The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  * * *

  I. The building still exists. A branch of the JP Morgan Chase bank occupies the ground floor.

  1 In 1860–61, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine ran a series of caricatures of silver-crazed miners and prospectors created by J. Ross Browne. Above, miners chaffering over the indications of a new location, hoping their rock contained profitable concentrations of the “precious needful.”

  2 Above, the squally business of disputing a claim, which often became violent when miners were under the influence of rotgut whisky, cut-rate wine, or stovetop brandy.

  3 Virginia City in 1861, as revealed in this panoramic illustration. The town would continue to change with both the arrival of enormous new hoisting and refining works as well as a devastating fire that swept through Virginia City’s narrow streets and wooden buildings in 1875.

  THE BONANZA CROWD

  4 James G. Fair, known for his massive physique and expertise in running mines.

  5 James Clair Flood opened the Auction Lunch Saloon in San Francisco, where he listened to speculators discussing Comstock mines over his bar top; before long he became enormously successful on San Francisco’s stock exchange.

  6 William O’Brien, James Flood’s partner at the saloon and later on the stock exchange.

  7 John William Mackay, once a paper boy on the streets of New York City, was destined to become one of the richest men in the world.

  8 Marie Louise Antoinette Hungerford Mackay was living hand-to-mouth when she met her husband-to-be.

  9 William Sharon became the leader of the Bank Ring and was ferociously opportunistic and manipulative in his efforts to monopolize the Comstock Lode.

  10 William Ralston, perhaps the most enthusiastic booster California has ever had, not only destroyed the finances of the Bank of California but drowned the day his malfeasance became public, possibly a suicide.

  11 With the tentacles of its ownership reaching into many of the young state’s most important industries, the Bank of California sprang into existence as the most powerful financial institution on the Pacific Coast and battled John Mackay’s rise to power.

  12 Prussian immigrant and unrepentant egomaniac Adolph Sutro fought the Bank Ring for almost fifteen years to dig his gigantic drain tunnel 20,498 feet from this entrance to its intersection with the Comstock Lode.

  13 General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife visited Virginia City for an extensive underground tour of the Consolidated Virginia and California mines in 1879. Pictured here: John Mackay on the left and James Fair on the right; General Grant holds the lantern in the middle with Fair’s wife, Theresa, on his left elbow and Mrs. Grant on his right. Both Mackay and Fair kept framed copies of this photograph for the rest of their lives.

  14 The composing room of Virginia City’s paramount newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. Newspapers were a crucial component of a thriving mining camp, and the Territorial Enterprise attained lasting national influence.

  15 William Wright (pen name: Dan de Quille) and Sam Clemens (pen name: Mark Twain), the Territorial Enterprise’s two greatest “sagebrush” journalists. One would never achieve more than regional notoriety, his talents swallowed by the well-polished jug; the other would become the most famous American writer of the nineteenth century.

  16

  17 Comstock miners, a behatted dog, and three young lads, who may have worked in the mines as pick boys and engineers’ assistants. One of the mines kept a fully stocked stable and three working mules more than a thousand feet underground.

  18 Miners on the cages, braced for the terrifying descent underground where temperatures sometimes exceeded 135 degrees and the hazards included underground floods; collapses, or “caves,” of the galleries and stopes; foul, unbreathable air; falls into winzes and mine shafts, the deepest of which exceeded two thousand feet; premature powder detonations; boiler explosions; and the one miners feared above all others—fire.

  Acknowledgments

  Having last written about China and India in the 1930s and ’40s, this time around I hoped to find a story that didn’t require crossing the Pacific whenever I wanted to get the feel of a location. That desire led me to ferret through the nineteenth-century history of San Francisco, one of my favorite places, both historically and geographically. Those investigations kept “striking the lead” of the Comstock Lode, for prior to the great 1906 earthquake, the Comstock Lode was one of San Francisco’s strongest influences. Fond childhood memories of visiting Virginia City with my mother cemented my interest. The search for an undersung character with the heft to carry the story of the Comstock Lode led straight to John William Mackay—and one of the greatest untold rags-to-riches stories in American history.

  My greatest professional debts of gratitude go to my agent, Farley Chase, and to my editor at Scribner, Colin Harrison. Farley shared my enthusiasm for John Mackay’s amazing story from the moment of our first phone call, and his well-developed literary sensibilities and cogent advice have done much to shape this book from that phone call forward. Colin Harrison at Scribner had apparently long wanted to “do” a Comstock Lode story, and both Farley and I were thrilled to add his expertise and enthusiasm to The Bonanza King’s team. Ever since, Colin has been the best active collaborator and advocate we could have hoped to discover. Colin’s carefully considered advice, insights, “nose” for story, and ability to identify compressible detail have been a tremendous aid in shaping this book. I’ve learned much experiencing the machinations of Colin’s editorial mind, and to boot, he has been a great pleasure to work with. Also crucial in helping shape The Bonanza King to its final form has been the attention and expertise of Scribner assistant editor Sarah Goldberg. She did much to shepherd the project to completion and offered a critical last round of editorial advice before we took the book into final production. Between Sarah, Colin, and Farley, I feel incredibly fortunate to have marshaled such a formidable array of literary talent in service of The Bonanza King. Also richly deserving of thanks are Sean Devlin and Katie Rizzo, the two copyeditors at Scribner who worked diligently on the manuscript under tight deadlines; art director Jaya Miceli; book designer Erich Hobbing; and Scribner publicist Hailey Rutledge and freelance publicist Becky Kraemer. I’m grateful to all of you for your talents and hard work. Books are among the few remaining handcrafted products of the modern world, and all of your fingerprints are on this one.

  I owe great thanks to the digital collections that facilitated the research The Bonanza King required: the Internet Archive (archive.org); the California Digital Newspaper Collection (cdnc.ucr.edu); the New York Times historic archive (timesmachine.nytimes.com); the Library of Congress (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov), the David Rumsey Map Collection (davidrumsey.com), the New York Public Library (digitalcollections.nypl.org), and newspapers.com. I’m indebted to many of the Comstock writers and historians who have gone before me, most notably Henry de Groot, Dan de Quille (William Wright), Sam Clemens (Mark Twain), Eliot Lord, Ronald M. James, Michael J. Makley, and especially Grant Smith, whose collection of Comstock- and Mackay-related material assembled in the 1920s and early ’30s and archived at the Bancroft Library included many interviews with people who had once known John and Louise Mackay. Of especial assistance in photo gathering were Patricia L. Keats, director of Library & Archives at the Alice Phelan Sullivan Library of the Society of California Pioneers, and Jacquelyn Sundstrand, Sean Busey, Donnelyn Curtis, and Kimberly Roberts in the Special Collections Department at the University of Nevada, Reno.

  Many people offered direct assistance during the writing of The Bonanza King. I give thanks to medical doctors Mark and Susan Robinson for discussions of nineteenth-century medicine and diseases; San Francisco firefighter Chuck Watanabi for discussions about what the dynamics of a mine fire might have been like in 1869; George Washington University professor Tyler Anbinder, author of the excellent Five Points, for information about shipbuilding and Irishmen in 1840s New York City; Ro Martinoni, deputy recorder of Storey County, for tracking down in
formation about old Comstock mining claims; Janet Whitmore, PhD, art historian, for information about Alexandre Cabanel’s portrait of John Mackay; Katie Green, author of Like a Leaf Upon the Current Cast, for providing information about Dr. Edmund G. Bryant and Louise Bryant; Ray Brooks for consultations about minerals and Idaho mining; Katie Sauter, research librarian at the AAC Library; Professor Michael Bowers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Jack Tackle for Montana advice and for visiting Henry Comstock’s grave on my behalf; former City of Rocks Ranger Kristen Bastis for sharing her knowledge of the Oregon Trail and chasing down information about supergene enrichment; Jason Todd for also tracking down information on supergene enrichment; Campbell Gardett for his local knowledge of Mackay, Idaho; John Sherman for providing information on the historical range of California condors; Benjamin Dreyer for advice on how to tame the astonishing profusion of nineteenth-century commas; Bud Sprague, Brian Coppersmith, and author Julian Stockwin for nautical advice; Tarquin Crouch for consultations about England; Tom Rapko for emails about the “feel” of placer mining and what it’s like to hit a pay streak; and James Claire Flood, great-grandson of Mackay’s partner James Claire Flood, for sharing family lore and a passion for the history of the Bonanza Firm. Also helpful were Nevada State Historic Preservation Officer Rebecca Lynn Palmer; Robert (Bob) Nylen, curator of history at the Nevada State Museum; and Martin Fenimore, first cousin five generations removed from James Fenimore, “Old Virginny.” My thanks also go out to Bo White and Molly Rorrick; Scott Ransom and Nadia Drake; Diana McSherry and Pat Poe; Theo Emison, Melissa Fitzgerald, Dina Howard, Amy Sillars, John Blaney, Jeff Witt, and Emily Bazar; Bill McConachie and Ann Parker; Tom Lambert; Dave Saunders and economist Rod Garratt at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Charlie Downs and Professor George Wheeldon; Hans Moosmüller and Sheryl Bennett for hospitality in Reno; Steve and Patty Michiels; Sierra County Historian Virginia Lutes; and Steve Johnson.

  Personally, my greatest thanks go to my son, Ryan Crouch, and my wife, Tina Rath. They’ve extended me limitless love and support through the years I spent in the Comstock mines and have exhibited a superhuman tolerance for both long silences and relentless bombardments of Comstock-related “fun facts.” Ryan and Tina are on every page. This book could not have been written without them.

  A Note on Sources

  Virtually every sentence in The Bonanza King contains a fact, and the overwhelming majority of those facts come from some primary source. I kept careful track of all sources used while writing, and the citations multiplied into the thousands. Since I organized most of my research digitally, I’ve posted my bibliography and endnotes on my website, at gregcrouch.com/the-bonanza-king-bibliography and gregcrouch.com/the-bonanza-king-endnotes, and as time permits, I’ll endeavor to add live links that will allow readers to jump directly to the source material from within both the endnotes and bibliography. With that accomplished, curious readers will be able to garner as much pleasure from the source material as I did. I’ve also added a page of links to old maps and mine diagrams pertinent to The Bonanza King at gregcrouch.com/the-bonanza-king-maps. Many of the old maps are wonderful and some of them are spectacularly well digitized. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

  Much modern literature pertinent to the Comstock relies on the same few old source books. By and large, those books are accurate, if not always easy to read. However, in quite a number of places, other primary material makes the foundations of those old books worthy of scrutiny. I haven’t always agreed with their conclusions, but on every occasion that I forged a different path I felt like the preponderance of contemporary evidence forced me to divergent conclusions.

  The bulk of the primary material I consulted while writing The Bonanza King comes from two basic categories. First, the digital archives of newspapers and magazines contemporary to the Comstock heyday: archive.org; the Hathi Trust Digital Library at hathitrust.org; the California Digital Newspaper Collection at cdnc.ucr.edu; timesmachine.com, the online archive of the New York Times; newspapers.com; the archive of the San Francisco Chronicle accessible through the San Francisco Public Library at sfpl.org; and the Mark Twain Project at marktwainproject.org; among others. The ease and speed with which that was accomplished and the searchable nature of the various databases allowed me to spend much more time among the source material, meticulously track old stories as they developed through a variety of news outlets (and yes, newspapers in the nineteenth century had their own particular editorial slants, ones that historians haven’t always been careful to sort through), and to refer back to the original sources as often as needed, things that previous generations of writers working in an analog world found impossible or impractical to do. Newspapers in those days regularly published letters from correspondents in distant cities. Those provided excellent material for a readership unfamiliar with local conditions, which is more or less exactly the situation we find ourselves in today as we look back on the lode from a century and a half into the future. The other bulk of the primary material came from the Grant Smith collection held by the Bancroft Library and the Ellin Berlin collection at the University of Nevada, Reno. Grant Smith grew up on the Comstock. He’s the ten-year-old eyewitness who was out hunting birds with a slingshot on the morning of the 1875 fire. Later in life, Smith developed an interest in Comstock history and wrote a valuable book, The History of the Comstock Lode. He also began writing and collecting material for a biography of John Mackay that time never allowed him to complete. He transcribed and sourced items from interviews he conducted with a number of people who had known Mackay on the Comstock—and a few who had known him in the Gold Rush days. Those provided the best snippet views of Mackay on his way up. Mackay’s granddaughter, Ellin Berlin, wrote a novelized account of Louise Mackay’s life called Silver Platter. Although Ms. Berlin’s research is historically unreliable in several important aspects, she built an impressive collection of research, which I gratefully ferreted through.

  As I was researching, I used the organizational software Evernote to clip more than six thousand contemporary Comstock articles and other items into digital notes that I organized into chronological and topical folders tagged by subject matter. I suspect other Comstock historians would find those folders useful and valuable. Assuming it’s technologically possible, I’ll endeavor to make them available through a link on my website. In the meantime, I’m happy to give access to anyone who shares my passion for Comstock history.

  About the Author

  © TINA RATH

  Gregory Crouch grew up in Goleta, California, and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, with a military history field of study. He completed U.S. Army Airborne and Ranger Schools and served as an infantry officer. He is the author of the true-life World War II flying adventure China’s Wings and the alpine memoir Enduring Patagonia. A regular book critic, Crouch has reviewed for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review, and the Washington Post. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.

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  Bibliography

  A General Business and Mining Directory of Storey, Lyon, Ormsby, and Washoe Counties, Nevada. Virginia City: John D. Bethel & Co., 1875.

  Ahmad, Diana L. “Opium S
moking, Anti-Chinese Attitudes, and the American Medical Community, 1850–1890.” American Nineteenth Century History 1, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 53–68. London: Frank Cass, 2000.

  Alonso, Enrique, and Ana Recarte. “Pigs in New York City: A Study on 19th-Century Urban ‘Sanitation.’ ” University of Alkali, Spain: Friends of Thoreau Environmental Program, Research Institute of North American Studies. (PDF file downloaded July 11, 2015.)

  Altrocchi, Julia Cooley. The Spectacular San Franciscans. San Francisco: E. P. Dutton, 1949.

  Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001.

  Angel, Myron, ed.. History of Nevada. Oakland, CA: Thompson & West, 1881.