While Mackay directed the final push to mine the Big Bonanza, the Firm parried a series of lawsuits orchestrated by Squire Dewey that sought more than $40 million in damages from the Firm for defrauding the shareholders through self-dealing. (The 1881 “Bonanza Suits” ruling cleared the Firm of fraudulent behavior and required the Firm to pay $1.72 to each of the Con. Virginia’s 540,000 shares for an 1872 transaction involving twelve and a half feet of the old Kinney claim; only one stockholder ever came forward to claim his slice, and he was one of the litigants.) Mackay himself fought off a $200,000 lawsuit filed by Mr. William Smallman that accused Mackay of “wrongfully, wickedly, and unjustly” debauching Smallman’s wife, and enjoying “unlawful intimacy” with her between May 15 and October 20, 1878. The Smallmans hadn’t done their presuit research. Mackay had been in Europe at that time. Mr. and Mrs. Smallman were convicted of fraud on an unrelated charge in the spring of 1879 and sentenced to four years in prison.
In March 1879, Louise’s sister Ada married Count Telfener, a solid man of Italian and Austrian heritage with a background in engineering. John wasn’t able to escape his Comstock duties to attend. Newspapers ever after referred to Ada Hungerford from Downieville as “the Countess Telfener”—perhaps the first California-born American to achieve a European title.
Mackay got into “an old-fashioned Nevada fight” in a livery stable in August of that year with a man who insisted on his right to visit the Sierra Nevada mine. Mackay said that too many people had been going down into the mine lately, all of whom had abused him when they came out, and that “no man not working in the mine should explore it today.” When “words became too feeble to express the feelings of the parties . . . the Bonanza Prince and the coal-dealer” fought until other men pulled them apart.
The climax of the Comstock’s 1879 came when General Grant visited the lode in October at the end of his world tour. Gold Hill and Virginia City welcomed Grant with the typical western enthusiasms—brass bands, steam whistles, booming cannon, gunfire, cheering multitudes, a parade, and a grand mass of fluttering flags. The sixty-one-word speech the general gave to the assembled citizens couldn’t have lasted longer than a minute. John Mackay, James Fair, and Senators Jones and Sharon headed the list of Comstock luminaries who hosted the Grants for dinner.
Early the next morning, Mackay and Fair rode in carriages with General Grant, Mrs. Grant, their son, the governor of Nevada, and a few other notables around to the Carson River Valley and returned to Virginia via a long underground tour of the Sutro Tunnel and the Comstock mines joined to the tunnel by the north lateral—which included the Con. Virginia and California. The colossal dripping galleries of reinforced square sets that had housed the Big Bonanza struck General Grant with awe. Grant told Mackay it was one of the most impressive things he’d seen anywhere in the world and that Mackay “might be proud to be the master and director of the greatest mining enterprise on earth.”
One imagines John Mackay receiving the compliment with a nod, a stone face, and a stuttered mumble. The underground party took a group photograph in the shaft house of the Savage mine after they’d been raised to the surface. Both Mackay and Fair kept framed copies for the rest of their lives.
Grant’s words made a profound impression on Mackay. Several years later, he told a friend, “That did touch me. Any man might be proud of that, coming from Grant’s mouth, which never slopped over.” That friend was with Mackay almost every day for two years, and he never heard him mention it again—or say another word “in glorification of his own work.” General Grant, when he introduced Mackay to John Russell Young, said, “Mr. Mackay would make a great general had he been trained for the Army.”
Mackay considered those two compliments from Grant to be the greatest he ever received.
• • •
By the time Colonel James Fair departed on his own around-the-world tour in 1880—without his wife—the Comstock was in steep decline. Mackay held the Firm’s place on the Comstock, sinking the shafts and inclines deeper and running the drifts and crosscuts in a relentless search for ore against ever-worsening obstacles of hot, foul air, floods, and rising expenses. “Damn the heat!” Mackay said. “Give me the ore and we’ll run our shafts down as far as it goes.” A friend suspected that the money had become meaningless, that it was the “passion of the keenest hunt” that sustained him. “’Tis a poor man’s pudding just now,” he’d say, “but there may be more plums in it than we know of to-day.”
Of the eight enormous third-line shafts sunk to prospect the lode below the levels of the two great ore bodies, the Belcher–Crown Point bonanza in Gold Hill and the Big Bonanza in Virginia City, Mackay and his partners led efforts in five of them. Despite the steady discovery of isolated nodules and pockets of high-grade ore and masses of low-grade quartz, nothing in the deep levels materialized into a significant ore body. An increasing number of Comstockers joined those of their compatriots who had already left, taking their knowledge to mining regions all over the West and around the world. For the rest of the nineteenth century, wherever men burrowed deep underground in attempts to wrest wealth from the bowels of the earth would be found mine hands, foremen, engineers, and superintendents who’d learned the dangerous art of hard-rock mining on the old Comstock Lode.
• • •
Considered estimates place the Comstock’s total production during its twenty-year heyday at around $306 million—a sum equal in power and impact to $545 billion in the modern economy. More than a third of the total emerged from the Big Bonanza. By the time that stupendous ore body played out, the Con. Virginia had produced $61.13 million and the California $44.03 million, a combined total in excess of $105 million. The two mines had paid dividends totaling $74.25 million from a subterranean patch of Nevada just a little bit longer than four football fields. The return exceeded 70 percent, a testimony to the Firm’s good management. (The Gould & Curry returned less than 25 percent from the splendid ore body it had enjoyed in the early 1860s.) If the Firm’s share of ownership remained the same through those years, as seems likely, the Firm earned dividends worth between $41.74 million and $55 million, of which John Mackay’s share likely aggregated to between $15 million and $20 million. Mackay once remarked that with what he took out of the Bonanza, he could have rebuilt Trinity Church from basement to spire top in solid silver.
The Bonanza Firm earned another $9 million milling ore and reprocessing tailings, which added $3.8 million to Mackay’s account. Profits from timber and cordwood amounted to $645,000, putting Mackay’s personal take in the neighborhood of $20 million to $24 million.V Profits from the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Company, the Nevada Bank, Mackay’s real estate holdings, the San Francisco Gaslight Company, a chemical works, two dynamite factories, and the Firm’s other mining ventures both on the Comstock and elsewhere in the West must have added substantially to those totals. In November 1880, the tax collector assessed Mackay on a fortune worth $36 million in personal property and $250,000 in cash. Newspapers thought it should have been twice that amount. That same month, the Santa Cruz Weekly estimated Mackay’s net worth at $50 million and made him out to be the fifth-richest person in the country, behind only W. H. Vanderbilt, W. W. Astor, Russell Sage, and Jay Gould. The Irish Bonanza King was, by any measure, very wealthy, and an enormous portion of his riches existed in cold, hard cash, in gold and silver coin, unlike the fortunes of corporate paper juggled by the likes of Gould, Sage, and other Wall Street buccaneers.
• • •
Mackay hosted President Rutherford B. Hayes on the Comstock in the fall of 1880. His experience mirrored the country’s—President Hayes made less of an impression than General Grant. When Fair returned from his world tour in the fall of 1880 resolved to contend for Sharon’s Senate seat in the upcoming election, Mackay began planning his own escape.
Fair’s campaigning as a Democrat put Mackay in a potentially awkward position, as Mackay served on the Republican National Committee. Mackay supported the Republi
can presidential ticket—James Garfield and Chester Arthur—and negotiated the problem of his business partner’s campaigning as a Democrat with ease, since nobody in Nevada expected Mackay to stump for Republican William Sharon, who’d served Nevada with such a singular lack of distinction. Sharon hadn’t actually taken his seat in Congress until January 7, 1879, four years after his election, and even then, “the habitual absentee” skipped the next session of Congress to focus on his western business interests. In the 1880 campaign, “venality of the grossest and most open kind” marred the campaign for what California newspapers called the “rotten borough”—Nevada—and in James G. Fair of the Bonanza Firm, Sharon faced a nemesis “more well supplied with the munitions of war” than himself. Reno lawmen arrested two of Fair’s bagmen bribing voters outright on November 2. The minor news item did nothing to check Fair’s momentum. The one true issue in Nevada was anti-Chinese agitation. Fair railed against “Mongolians,” and Democratic candidates pledged to Fair carried the state legislature. The Candalaria True Fissure estimated that Colonel Fair invested $150,000 persuading the people of Nevada that he was the right man for the job. The pro-Sharon Gold Hill Daily News said, “Colonel Jim Fair . . . had literally sacked the state.” Fair saw off an attempt by Adolph Sutro to break his caucus in the Nevada legislature, and the “saturnalia of corruption” finally ended in January 1881 when the state legislature elected Fair to the United States Senate. Nevada had replaced one lousy senator with one perhaps worse. Fair would make only one speech during his Senate tenure, in support of the Chinese Exclusion Act, one of the more onerous pieces of legislation ever passed by that august body, although one sadly popular among Nevada miners, and his personal conduct would disgrace both himself and his state.
Mackay hadn’t stayed in Nevada to see Fair’s election formalized. He’d left the Comstock in late November, possibly expanded his acquaintance with General Grant in New York City, and arrived in Paris on December 9. Alexander O’Grady remembered Mackay striding into the house at Rue de Tilsitt “like a sailor home from the sea,” casting aside his coat, his cares, and his worries, taking the stairs two at a time and drawing the whole household to himself with unconcealed and affectionate regard. Plausibly, he hadn’t seen them in two years. In O’Grady’s memory, John and Louise enjoyed each other. Mackay recognized that in the manner of achievements possible for a woman of the times, his wife had come every inch as far as he had. He was proud of her accomplishments and teased her with gentle devotion. Alexander O’Grady described Louise as “openly fond” of her husband and doting on his letters during their long separation.
Mackay was the toast of Paris’s American colony through the winter and spring of 1880–81. As the newspapers told it, the Count and Countess Telfener hosted a dinner for Mr. and Mrs. Mackay soon after his arrival. Louise wore her favorite color—white—appearing in a dress of white brocade and white satin trimmed with a profusion of exquisite white Brussels lace. The American vice-consul general gave the Mackays a dinner at which Louise also wore white satin and lace. At a third dinner, she appeared in a “toilet” of “extreme beauty,” a train and corsage of pale blue brocade, worn over a pale blue satin skirt-front decorated with two embroidered bands from which dropped pale-blue fringes shaped like small peacock feathers, with a large pearl forming the eye of each feather. Her corsage was cut square, bordered with a narrow ruffle, and around her neck—“the whitest throat” in the American colony—hung a chain of diamonds and “an immense oval turquoise set in diamonds.” Louise Mackay, with a monthly income rumored at $150,000 thanks to bonds her husband deposited on her behalf, had become the best customer in the history of Boucheron.VI
The Mackays gave “a sumptuous ball” of their own, one of the remarkable luxuries at which was “a large supply of fresh strawberries.” A choir of forty complemented a forty-person orchestra. The staff served dinner at midnight, the first supper at 3:00 a.m., and the second an hour later. Mr. Mackay and twenty- or twenty-one-year-old Eva had retired hours before. Louise kept at the festivities with the late-night revelers.
Mackay enjoyed his ease. He’d earned it. He got reacquainted with his wife and his sons. He added to his collection of top-quality art, acquiring Léon Bonnat’s superb canvas The Negro Barber (of Suez), an arresting image of a muscular black barber bending over to shave the chin of a man seated cross-legged on a mat beneath him. The purchase, reportedly for 22,500 francs, said much about Mackay’s evolved artistic sensibilities. A telegraph notice reported Mackay in Rome, buying statues and paintings. He read—Shakespeare and biographies of great men being particular literary interests—and supported his favorite actors at every opportunity.
The Chicago Tribune described Louise as the most charitable woman in Paris. John poked fun at the lavish scale of Louise’s philanthropies and entertainments. “Louise, if you keep this up, you’ll land us both in the poor house,” he teased. He never constrained her expenditures, however. Alice O’Grady managed the staff and minded the normal household expenses, and Mackay never limited her outflows, either. He insisted only on accurate account books from them both. “I’m a businessman,” he’d say, “and I want everything connected with my affairs, even the household, handled in a businesslike way.”
Perhaps in reaction to the years of dirty mining he’d endured or to his Five Points upbringing, Mackay kept himself scrupulously clean. He bathed and changed his underwear every morning and again after exercise—more often than any other man Alexander O’Grady could remember. Strong and fit from the decades underground, Mackay dressed in simple, well-tailored clothes without adornment or affectation and carried himself like a proud old soldier who knew what it meant to be a man. Mackay summoned his son Willie and Alexander O’Grady to accompany him on his morning walks, and in Alexander’s memory, he enjoyed their “prattle.” He also employed them as interpreters, since both boys spoke French like natives. Perhaps with a little too much fondness, Mackay embraced his inability to learn the language. Although the household employed as many as thirty servants, Mackay refused point-blank to tolerate the attentions of one of the personal valets so commonly used by European aristocrats. A man named Franc‚ois, one of the household servants, looked after Mackay’s luggage, clothes, errands, and other wants and made himself indispensable as what a modern executive would recognize as a personal assistant, but Franc‚ois was always at pains to explain that he was under no circumstances permitted to help with Mr. Mackay’s bathing, dressing, or shaving.
Later in the spring of 1881, the son of Mackay’s childhood hero James Gordon Bennett threw a party in the Mackays’ honor in the ancient town of Pau, at the base of the Pyrenees in southwestern France. The elder Bennett had founded the New York Herald in 1835 and built it into the largest and most profitable daily in the country. As a boy, John Mackay had hawked the newspaper on the New York streets, making a half-cent profit on every sale. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., assumed the Herald’s reins when his father retired in 1866. As the younger Bennett had a well-earned reputation as a sportsman, a rake, and a bit of a lout, New York society expected him to fail. “Society” misread the man. Bennett possessed “a curious Scotch reverence for his father’s memory,” according to a close friend. The Herald was more than a business to the younger Bennett, the newspaper was a “family pride” and a “birthright.” Bennett Junior sponsored Henry Morton Stanley’s famous expedition to Africa to find missing explorer David Livingstone and drove the Herald to even greater heights. Bennett Junior lived a grand existence in New York through most of the 1870s, but in 1877, he disgraced himself at the home of his fiancée. He arrived drunk and urinated into the family fireplace (or possibly into the grand piano). The offended lady’s brother horsewhipped Bennett the next day, and the two fought a duel. Both missed. Ever since, the younger Bennett had managed the Herald by telegram from Paris, an expensive proposition in light of the twenty-five-cents-per-word cost of transatlantic telegraph traffic, one possible only for the owner of an astoundingly profit
able newspaper. Of the great New York fortunes, Bennett’s reportedly ranked only behind those of William Henry Vanderbilt and William Waldorf Astor. Two years before, Bennett and the Herald had financed George De Long’s attempt to reach the North Pole with thirty-two men aboard the USS Jeannette. The expedition left San Francisco in July 1879 and hadn’t been heard from since.
Although John Mackay had a decade of life experience on Bennett, the two had become friends during Mackay’s previous Paris sojourns and because Louise had become such a pillar of the “American colony.” Aware of the intense pleasure John Mackay took in music, Bennett hired Vienna Kapellmeister Johann Strauss (the Younger)—“the Waltz King,” then considered the world’s best composer, director, and performer of dance music—and his entire Vienna orchestra and brought them to perform at the party, reportedly at the cost of 140,000 francs. The younger Bennett brought the Mackays and the rest of his “brilliant company” to Pau from Paris and other cities in private express trains. A reporter at Bennett’s “Diamond Ball” said that nowhere else was it possible “to behold such a wealth of diamonds”—Louise Mackay’s “treasures of jewelry almost weighed her down.”
Descriptions of Louise Mackay’s endless social triumphs crossing the ocean on the transatlantic telegraph cables appeared as regular fodder in the society columns of American newspapers. Digs like “Shoddy Abroad” published in the Sacramento Daily Union never ceased, either—on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Bonanza King Page 49