Six thousand miles away, in San Francisco, John Mackay didn’t leave his room in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel for six days. Two of his old Comstock friends sat with him in his room. Mackay only broke his morbid silence to say, “Oh God, what have I done to deserve this?” When Mackay finally bestirred himself to begin the long trek to New York on October 25, the friend who made the trip with him described it as “the saddest journey he ever took.” Mackay hardly spoke.
John, Louise, and Clarence brought Willie’s body back across the Atlantic at the end of the following January aboard the SS La Touraine and interred him in a temporary vault, pending completion of the $300,000 mausoleum John was having built in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Neither John nor Louise ever recovered. Both took huge steps back from public affairs. John Mackay bore the loss “manfully” and attended to business, because that’s what a man did, but his friends remarked on how rapidly Mackay aged. Mackay’s hair filled out with gray. “A serious, almost mournful expression” replaced his smile. Clarence replaced Willie at his father’s side in family business affairs. Mackay kept an apartment at the Belgravia on Fifth Avenue. Willie had used part of it when he stayed in New York, and Willie’s section remained untouched in the years after his death. When Mackay showed visitors around the house, he gravitated toward souvenirs of his son until “over-mastered” by emotion. In San Francisco, Mackay took long walks that often ended in the Laurel Hill Cemetery at the graves of his old friends. Nobody who knew him ever doubted that John Mackay would have exchanged every one of his millions for the life of his son.
Willie’s death affected Louise as profoundly as it did John. Much to the “deep regret” of Louise’s many American and British friends, she preserved her “strict mourning” through the festivities of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897, nearly two years later. Glorious pageantry commemorated the queen’s sixty years on the throne, the longest reign in British history. Louise’s residence at Number 6 Carlton House Terrace would have been the perfect location from which to enjoy the celebration, but she remained “secluded” throughout. Although she returned to the United States in the spring of 1898 for Clarence’s wedding to Katherine Duer, described by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as “one of the very best known society women of New York and Newport,” Louise didn’t “lighten her mourning” until January of 1899, when she finally resumed entertaining—an event considered significant enough to merit attention in the New York Times. (For his son and new daughter-in-law, John financed construction of an elaborate mansion designed by Stanford White on 688 acres at Harbor Hill, Long Island.)
John wore his blacks for at least another year. When an old San Francisco friend and his wife visiting New York convinced Mackay to join them at the opera in 1900, Mackay confessed that he hadn’t attended a single entertainment since Willie’s death five years before.
In spite of his grief, Mackay maintained his business interests. Having bought into the Southern Pacific and the Canadian Pacific railroads in the 1880s and never sold, Mackay served on the board of both roads. He was a large investor in—and vice president of—a $7 million sugar refinery in Yonkers, New York, and the largest individual stockholder in American Telephone & Telegraph, an investment presumably made to diversify his communications holdings and gain a stronghold in a new and promising technology. He owned mines in Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, California, and Nevada and likely elsewhere. In California real estate, Mackay owned about fifty-five hundred acres of ranch land in San Mateo, San Rafael, and Mendocino and about $5 million worth of property in San Francisco. In New York, Mackay owned the fourteen-story Postal Telegraph Building and the eighteen-story Commercial Cable Company Building at 20 Broad Street, adjoining the Stock Exchange, and maintained five or six free beds in New York City hospitals in memory of his son.
The goal of laying a telegraph cable across the Pacific to connect San Francisco with America’s new foreign interests in Hawaii and the Philippines brought Mackay out of semi-isolation. A firm believer in the power of private enterprise, Mackay announced that he’d do it without any government “subsidy or guarantee.” Even then, it took more than a year to get government approval and even longer to get the navy to part with its depth soundings of the Pacific. Long before he received formal government approval, Mackay was building 156 miles of undersea cable per day, at tremendous cost. The goal re-energized the old miner, and when Mackay met a friend in May 1902, Mackay put up his fists and sparred a round of shadow boxing, saying that he felt as if he “could handle any 70-year-old fellow in the world.” Gout also slowed him, but as Mackay joked with the same friend, “as you know—well, I never earned that.”
Mackay was in London in July. Cable ships loaded with the first sections of the Pacific cable would soon depart the Thames. On July 15, Mackay had lunch with George Ward, longtime manager of his transoceanic cable enterprises. As they were leaving the meal, Mackay told Ward, “I’ll just lay that Pacific Cable, and then retire from business.”
It was not to be. John Mackay had felt ill during his lunch with Ward. He took to bed in Number 6 Carlton House Terrace that afternoon. One of his lungs filled with fluid. He died five days later, on July 20, 1902, with Louise and a Catholic priest at his side. His son Clarence completed the transpacific job. At the time of his death, newspapers estimated Mackay’s fortune at between $50 and $100 million, making him one of the world’s richest men. Nobody seemed to have an exact figure. Mackay’s private secretary said that Mackay didn’t know how much he was worth within $20 million and probably didn’t care. John Mackay was interned in the mausoleum he’d built for his son in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, where he resides among some of history’s most distinguished New Yorkers. He’d been a hard, but good man. Money hadn’t made him a hypocrite, and it had never stolen his good name.
• • •
In the aftermath of Mackay’s death, long, laudatory obituaries filled the columns of most American newspapers—and many in England and France. Almost all of them garbled the details of Mackay’s mining career, but expressed the basic sentiment that Mackay had “stormed the strongholds where nature had stored her treasures” and won them “in fair fight.” (It would fall to later generations to call the mining industry to account for the colossal environmental damage it inflicted on western ecosystems and for the havoc wreaked on Native American cultures.) The Salt Lake City Tribune said that, “Of all the millionaires of this country, no one was more thoroughly American than Mr. Mackay, and no one among them derived his fortune more legitimately.” Goodwin’s Weekly considered Mackay’s example “the highest of all rich men in America.”
Ironically, therein lay the reason John Mackay would fade from the memory of his countrymen. He died a widely admired man. Although Mackay stood among the leading industrialists and mining magnates in the last decades of the nineteenth century in terms of his wealth, none of the vitriol directed at the “Robber Barons” of the age had accrued to him. Mackay never chiseled on his employees’ wages. Indeed, at Postal Telegraph and Commercial, Mackay kept wages high and incentivized and aided in his employees’ purchase of company stock, one of the first business leaders to take such steps. Nor did Mackay ever lose his common touch. He never lorded it over his fellow man. John Mackay was always himself, as at ease among the miners on the Con. Virginia’s “fifteen hundred” as he was among the oldest families of Europe—and history records no aristocrat fool enough to have asked Mackay who he thought were the better men. Mackay’s personal philanthropies through the last decades were legion and legendary, but unorganized. Unlike many of his pocketbook peers, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Stanford, and Huntington, Mackay felt no great compulsion to leave behind a philanthropic organization or a university that would spend the next hundred years rehabilitating the family name. He’d never lost it. When Mackay finally did set an old friend to investigating options it was too late, too little time remained to him to push the plan to completion before his death, and his will contain
ed no specific instructions.
• • •
Like Mackay, the Comstock Lode faded from the national consciousness. Virginia City remains, still clinging to the side of Mount Davidson and surviving on nostalgic remembrance of the whisky and gunsmoke glories of the Old West while largely forgetting what it was, a working-class town of men and women who struggled to win a fortune—or even a living—from an unexploited landscape and birthed the American deep-mining industry. Huge gross quantities of gold and silver remain in the unmined portions of the great vein, just not in concentrations high enough to merit extraction. Or probably not. Once upon a time in the not too distant past, Virginia City was the biggest urban industrial concentration between Sacramento and St. Louis. In the 2010 census, Virginia City recorded 855 inhabitants, and Gold Hill had fewer than 200. They’re wonderful places to visit. The feelings remain, as do the mournful glories of the desert vista.
• • •
The wealth of the Comstock best survives in the economic powerhouse of modern San Francisco. Gold and silver pouring from the veins of Nevada radically changed San Francisco, transforming the city from a seaport serving the needs of the California interior into an industrial and financial center on the cutting edge of the new industry of deep, hard-rock mining, one of the high-technology industries of its day.
If one knows how to look, San Francisco’s connections to the old Comstock Lode remain strong. In 1902, James L. Flood commissioned the construction of a commercial building in his father’s memory at 870 Market Street, at its corner with Powell Street. The largest building in the city when it opened, the structure survived the 1906 earthquake and fire and remained in the family. Today it houses the flagship stores for Gap, Urban Outfitters, and Anthropologie. James Clair Flood’s great-great-grandson, also James Clair Flood, keeps an office inside from which he directs the business of the Flood Corporation. A display inside the business entrance on the first floor commemorates the Bonanza Kings and includes a few pieces of Comstock silver. The astonishing Nob Hill mansion James C. Flood completed in 1888 at a cost of $1.5 million also survived 1906—the only one of the millionaires’ houses atop Nob Hill that was so fortunate, but also the only one built of Connecticut brownstone shipped around Cape Horn. The building and its grounds occupy an entire city block and it currently houses the Pacific-Union Club, which purchased and refurbished the structure after the fire and has been there ever since. John Mackay and James Flood were once members.
Flood’s Nob Hill mansion stands directly across Mason Street from the front entrance of the Fairmont Hotel, whose construction was undertaken by James Fair’s daughters Theresa and Virginia in 1902. They sold out of the project before its completion, mere days before the great earthquake. Others finished its construction, but the name remained. A gathering of the world’s statesmen drafted the United Nations charter at the hotel in 1945. In 1961, Tony Bennett gave the first performance of his classic “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in the hotel’s Venetian Room.
The California Street cable car line runs alongside the Fairmont and directly in front of the Flood Mansion. Few of the people who ride the world-famous cable cars understand the Comstock Lode connection between the cable in “the slot” pulling their trolley up California Street and the two imposing structures they pass atop Nob Hill. (The Powell Street line starts at the foot of the Flood Building on Market Street.) Elsewhere in San Francisco are streets or buildings bearing the names of Sharon, Flood, Hearst, Ralston, Mills, and tiny Ophir Alley, which connects Cosmo Place and Post Street two and a half blocks west of Union Square. Unfortunately, none of the city’s thoroughfares carry Mackay’s name. South of the city is the town of Millbrae and Mills Field, both named for Darius Ogden Mills—we all know Mills Field today as San Francisco International Airport. A few miles farther south, in Belmont, one can use Ralston Avenue to visit Ralston Hall, where both William Ralston and William Sharon once lived. Across San Francisco Bay from Belmont is the town of Hayward, named for Alvinza Hayward, who snuck the Crown Point mine out from under Sharon’s and Ralston’s noses and made a fortune at their expense. John Percival Jones founded Santa Monica, where the Los Angeles megalopolis now meets the Pacific. Many other Comstock connections lurk elsewhere in California. In the forty-five years between the end of the Gold Rush and the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, nothing exerted a bigger influence on San Francisco’s fortunes than the Comstock Lode.
• • •
Louise’s daughter, Eva Bryant Mackay, the princess of Galetro and Colonna, John’s daughter, raised her children to adulthood after separating from her husband, then devoted herself to charitable services. During the Great War, she worked indefatigably on behalf of the Italian Red Cross while her two sons served in the Italian army. After the armistice, Eva treated victims of the Spanish flu epidemic—which few had the courage to do—and contracted the disease herself. Louise rushed to her side. Eva died on March 28, 1919, at the age of forty-eight. Obituaries speculated that the tireless relief efforts she’d made during the war had undermined her ability to resist the virus.
Louise Mackay lived until 1928. Her long New York Times obituary made much of her fairytale marriage, the “enviable” position she’d enjoyed in the society whirls of Paris, London, and the French Riviera, and her many social triumphs, but failed to note the heartbreaking tragedy of her existence—she’d outlived three of her four children. In accord with Louise Mackay’s specific requests, after “services of the simplest character,” her body was interred in the family mausoleum alongside the bodies of her parents, son, daughter, and husband.
Clarence Hungerford Mackay successfully managed the Postal Telegraph, the Commercial Cable Company, and the other Mackay family business interests for several decades after his father’s death. He and his wife, Katherine Duer Mackay, had three children and remained a significant force in society and horseracing. Effendi, a colt bred by the Mackay stables, won the Preakness Stakes in 1909. Katherine, an ardent advocate of women’s rights and women’s suffrage, had founded the Equal Rights Society in New York City the year before. In 1911, Katherine fell in love with Clarence’s personal physician. The couple divorced in 1914. Katherine abandoned her children and station and moved to Paris with the doctor. Years later, while she was dying of cancer, the doctor left her for another woman.
Cable Ship Mackay-Bennett is best remembered for deploying from Nova Scotia and recovering the bodies of people lost in the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912. The ship was retired in 1922, but served as a storage hulk in Plymouth Harbor, where she was sunk by a German air raid during the Battle of Britain. She was finally scrapped in 1963. Clarence Mackay endowed an aviation trophy still annually awarded by the United States Air Force. Among its many winners are such famous aviators as Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who commanded the United States air forces during World War II; Jimmy Doolittle, leader of the famous “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” raid in early 1942; and Chuck Yeager, first person to break the sound barrier. Clarence Mackay hosted many lavish parties at his Harbor Hill estate in the 1920s. The two most widely remembered are one for the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, king of the United Kingdom, who abdicated the throne in 1936 in favor of American double-divorcée Wallis Simpson, and another for Charles Lindbergh on the night of Lindbergh’s ticker tape parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue that honored his solo flight across the Atlantic. Clarence Mackay adhered to the Roman Catholic traditions held dear by his mother, and although he’d been divorced from Katherine Duer since 1914, not until after she died in 1930 did Clarence marry soprano Anna Case, his longtime girlfriend. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History currently displays the 167.97 carat emerald necklace Clarence gave Anna as a wedding present. Clarence had sold the majority interest in the Postal Telegraph and the Commercial Cable Company to International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) in 1928, accepting as payment an enormous chunk of ITT stock when it was worth $201 per share. Clarence must have felt good about the deal when ITT stock rose
150 percent over the course of the next year. Then came the stock market crash and the long decline. In 1932, ITT sold for $2.87. Clarence negotiated the Great Depression selling his art and antiquities and died of cancer in 1938.
ITT operated the Postal Telegraph & Cable Corporation as a corporate shell holding the Mackay interests until merging the domestic portion of the Mackay system with Western Union in 1943. The international cable and radio portions of the Mackay system remained with ITT, which had emerged from the Great Depression as one of the great multinational conglomerate corporations of the twentieth century. ITT maintained interests on both sides of World War II and had its fingerprints on some of the nastier South American events of the 1960s and 1970s, including military coups in both Brazil and Chile. Facets of ITT survive into the twenty-first century.
In November 1925, Clarence’s daughter Ellin Mackay—John Mackay’s granddaughter—wrote one of the most influential articles in the early history of a then-fledgling magazine called The New Yorker. She enjoyed a sixty-year marriage to Irving Berlin, one of America’s greatest songwriters. Clarence did not approve of the union and disowned her. Ellin Mackay Berlin wrote a novel based on her grandmother’s life and inspired many of her husband’s songs, including “Always,” which became a postmortem anthem of legendary country singer Patsy Cline, and “Blue Skies,” which equally legendary Willie Nelson took to the top of the country charts in 1978.
In remembrance of his father, Clarence endowed the Mackay School of Mines at the University of Nevada, Reno. Having his name attached to one of the world’s leading mining institutions would surely fill John Mackay with satisfaction and pride. In 1908, Gutzon Borglum—the man who would sculpt Mount Rushmore—erected a statue of Mackay in front of the school, where it remains today. John William Mackay stands as a simple miner with the bottoms of his trousers tucked into a pair of mucker’s boots, holding a chunk of ore in his right hand and resting his left on the handle of a pickaxe. The likeness memorializes John Mackay as he would surely want to be remembered, with his gaze turned toward Virginia City and the Comstock Lode and his sleeves rolled up, ready for work.
The Bonanza King Page 55