With a solid wall of flames running through the railroad depot, the hoisting works of the Ophir and Con. Virginia and the Con. Virginia mill and all their lumber yards, the battle shifted to the C&C hoisting works a thousand feet farther down the hill. They, too, seemed doomed. With what the Territorial Enterprise described as “his old miner instinct and miner’s knowledge,” Mackay led the desperate fight to save them. Under Mackay’s direction, miners dynamited a line of houses below G Street and dragged away the debris. The San Francisco Chronicle correspondent described the effort as “superhuman.” The wind was threatening to jump the flames over the firebreak and drive the fire onto the C&C works when a southward swing of the wind gave the men the chance to complete the firebreak. The respite provided the critical opportunity. The fire never crossed H Street. The C&C hoisting works survived.
By 1:00 p.m., the worst of it was over. The flames died as they ate the fuel that sustained them, leaving ghastly wreckage. The half-mile-square heart of Virginia City had vanished. Coils and wraiths of smoke rose from charcoal and ashes. Here and there stood remnants of brick walls. The great machinery of the mines and mills stood like iron specters in the writhing smoke, every massive arm and wheel still. A gush of smoke rose from the Ophir shaft, raising fears that the mine had caught fire, but most everywhere else, the flames had burned down to smoldering embers. The majority of the burnt district had been scoured to ground level. Gale-strength wind gusts swept the desolation, carrying away sheets of tin roofing and great blasts of dust and ash.
Early estimates of the number of people rendered homeless ranged from two thousand to ten thousand. The fire swept away two hundred businesses, including the Bank of California, Piper’s Opera House, most of the town’s saloons, and “all the small houses on D Street,” which the Daily Alta California described as “occupied by a class of population which will be no great loss to the city.” (The Alta’s moralizing would have no discernible effect on the demimonde’s reoccupation.)
The aftermath showed Americans of the West at their finest. The calamity obliterated social distinctions. Everybody tried to make everybody else as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. Ladies in the surviving parts of town cooked meals, then went into the streets to hunt up burnt-out families too proud to ask for assistance.
The town’s population of single men burned out of lodgings and possessions soon began availing themselves of the copious stocks of whisky in the unburned portion of town. They roamed the ruined streets in packs, howling, singing, and gazing on the devastation through the distorting lenses of the liquor jugs. The overwhelming press of business in the few surviving saloons led barkeeps to refuse to mix drinks. Patrons had to content themselves with “uncompromising straights.”
Storm built over the Sierras, and women and children wandered around looking for places to lay their heads. The Third Ward School housed as many as possible, but even with it and other public buildings and assembly halls packed to capacity and every surviving bed in town double- or triple-shotted with refugees, the available space didn’t suffice. Burned-out men and their families sought shelter in old mine tunnels and bivouacked in the lee of boulders and behind sagebrush windbreaks. Their campfires dotted the hills around town after dark. Burning embers and a hellish orange glow emanating from the mouth of the Ophir shaft reflected onto the base of rising smoke clouds. Fire had passed the Ophir bulkhead. Bucket brigades and fire companies fought to stop its progress down the shaft. Snow began falling at 8:00 p.m. An hour later, the snowflakes turned to light rain. A series of heavy showers rode through the area on the still-blustery wind about two o’clock in the morning. The Comstock passed a miserable night.
• • •
Like so much of the city, the Territorial Enterprise had been burned out. Having lost its building, printing presses, boxes of type, and the entirety of its archive, the newspaper missed its next day’s issue. Forty-eight hours after the fire, the Enterprise reappeared on just two pages instead of its usual four, thanks to the good offices of the proprietor of the Gold Hill Daily News, who allowed his Virginia City rivals use of his printing presses. In a brief article titled “Characteristic,” the Enterprise described a “haggard” figure emerging from the successful battle to save the C&C hoisting works, “begrimed with dust, powder-smoke, and the smoke of the fire.” The man was John Mackay, looking “like a laborer just ready to drop from exhaustion.”
Mackay sat on a berm and watched the fire burn itself out. An old acquaintance approached. “Mackay, you’ve lost what would have bought an earldom today.”
“Don’t speak of it,” Mackay said. “It’s not any matter and isn’t worth mentioning.” He gathered what remained of his strength. “Let’s see what we can do toward making these women and babies comfortable.”
* * *
I. Ironically, cheap American foodstuffs transported by the new railroads and shipped to Europe had done much to precipitate the collapse—American exports undercut the eastern European agriculture in which Austrian banks had heavily invested.
II. century and a half later, seven and a half million people ride Andrew Smith Hallidie’s “cable cars” every year, and they’re famous the world over, the universally recognized symbol of San Francisco. Less well understood is the fact that the cable cars’ roots reach back to the hoists that once served the Comstock mines.
III. Although articles about Mr. Peck and his wonderful mineral rod appeared in the Territorial Enterprise in both 1871 and 1875, the author admits the possibility that Mr. Peck is a “quaint” (a story told with “improved facts”) nursed through four years by the newspaper in the spirit of Mark Twain.
IV. Not to be confused with Calaveras County or the Calaveras River in the foothills of the Sierras.
V. Late in life, Smith would become an important Comstock historian whose book History of the Comstock Lode and archival material held by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, have contributed greatly to this work.
CHAPTER 16
The Bonanza King
Virginia City at the peak of the bonanza times.
* * *
To call a place dreary, desolate, homeless, uncomfortable, and wicked is a good deal, but to call it God-forsaken is a good deal more, and in a tolerably large experience of this world’s wonders, we never found a place better deserving the title than Virginia City.
—Miriam Florence Leslie, California: A Pleasure Trip from Gotham to the Golden Gate
Of course the town rebuilt. The San Francisco Chronicle’s reporter on scene described Virginia as “determined to come out strong under adverse circumstances.” The first burned-out man back in business was O. C. Steele. He erected a shanty and sold butchered meat from one end and whisky from the other. Not long thereafter, The Snug Saloon opened over two charred boards, dispensing bit whisky to “the Virginia sufferers” while a cold wind drove spitting clouds overhead.
Senator Sharon granted relief efforts use of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad. The ladies of Carson City sent hot coffee, eight hundred loaves of bread, one thousand pounds of cooked ham, a comparable quantity of beef, and other “substantial vivands” up the railroad and alleviated the immediate hunger. Upward of two thousand people partook. Blankets, clothing, and shoes arrived on subsequent trains. One package of blankets came from a San Francisco clothing manufacturer named Levi Strauss whose patented rivet-reinforced denim pants had become popular among Comstock miners in the two years since their introduction.
Trudging among the devastation, John Mackay sought out Father Manogue. Knowing that if he personally opened his vaults, his good offices would attract a few grafters among many genuine sufferers, and when he found them out, he’d get angry and be liable to insult and reject subsequent worthy cases, Mackay asked the father to operate the purse strings of relief on his behalf. “Do it thoroughly,” Mackay said, “and when you need help draw upon me and keep drawing.” In the coming months, Mackay supported Father Manogue’s efforts to
the tune of $150,000. (His contributions also did much to finance reconstruction of the church he’d damned to save his mine.I)
Near the Con. Virginia’s wrecked works, the Chronicle correspondent buttonholed James Fair as he was about to drive off in a small wagon. The reporter asked if the noxious gas rising from the shafts of the Ophir and the Con. Virginia meant that the mines were on fire.
Fair, visibly annoyed, told him that he’d just inspected both mines and that there was “no more fire [underground] than here in my buggy.”
John Mackay was more accommodating. He’d been through all the mines with Fair that morning and found no gas or fire in any of them. The old Sides Shaft had burned, he explained, and gas had worked its way into the mines through the Latrobe Tunnel, which connected them all. As he’d telegrammed Flood and O’Brien in San Francisco, things looked “all right” underground. Curiously, neither Mackay nor the reporter mentioned the all-night struggle Sam Curtis and his men had waged to stop fire going down the Ophir shaft. In the coming weeks, they rebuilt it from the surface to a depth of four hundred feet.
In the immediate aftermath, the San Francisco Call had quoted Mackay as saying that the mines wouldn’t raise ore before spring. A telegram from the president of the stock board asked for Mackay’s confirmation, since “coming from you this statement has great weight.”
Mackay’s return telegram called the report “mistaken.” He’d said no such thing. If the weather cooperated, he said, “sixty days will repair all damage to works. I think the mines are all right. . . . Things look brighter today.”
Kitchens established at the Third Ward School served upward of fifteen hundred people per day. Chinese citizens shared the fare for the first day or two, which the newspapers cited as evidence of Comstock magnanimity. If so, the egalitarian mentality lasted less than forty-eight hours. Afterward, the relief committee issued Chinese refugees uncooked rations instead.
Only five days later, a Chronicle subheadline confidently reported “The City Rapidly Rising from Its Ashes.” According to the paper’s special dispatch, “Virginia comes up to the scratch smiling, with both eyes blackened, her nose swollen and red with the frost, and battered both above and below the belt.” Throughout the burnt district, laborers cleaned and piled bricks for subsequent reuse. Carpenters framed houses as fast as the railroad dumped lumber in town. Not a moment went to waste in Virginia City’s rush to rebuild, but in the reporter’s judgment, “the palm for enterprise” went to the burnt-out saloon men. Exercising an excusable mite of artistic license, the reporter described Virginia’s barkeeps standing among the flames “like salamanders,” dispensing the cordial “in spite of fire, smoke and burning dust.” To their everlasting credit, nobody accused them of either watering the palliative nor raising its price.
In the remains of the Con. Virginia mill, workers struggled to dislodge about $100,000 worth of bullion the fire had “retorted and deposited upon the spot” from eight thousand pounds of amalgam. The mill had thirty-seven thousand pounds of mercury in use at the time of the fire—every ounce of which had vaporized and vanished.
The same issue of the Chronicle described a well-dressed gentleman with business to conduct visiting the reconstruction effort already underway at the Con. Virginia hoisting works. Men worked at dismantling useless machinery. Others built derricks capable of swinging heavy metal pieces off their foundations and out of the way. The visitor asked a group of miners if they knew the whereabouts of Mr. Mackay. All their fingers swung to indicate a man standing among the ruins wearing a blue blouse and ash-stained canvas trousers beneath a slouch hat who looked every inch like any other miner on site.
“No, no,” the visitor said, “I mean Mr. Mackay of the Consolidated Virginia.”
“Well, that is he.”
“Pshaw, you don’t say,” the man said. He picked his way through drooping iron, mangled cages, and general debris to John Mackay.
He found a man exactly four weeks shy of his forty-fourth birthday. Mackay’s “keen, penetrating eyes” shone from a ruddy, grime-encrusted face that exhibited “decision and frankness.” He appeared spare and lean, “all muscle and nerve,” nothing wasted. Mackay moved with “the sure, agile tread of the leopard or the lynx,” and even amidst crisis and disaster, there was a “joyous element” to the man, “which would [have been] winning were its owner only a cab-driver instead of the master of millions.” Mackay spoke slowly, still fighting his stammer. Visiting “metropolitan eyes” remarked the “sense of command blended with comradeship” with which Mackay handled his miners.
They loved him for it. John Mackay’s very existence proved that in America, no uncrossable chasm divided a four-dollar-a-day miner from a man worth many tens of millions of dollars.
That evening, the reporter interviewed Mackay at the Fairs’ “palatial residence.” Though obviously exhausted, Mackay exuded confidence. Other mills could pick up the slack while he and his partners replaced their lost mill property (which would cost them around three-quarters of a million dollars). That very afternoon, he’d spent three hours underground, inspecting the Con. Virginia, the California, the Best & Belcher, and the Ophir workings, and so far as he could see, there wasn’t a single timber or wedge out of place. “Our mines are all right in every respect,” he said, “and if the insurance men will pay off without delay all these poor people around us, so that they may go on and build, Virginia will soon be herself again.”
The turn of the conversation away from the big bonanza to the condition of the citizenry, which the reporter considered “so characteristic of Mackay,” ended the formal interview. The reporter accepted a small glass of “the purest bourbon” and “a fine Havana” and took his departure.
Ben Smith, caretaker of Mary Jane Simpson, collected the immolated mule’s bones into an empty box of mine candles and buried them just outside the fence of the Virginia City Cemetery. On a board over the mule’s grave he scratched the inscription: “Sacred to the Memory of Mary Jane Simpson.”
• • •
The Con. Virginia’s rebuilt hoisting works began raising ore seven weeks after the fire, on December 13. The Firm bought up fire-emptied lots around the shaft house and left them vacant to create storage yards and a firebreak. To improve efficiency, the Virginia & Truckee extended tracks to either side of the rebuilt works, and even with the lost time, the mine produced $16.7 million worth of bullion in 1875. Over the winter, Mackay and Fair replaced their mill property and got the C&C shaft sunk deep enough to allow them to work the bonanza from both east and west. Through that winter and over the next year, a new town sprang up to replace the old. The new International Hotel rose six stories above C Street and featured sumptuous mahogany furniture, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, magnificent chandeliers, and another mechanical elevator. About the only piece of corporate or personal property John Mackay didn’t replace was his own lost house. Knowing he’d never lure his wife back to the town she so dreaded—“I know it too well,” she’d say—Mackay sold the lot, took up simple rooms over the Gould & Curry office on C Street, and focused his attention on mining the Big Bonanza.
The ore body was simply colossal, 1,200 feet long, 600 feet tall at its deepest point, and although in most places “only” about 200 feet wide, at its widest on the 1,500-foot level the ore body was fully 340 feet across. Some years later, Mackay described the Big Bonanza’s scale to a Gotham journalist as kidney-shaped and “about as high as the steeple of Trinity, and in an area as large as the City Hall Park.” Comparing the Big Bonanza to the Crown Point–Belcher bonanza in the roughest terms, the Big Bonanza was 100 feet taller, twice as long, more than twice as wide, and filled with ore twice as rich. To get that stupendous quantity of ore out of the ground required replacing that entire volume with a carefully engineered and reinforced lattice of square-set timbers and raising the ore to the surface from between 1,100 and 1,650 feet underground.
The stress of running such a gigantic, complicated, and dangerous operation tolle
d on both Mackay and Fair, and Fair wasn’t on the lode for a period of several months in early 1876. One report placed Fair in the East. Another said Fair “worked so long and so hard that even his abundant stamina” couldn’t take the strain and that “at times,” Fair sustained himself with “copious draughts of a brandy bottle.” When that failed, Fair took “unwanted vacations.”
Mackay went underground every day, supervising, inspecting, and directing operations, sharing the perils of his men in the greatest firetrap in the world. Underground, the heat verged on intolerable. Pools of scalding water accumulated on the drift floors and in the stopes. Air temperatures often exceeded 135 degrees, and in places the ore was too hot to touch with an ungloved hand. In a winze where a pneumatic drill couldn’t be worked, a man saw Con. Virginia miners working “13 to the pick,” doing two-minute rotations with the pick and then resting while the other dozen men took their turn for the course of an eight-hour shift.
The California mine joined the Con. Virginia in full production in April 1876 and paid its first dividend in May. With both mines paying a monthly dividend of $1,080,000, John Mackay’s cash income—from the dividends of the two bonanza mines alone—fell somewhere between $450,000 and $607,000 per month. The only people in the world with a monthly cash income anywhere comparable were Mackay’s three junior partners. The income and expenditures of the four-person firm exceeded those of half the states in the Union. On dividend day in San Francisco, the line of people waiting to receive their coins, stacks, or sacks of gold at the Nevada Bank extended down the whole length of the bank.
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