed his arms. A doctor pressed upon and released Ralston’s chest at regular intervals to stimulate his heart, and a young German cradled Ralston’s head in his lap and “glued his lips to those of the almost inanimate man . . . forcing his own life-giving breath into the speechless mouth.”
Colonel Fry, Robert Morrow, and Lloyd Tevis—all three important figures on the Comstock—Mayor Otis, and a number of Ralston’s other personal friends joined the ever-larger crowd of onlookers. To the young German giving Ralston “artificial breathing,” it seemed that Ralston’s cold body warmed up for the first half hour. He and the other rescuers sustained their attempt for forty-five minutes, until ten minutes to five o’clock, when “a violent gasp and shudder” shook Ralston, followed by “complete quiet.”
The crowd fell silent in the strange and solemn presence of death. The wreck of a half-sunken sloop stood in the water nearby. Only a few hushed voices and the slow, rhythmic lapping of the incoming tide broke the silence. Tears filled the eyes of many onlookers as the coroner’s “dead-wagon”—“a long black box on wheels”—drawn by a single horse, hauled away the body.
Reporters on the scene noticed torn pieces of paper still floating in the water. They wet their feet recovering fragments, but couldn’t make sense from the words they contained.
• • •
That night, many of Ralston’s innumerable friends and associates gathered in disbelief to view his body at Colonel Fry’s house and console his widow and children. Among them were William Sharon and bank secretary Stephen Franklin. Wearing dark suits of mourning, Sharon and Franklin stood together to view Ralston’s body. According to Franklin, Sharon looked down at his dead partner and said, “Best thing he could have done.”
• • •
Spurred to action by the Bank of California’s collapse and Ralston’s death, and likely by a summons from Flood and O’Brien, John Mackay reached San Francisco on Saturday morning, August 28. William Sharon met Mackay at the Ferry Building, probably wanting assurances of a truce that would allow him to execute his nascent plan to reconstitute the Bank of California. By that time, the financial panic had ended. All that remained was the ruined bank and the sadness of Ralston’s death. No other commercial failures had attended the Bank of California’s collapse. A hired hack took the two men up into town. Ralston had been a giant in California for much of the time Mackay had been in the West, and personally, Mackay had liked and admired him.
“Did you do everything you could to save him?” Mackay asked.
“I was afraid for a time that we would have to,” Sharon answered.
“The son-of-a-bitch,” Mackay added to describe Sharon when he told the story in later years.
• • •
In San Francisco, William Chapman Ralston had defined the age. Flags all over the city flew at half-mast. The Daily Alta California eulogized him as the city’s “mainspring,” lauded his energy, industry, and enterprise, and found it “sad that such a life should have closed in such awful shadow.” Eyewitnesses estimated that half the population of San Francisco followed Ralston’s cortege from his funeral service at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Union Square west to the Lone Mountain Cemetery. Darius Ogden Mills, William Sharon and twenty-one other prominent San Franciscans served as pallbearers. The quiet, somber processions exceeded three miles in length and took forty-two minutes to pass.
For Ralston’s death and the fall of the Bank of California, San Francisco editorialists and opinion makers blamed Darius Ogden Mills, the bank directors, the Bonanza Crowd, the Bulletin and Call, the many supposed friends who should have come to Ralston’s aid, and William Sharon. Especially William Sharon. They blamed everyone except William Ralston. Rumors abroad already claimed that the institution he’d founded would be “resuscitated” based on a subscription of capital from some of the state’s wealthiest men.
William Sharon fronted the scheme. Over the next several weeks of effort to revive the Bank of California, Sharon played the highest stakes poker game of his life. Nobody else among the bank’s other principals had the guts to try. Darius Ogden Mills and several other directors suggested bankruptcy. Threats to their personal fortunes by Bank of California creditors changed their minds. Sharon convinced Mills to join him at the head of a syndicate of leading San Franciscans dedicated to recapitalizing and reopening the bank. Mills would assume the revived bank’s presidency. Sharon and Mills each contributed $1 million. On rough tables fitted into the parlor of his San Francisco mansion, Sharon worked like a fiend, surrounded by paper, pencils, and clouds of cigar smoke, meeting with a stream of recalcitrant, reluctant, angry men with only one common interest—money. Some men Sharon convinced to join in an effort to honor Ralston’s legacy. He appealed to the sense of civic duty in others. Still others he threatened. When necessary, he lied and bluffed, and in one week, Sharon collected promises totaling more than $7.5 million from sixty-three individuals and the Stock & Exchange Board.
To clear the bank’s accounts, Sharon bought Ralston’s debt and all of his security from the Bank of California for $1.5 million, along with the assurance that he could keep any proceeds that might result from the liquidation of Ralston’s assets and the settlement of his liabilities. The purchase forced Ralston’s creditors to deal with Sharon personally, in private, rather than with the institution of the bank. The paperwork detailing the precise nature of Sharon’s partnership with Ralston disappeared from a safe. He located and rebought the overissued stock Ralston had sold, much of it for a fraction of the original purchase price. Sharon sponsored positive newspaper articles and kept the goodwill of Ralston alive with public meetings that honored his memory. As much as possible, he obscured the scope of Ralston’s iniquities and the negligent oversight of the bank’s directors. On October 2, 1875, five weeks and a day after the suspension, William Sharon reopened the bank.
He did it on the same day as the Palace Hotel’s gala debut. Around 11:00 p.m., after an orchestra completed playing Franz von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant overture in the “brilliantly illuminated” interior courtyard of his new hotel, Sharon gave a speech in which he lauded the “proud and manly spirit” of William Ralston and the “resuscitation” of the institution he’d founded. “Bursts of applause” interrupted Sharon’s speech on several occasions, and “prolonged cheering” followed his conclusion. In a fit of the self-congratulatory boosterism for which San Franciscans had become famous, the Daily Alta California hailed the resumption as “a feat that could not have been accomplished outside of California.”
That William Sharon’s fancy new hotel wouldn’t have sold for half of its construction cost went unmentioned in the publicity and celebration.
The four Irish Bonanza Kings opened the Nevada Bank of San Francisco two days later, with much less fanfare. Although Sharon’s Bank of California reopening captured by far the larger number of column inch
es, the wheel of financial power had turned on the Pacific Coast. William Sharon and the Bank of California found themselves in second place. John Mackay, James Fair, James Flood, and William O’Brien had risen to dominance. A New York Times article that season estimated John Mackay’s total net worth at $75 million, called him “the richest man on the Pacific Coast,” and noted that sixteen years before, he’d been swinging a pick at the face of a drift for four dollars a day.
John Mackay, his partners, and the miners who worked for them settled down to face one of the most gargantuan mining challenges of all time—extracting the entirety of the Big Bonanza, the vast majority of which still remained underground.
• • •
Things didn’t proceed in the manner they anticipated. Just three weeks later, on the morning of October 26, 1875, a gray dawn crept into leaden skies over Virginia City. The uniform layer of cloud rushing over the Sierras from California portended a storm. Fierce Washoe zephyrs thundered down the sides of Mount Davidson, one minute still, and then charging past gale force in the next to churn the dust, thrash the sagebrush, and moan around the walls of the town. One of the few persons abroad that early morning was a ten-year-old boy named Grant Smith.V He patrolled up B Street scouting for pigeons to shoot with his slingshot. Passing in front of Mooney’s Stable, Smith heard the cry, “Fire!”
The boy looked uphill into the driving wind and saw a thin stream of smoke trailing from a small, one-story frame boardinghouse belonging to Kate Shay, otherwise known as “Crazy Kate.” The Sacramento Daily Union called her “a woman of ill-repute;” the San Francisco Chronicle called hers a “lodging house [of] a low order,” and reported some of the occupants up late the night before “in a drunken carousal.” According to Enterprise reporter Dan de Quille, people in the adjoining houses heard a coal-oil lamp break during a drunken row. At a minimum, someone had left a candle burning unattended. A neighbor saw an eerie light, barged in, and found flames licking up the wallpaper and wooden walls of the room next to Kate’s bedchamber. Alarm bells clanged, and within minutes, Kate’s house “flamed like a torch.” The house’s light siding and desiccated shingles caught fire, warped, and whirled away in the angry wind. Some landed in Mooney’s stable and caught fire to the hay in the hay yard, which the wind carried away like flaming chaff.
According to Grant Smith, “a garden hose could have put out the fire” when the alarm first rung, but the fire department arrived tardy. Scarcely a drop of rain had fallen for months, and the town was tinder dry. A fireman wheeled up a Babcock fire extinguisher, followed by the hand-pumped engine of Fire Company No. 4, but their efforts went for naught. The angry zephyrs whipped the fire fiend loose. Within fifteen minutes, twenty buildings were in flames. Church bells commenced ringing. Engineers at the hoisting works let loose their steam whistles. In the next five minutes, the number of burning buildings doubled. A few minutes later, an area equal to a whole city block was aflame. People nearby tumbled into the streets in their bedclothes, many just as the fire spread to their houses. Smith rushed home. The pair of two-story houses between A and B streets owned by his family caught fire. His mother salvaged a handful of valuables and hustled him and his three brothers up the hillside to the dump of the old Sides Shaft, from where they watched the calamity unfold. People below piled into the streets. Men and women shouted, screamed, and swore as greedy flames drew their lodgings and businesses into the inferno. A gigantic pyramid of fire grew over an ever-expanding base of burning buildings. Hundreds of feet overhead, the flame tips writhed into roiling clouds of smoke, showering sparks and burning fragments all over the lower city. Wind-driven cinders kindled new fires far in advance of the onrushing wall of flame.
The church bells, fire alarms, and steam whistles never ceased clanging and shrieking. Their discordant din blended with the crash and thud of falling walls, the dull report of building after building bursting into flames, the smash of iron doors falling from their mountings, the shatter of window glass burned from its frames, the howl of the wind, and the shrieks and cries of despair. Above it all moaned the bass roar of the firestorm. The “hideous and demoralizing” cacophony drove the whole town mad.
Acre after acre of buildings joined the “sea of fire.” A dense, stinking cloud of gray-brown and black smoke boiled over the city, whipped north and east by the wind. Desperate to save something from the impending calamity, families three or four blocks ahead of the flames heaped belongings into the streets. Merchants vomited wares onto the sidewalks and fought to engage wagons. Teamsters jacked prices high and whipped their animals through the mayhem, cursing. Frantic citizens pressed every conceivable conveyance into service, from wheelbarrows to barouches. Without time to rig terrified animals into harness, men by the hundreds took the place of draft animals and hauled loaded wagons toward the outskirts of town. Women and children staggered beneath impossible loads. Rough hands carried a woman in labor to safety. Horsemen galloped through the crowds, heedless of the foot-bound multitudes. Behind them all, the ravening flames leaped skyward “with a rush and a loud roar.” People fled as if they were trying to escape the sack of Troy.
The wind veered and lashed the fire four blocks up A and B streets. Another shift swept it down to C Street and encircled the county buildings. By 9:00 a.m., a “cyclone of fire” enveloped the county buildings, the International Hotel, the Bank of California, and the whole rest of the core of the city above C Street. Twenty-five miles away, the population of Reno could see the black cloud boiling up from behind the Virginia Range.
Telegrams from Virginia City threw San Francisco into a “ferment.” A rash of panic selling cratered the stock market. Speculators pressed James Flood for information. What had he heard from his partners? Flood hadn’t heard a thing. He expressed confidence that Mackay and Fair were doing their duty, fighting the fire.
Flood knew his partners well. John Mackay’s house at the corner of Howard and Taylor had burnt down, along with a number of other dwellings on “millionaires row.” Mackay hadn’t made the slightest effort to save it. He and Fair had been on site at the Con. Virginia hoisting works since shortly after the first alarm. Both miners recognized the extreme danger—the Con. Virginia works were right in the heart of town, and wind threatened to drive the fire right over them. They ordered everyone out of the threatened mines under their control—the Con. Virginia, the California, the Best & Belcher, and the Gould & Curry. Anything on the surface could be rebuilt, the whole town if necessary, but if fire burned down the Con. Virginia shaft and got into the timber-filled stopes far below, they’d lose the richest mine in the world forever. The fire had to be kept out of the shaft at all costs. Mackay had anticipated the danger. He had a plan. With every last man hoisted from the Con. Virginia, Mackay directed the engineers to lower the cages into a flat line a few feet below the surface. Miners sprang the safety catches to fix the cages in the shaft. Men working like demons floored over the pumping compartment and piled sandbags, dirt, and ore onto the cage hoods to make a fireproof bulkhead. Others shoveled sand and dirt onto the floor of the hoisting works. Mackay was everywhere directing the work.
Outside, the fire surged across C Street toward D. If it leaped D Street and caught to the huge structure of Piper’s Opera House on the east side of the street, the whole block between D and E streets would catch fire. If that happened, nothing could stop the fire leaping E Street, burning the railroad depot, and getting level with the Con. Virginia hoisting works. Then, the slightest northward twitch of wind would doom the works. The police chief gave his okay. Mackay led gangs of miners dynamiting the Opera House and a line of adjacent houses in the hopes of creating a fire break. The thudding detonations added a new touch of horror to the mayhem.
A few blocks south of the Con. Virginia hoisting works, the wood-shingled roof of the Catholic church started catching fire. A pious old Irishwoman bustled off to find John Mackay. She found him battling to save the Con. Virginia. “Oh, Mr. Mackay, the church is on fire!” she said.
Perhaps he could save it?
“Damn the church!” Mackay exclaimed. “We can build another if we can keep the fire from going down these shafts!”
When the wind began scattering the church’s burning shingles into the lower city, miners dynamited the entire structure. Wind-driven flames vaulted the firebreaks with hardly a pause. Inability to stop the fire at Piper’s Opera House doomed the Virginia & Truckee Railroad Depot, and once the depot caught fire, the Con. Virginia hoisting works couldn’t be saved. Men fell back before onrushing walls of flame.
Thousands of feet of mine timbers and hundreds of cords of firewood stored in the depot yard and outside the hoisting works caught fire and swelled to volcanic infernos. The stupendous heat pouring from the woodpiles melted the metal wheels of nearby railroad cars. By 9:30 a.m., flames began to envelop the hoisting works. Driven by wind and the hellish heat, the fire raced down the trestle work supporting the car track over which the mule Mary Jane Simpson hauled the ore from the shaft to the mill. Only when they heard her terrified braying did the men realize that no one had loosed her from her stable. By then, it was too late to save her. Getting her out was suicide, but Ben Smith, her devoted groom, secured a pistol and tried to find a vantage from which he could shoot his beloved mule. Desperate to shorten her agony, he wriggled into a crawlspace beneath the hoisting works while the building took fire over his head. Heat scorched his skin and singed his hair and whiskers. Smoke choked Smith. Mary Jane Simpson’s screams drove him on. He couldn’t find a position from which to administer the merciful shot. Mary Jane Simpson died in horrible agony. Ben Smith barely escaped with his life.
The fire burned along the trestle work and consumed the Con. Virginia’s massive, state-of-the-art mill and the stamp batteries of the almost-complete California mill. Stopping the fire going down the Ophir shaft was just as important as keeping it out of the Con. Virginia—the mines connected underground. At the Ophir, Superintendent Sam Curtis and his men worked as furiously as Mackay and Fair and their crews at the Con. Virginia. Ophir men bulkheaded their shaft twenty feet below the surface and heaped sand and dirt atop the blockage as the building burned. At the last second, they fled for their lives.
The Bonanza King Page 45