The Mackays arrived in England in the week before May 7 to support Mackay’s friend John McCullough’s London debut as the title character in James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius. “Rank, fashion, and beauty” strove against each other in the packed house, and the audience cheered the American tragedian with bursts of “hearty and spontaneous applause . . . seldom heard within the walls of a London Theater.” Louise attended the Compte de Camonda’s costume ball as Cleopatra in a “wondrous blend” of a gold and turquoise satin wearing sapphires and diamonds worthy of her namesake. John’s costume went unrecorded, but anyone would be forgiven the surmise that he attended as Mark Antony.
Mackay next surfaced in New York on June 2. His sudden appearance and dinner with Nevada senator John Percival Jones caused much comment in mining circles. Mackay passed through Los Angeles on June 14, on his way to the Comstock, having taken the southern route from the east, likely because of a desire to inspect mining discoveries in the southern Arizona Territory. Apache depredations, Mexican raiding parties, and the lawless violence of the mining camps didn’t deter him. He’d lived it all before. The reason for his whirlwind trip to Nevada remained obscure, but he’d likely been summoned by Flood to inspect a potentially important development in the deep levels of the Comstock mines.
With the great miner on his way back to Virginia City, the Carson Morning Appeal joked about the “epistletory bonanza” [sic] of some three hundred letters Mackay would have to “crosscut” in the Con. Virginia office. Mackay received hundreds of letters from gold diggers all over the world, those from Europe often addressed to “Mackay, North America.” Many letters from women sought marriage—or other less reputable arrangements. Some came from correspondents sure that $20,000 or $30,000 in seed money would set their schemes rolling down the road to millions, most of them “good enough to offer Mr. Mackay a half interest.” One suggested a modest $1 million investment to buy up every goat in the world and thus monopolize the kid-glove market. All found their way into a wood stove.
Whatever Mackay found in the deep levels didn’t hold his attention. Comstock bullion production barely topped $1 million in 1881, the worst annual showing in the twenty-two years since the lode’s discovery. Speculators made much of Mackay’s giving away the sparse furnishings that had adorned the lodgings he’d kept in the Gould & Curry office since the big fire in ’75, “as if he intended to shake the dust of the Comstock from his feet forever.” The whole lot wouldn’t have brought $300 under the auctioneer’s hammer. Mackay left New York for France aboard the steamship St. Laurent on July 12 and likely spent most the rest of the year touring Europe with his wife. Someone in Virginia City received a letter from him dated September 18. Mackay had penned it from Moscow and said that he hadn’t seen an English-language newspaper in seven weeks. Later that autumn, a hotel keeper in The Hague, in the Netherlands, gloated about “the King and Queen of the Bonanza Mountains of California” staying at his establishment.
In San Francisco, James Flood and Senator Fair bickered. Fair withdrew from the Firm’s mining operations in the autumn of 1881 and focused his money on San Francisco real estate investments and other California speculations. The Firm had sponsored development of the New Yellow Jacket shaft in the Gold Hill section of the lode. Low-grade quartz between 2,200 and 2,300 feet and small ore stringers between the 2,760-foot level and 3,000 feet kept up hopes, but 170-degree water spouting from the drill holes and foul air at such an incredible distance from the surface made progress ever-more difficult and expensive. Flood and Mackay ordered the Gold Hill pumps shut down. The Gold Hill mines flooded to the level of the Sutro Tunnel’s South Lateral. Deep-level prospecting continued in the middle mines and on the north end of the lode.
Mackay arrived on the Comstock at midnight one night in July 1882. As usual, his wife, sons, and daughter had stayed in Europe. He spent the entire following afternoon examining the lower levels and emerged several hours later “looking as fresh as though he had spent the time seated in an easy chair on the surface in the shade.” He hadn’t been underground in a year. He spent much of the next two months in the mines.
One thing Mackay noticed during his Comstock sojourn in the summer of 1882—if conducting business across the Atlantic hadn’t drawn his attention to the situation already—was that the cost of using the transatlantic telegraph to communicate with his wife had doubled since the last time he was in Nevada. Mackay found that painful. Not so much because of the cost—he could bear any cost to communicate with his family—but because the new rates marked a step in the wrong direction, against the march of progress. The rate rise crucified James Gordon Bennett, Jr., orchestrating the affairs of the New York Herald via voluminous cables between Europe and New York. The hiked rates came as a result of the new “pool” of the transatlantic cable companies organized by notorious corporate raider, secretive railroad and telegraph magnate, and “arch-trickster” Jay Gould in May 1882. Gould’s “pooling agreement” had raised rates from twenty-five cents to fifty cents per word.
Mackay returned to San Francisco and probably Virginia City before heading east via the southern route, as usual likely wanting to inspect mining developments in the southern Arizona Territory, and as usual undeterred by chaotic violence of the camps that kept more “civilized” eastern businessmen at a distance. The savage Tombstone gunfight at the O.K. Corral between Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday on one side and the Cowboy gang of the Clanton and McLaury brothers and Billy Claiborne had taken place the year before, and a bloody feud between the two factions had raged ever since. Mackay arrived in Chicago on October 17. A reporter seeking an interview noted his plain suit, checked shirt, and faded, stiff brown hat. Mackay wore no diamonds, and the only ornament about his person—“if ornament it could be called”—was a gold slide on a black silk ribbon that he used as a watch guard. Mackay told the man there was “nothing new in the way of mining on the Pacific coast.” That afternoon, he departed for New York and continued across the Atlantic to France.
John and Louise Mackay, their two sons, Eva, and their tutors wintered on the French Riviera and made excursions to Rome and Naples. The turn to March found them at Menton, “the Pearl of France,” on the Mediterranean coast at the border with Italy, where they were joined by the Count and Countess Telfener. They returned to Paris in April, and Mackay added to the family art collection with the purchase of Flemish master Gerard Douw’s canvas The Fish Merchant.
They were still in the French capital when salacious stories about Senator James G. Fair suddenly filled American newspapers. According to the correspondent of the Chicago Herald who broke the story, Fair and his family had been “at loggerheads” for the past several years, the trouble consisting of the “somewhat open way” in which “Slippery Jim of the millions” violated the Seventh Commandment. On the Comstock, it had been more or less an open secret that Fair invested in “wildcat claims” to the manifest detriment of his wife. Fair’s “countless infidelities” poked through a cracked door in San Francisco and escaped the closet completely in Washington, D.C., where Fair had “soiled the senatorial toga” and sold out the marital combination “on every opportunity.” Nor was Mrs. Fair, by all accounts “a most estimable lady,” inclined to “suffer in silence.” A portly woman with “flashing black eyes” and “a will of considerable horsepower,” she filled the air about Fair’s head with sulfurous remarks every time she caught him in “some new peccadillo.” Rather than taking his medicine, the senator counterattacked with “abuse.” He accused her of unseemly conduct, which everyone knew to be false. Fair insinuated that John Mackay had “more influence about his house than he has himself”—likely the result of Theresa Fair’s holding Mackay up as an example of how a married man ought to comport himself. Not long after Colonel Fair took his seat in Washington, his wife paid him a surprise visit and found Fair enjoying a setup that “might have been the envy of [the] Khedive of Egypt.” Mrs. Fair blew it up “with several pounds of moral dynamite�
�� and treated the senator to some of the strongest—and presumably most public—“curtain lectures” that “the active tongue of a strong-willed and fearless woman ever pronounced.” The colonel fell back “on his ancient privilege of abuse” and cut off his wife’s money supply. She had to borrow money to fund her return to California. Back in San Francisco, Mrs. Fair and the children occupied the family mansion on a corner of Pine and Jones streets. The colonel fortified himself at the well-stocked bar inside the Occidental Hotel.
James Fair, Jr., the senator’s eldest son—then twenty years of age—“a chip off the block” known to cavort with “evil companions of the female persuasion” and for liberal enjoyment of liquor, attempted to shoot his father but was prevented and tumbled aboard a train for Paso Robles, about two hundred miles south of San Francisco.
Theresa Fair went to Virginia City and filed for divorce. On May 12, the court heard the testimony of one “woman of the town” from San Francisco and read the sworn deposition of another, collected a few more details, and granted the divorce. Fair contested nothing. James Fair got custody of their eldest son, the one who had allegedly tried to shoot him. Theresa received custody of the three minor children, the family residence in San Francisco, and $4.25 million, a staggering sum by the standards of the day but far less than half of the family fortune. The trial had lasted under an hour.
Long before the scandal went public, John Mackay and James Flood had come down squarely in Theresa Fair’s court. Their opprobrium may have contributed to Fair’s decision to stand apart eighteen months before. As a San Francisco correspondent of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote two years later, “Public opinion was against [Fair] at the time of the divorce suit of his wife, and nothing has since changed it.” In Nevada, the Carson Morning Appeal’s editor considered it “a matter of regret” that John Mackay had not been elected senator “in place of that king of duplicity and deceit, James Fair.” In the editor’s estimation, Mackay possessed “a thousand manly and honorable qualities.” Fair had “none.”
Ironically, John Mackay had accepted an official government charge that same May, but one far distant from Nevada or Washington, D.C. Just a few days after the Virginia City District Court freed Theresa Fair from the bonds of matrimony, John and Louise Mackay passed through Berlin on their way to Moscow. President Chester Arthur had asked Mackay to serve as special ambassador of the United States at the coronation of Czar Alexander III, whose father had been assassinated by bomb-throwing Nihilists two years before. Fear of the Nihilists motivated the long delay, but whisperings that “the present Emperor was only half a Czar so long as he remained uncrowned” eventually became too loud to ignore.VII
Telegrams to California described “the whole European press” fawning over the magnificence of Mackay’s private train carriage and the fifteen sumptuous dresses carefully hung in his wife’s private baggage car. Muscovites evinced much interest in “the Big Bonanza” and his wonderful silver mines in the tumult of events leading up to the grand coronation, considering him “one of the most interesting personages attending.” At the czar’s reception for the diplomatic missions held a night or two before his official investment, John Mackay chatted pleasantly with the Russian empress, fielding her questions about California.
The breathtaking coronation spectacle took place inside the Kremlin’s Cathedral of Michael the Archangel. The ceremony of chanting, bowing, receiving, anointing, addressing, faith-professing, cross-kissing, enrobing, and praying culminated when an attendant brought forth the imperial crown on a velvet cushion. The czar picked up the crown, held it high so all could behold its bejeweled magnificence, and put it on his own head. The New York Times’ man in Moscow found the ceremony “fully worthy of the occasion of the assumption of autocratic power by the absolute ruler of eighty millions of people.” A veteran diplomat considered the pageant the most spectacular and imposing he’d witnessed during a thirty-five-year career. Outside, in the city, mounted Cossacks patrolled every street, their steely eyes peeled for the Nihilists. At the ball held afterward, the new czar decided that Mrs. Mackay was the best-dressed woman present. Not even the stupendous pomp and barbaric splendor of a Russian imperial coronation could dim Louise Mackay’s star.
John Mackay never recorded his thoughts on the occasion, but of all the splendid personages present, he’d possibly had the lowest birth—which wouldn’t have caused him the least bit of shame. He must have been quietly proud of his wife, too, watching her enjoy the ball, fully aware that she’d covered every bit as much improbable distance as he had himself. They circulated with “the finest people in Europe.” Unfortunately, John Mackay found most of them unimpressive. Mackay was chivalrous to a fault, and nobody ever heard him utter an unkind word about any woman, of any station, either in public or in private. He displayed rather a lot less charity toward male members of the European nobility. Of them, in private, he was “profanely contemptuous.” He called them “bums and parasites” who “ought to go to work as I did.” In high company, Mackay took malicious pleasure in telling European aristocrats that he’d once been a common miner. Yes, he’d cooked his own food, and yes, he’d washed his own clothes. “It was either that or go dirty,” Mackay said. He’d been born in Ireland, he’d relate, the poorest country in the world, scion of a long line of Irish “bogtrotters.” He’d gone barefoot as a child and shared a dirt floor with the family pig. Louise feigned “mortification” and embarrassment in company, but she’d known the rude press of poverty herself. They’d traveled the hard roads their European associates had not. John and Louise Mackay had come as far as—and perhaps farther than—anyone else in the world, from the slums of New York and the filthy, transient mining camps of California to serve as their country’s official ambassadors at a Romanov coronation.
Except for the two brief trips to the Comstock, Mackay had enjoyed two and a half years of family time and ease after the sustained focus required to manage the extraction of the Big Bonanza. Together with his wife, he’d explored the ancient cultural capitals of Europe and soaked himself in world-class art, theater, and music, experiences so far beyond the original possibilities of an Irish street urchin that they might have existed on another planet. He’d also decided that he wasn’t ready to settle into a permanent retirement. He still had the old fire. He missed the challenge of swinging great enterprise. He missed having an enemy.
The one he’d decided to make might have been the most formidable private individual on earth—Jay Gould.
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I. The rebuilt St. Mary’s in the Mountains Catholic Church still stands, one of the most beautiful nineteenth-century buildings in Nevada.
II. The Delta Saloon still operates, although perhaps not with unbroken lineage.
III. The Mackays’ old mansion currently houses the Belgian Embassy.
IV. The author appreciates O’Brien’s tastes. A lifelong surfer, he has spent more time at Ocean Beach than at any other place in San Francisco.
V. A $20 million fortune in 1880 would be worth about $35.6 billion today measured as an equivalent share of the total national economy.
VI. Arguably, Louise Mackay still holds that distinction.
VII. n an odd twist of history, President Arthur, risen to the presidency on the assassination of James Garfield, sent Mackay to the coronation of a czar who also ascended to power as the result of an assassination.
CHAPTER 17
The Cable War
The Mackays’ Parisian mansion at 9 Rue de Tilsitt today, which currently houses the Belgian Embassy.
* * *
Mackay’s simple word is worth 100 cents on the dollar anywhere. He has resided a quarter century on this Coast, and it would be hard to find a man who would say that he ever broke a promise or attempted ever to mislead any one in a business transaction.
—“Mackay and Gould,” Carson Morning Appeal, October 25, 1883
A small, frail man with a thick beard and a prominent forehead long since deserted by his
hairline, Jay Gould was, without question, the most hated man in America in the summer of 1883—and the most feared. A former business partner, since murdered, once described Gould as “a heap of clothes and a pair of eyes.” Fairly or not, public disgust at all the distortions, dishonesty, double-dealing, and oppressions in the post–Civil War economy had come to rest in his person. Most Americans imagined Jay Gould as a demonic genius pulling the levers of the economy for his private enrichment—to the detriment of everybody else. The eyes of the times saw Gould’s wealth as exactly opposite Mackay’s. Gould had “extracted” his wealth “from thousands of people who have through toilsome years acquired the small investments which he has squeezed like a sponge into his own coffers.” Mackay had wrested his from the earth through honest toil, paying fair wages, without taking advantage of his fellow citizens. Like almost every American newspaper beyond Gould’s control, the New York Times took after him with a vengeance. The paper spoke for most Americans when it described Gould as “an unscrupulous gambler who has never yet played without cogged dice” and “a money grabber . . . universally believed to be without heart, conscience, or shame.” “His touch is death,” muttered ruined Wall Street operator Daniel Drew.
Gould never enjoyed Mackay’s rugged good health and appetite for physical labor, but he shared Mackay’s capacity for disciplined, directed, and sustained hard work. Gould had a passion for orchids, and like Mackay, he collected art. Despite decades of anti-Semitic slurs heaped on his head, Gould didn’t have a drop of Jewish blood. His Puritan ancestors had pioneered the New York wilderness. Five years younger than Mackay, too young to have rushed after California gold, Gould worked as a surveyor in the middle 1850s, then ran a tannery and a leather merchandising operation—which failed. Between 1860 and 1867, while Mackay was working his way off the bottom rungs of the Comstock mining industry, Jay Gould served an apprenticeship in New York’s stock and commodities trading and financial industries, ingurgitating the changing, dynamic conditions of the industrializing economy. He emerged as one of the first Wall Street operators to comprehend how to use the new tools of modern finance, law, and politics as levers with which to control large public corporations, especially railroads. Gould’s masterly—and most would say devious—use of equity ownership, bonds, short-term or “floating” debt, proxy voting control, bankruptcy and receivership, contractual flaws, well-connected friends, government oversight and intervention, and litigation baffled, thwarted, and ruined competitors through the next two decades. Whereas other big wheels of business cultivated attention, Gould always sought the shadows, vesting his ambitions in secrecy. Few could fathom Gould’s stratagems as he rose to control one railroad, then appeared at the helm of another before most of his rivals realized that he’d disappeared from the first. Through the 1870s, Gould consolidated railroad and newspaper interests into a powerful empire. Camouflaged behind the very public railroad dramas, the enlargement of Gould’s telegraphic power went largely unremarked. In 1878, Gould sold a telegraph company called Atlantic & Pacific (A&P) to Western Union, by far the industry’s dominant power.
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