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  For my wife, Tina Rath

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The New Camp

  1. A Rough Irish Lad

  2. Gilded Dreams—and the Hard Fist of California Reality

  3. The Lure of the Washoe Diggings

  4. The Rush to Washoe—and an Indian War

  5. Surrounded by Riches—and Unable to Get Them Out

  6. Revving Up the Boom

  7. The First Boom, Frenzied and Exuberant

  8. A Tiny Sliver of a Mine

  9. The Rise of the Bank Ring

  10. The Irish Coup

  11. The Lode’s Worst Day

  12. Jones’s Sick Child

  13. The Consolidated Virginia Mine

  14. The Strike

  15. The Big Bonanza

  16. The Bonanza King

  17. The Cable War

  18. Twilight

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Photograph Credits

  Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.

  —Proverbs 22:29

  PROLOGUE

  The New Camp

  “Gold is where I ain’t.” A restless miner, unsatisfied with the prospects of his claim, prowls the hills for new diggings.

  * * *

  California drew to her golden shores the pick of the world, Nevada drew to herself the pick of California.

  —C. C. Goodwin, As I Remember Them

  John Mackay (pronounced Mackie) and his partner Jack O’Brien bent beneath their loads and slogged to the top of a high ridge at the crest of what would become known as the Virginia Range. They’d climbed more than twenty-three hundred feet from the valley beneath. It was sometime in July or August of 1859, and a hard sun shone down from the pale sky. A fierce, dry wind blew across the ridge. The rocky soil beneath their boots didn’t support much besides scrappy piñon pines and waist-high sagebrush. Behind them, westward, on the opposite side of the valley out of which they’d just climbed, rose the high peaks of the Sierras. On the far side of those mountains lay the California goldfields from whence they’d come. Eastward stretched a landscape of lonely, sorrowful magnificence, chain on chain of brown desert mountains fading into the uttermost limit of vision.

  Too poor to afford a horse or a mule, they’d walked more than a hundred miles, lured by rumors of a rich new strike of gold and silver in what was then the western Utah Territory. Only a few more miles remained. Mackay shouldered everything he owned: a bedroll, several cooking implements, maybe a change of clothes, and the basic tools of mining—a pick and a shovel and perhaps a sledge and a heavy, handheld drill. The flush of effort had put dewdrops of sweat under his hairline and ruddy Irish color up in his cheeks, a complement to the reddish-brown of his hair and the luxuriant mustache that stretched an inch or two beyond the corners of his mouth. Mackay stood a touch above average height and looked on the world with clear blue eyes. He was nearly twenty-eight years old, and his tight-knit frame didn’t carry an ounce of loose flesh. Mackay had coarse, callused hands and a grip like iron. Seven years with a pick and shovel will do that to a man. He moved with easy, athletic grace and an air of contained violence. He also seemed to be enjoying himself. Mackay found the pleasure in hardship. He didn’t say much, and when he did, he spoke slowly, fighting a childhood stutter. Mackay was proud, touchy, and quick with his fists. He would share his last morsel of food with a friend, but nobody ever took anything from John Mackay without a fight.

  Work was all he knew. He’d been laboring to support his mother and sister since his father died when he was eleven years old. He’d managed to remit small sums home to New York City since he’d come to California at age twenty-one, but despite seven years of excruciating toil in the goldfields, Mackay’s existence was every bit as hand-to-mouth as it had been when he stepped off the boat in San Francisco. Few recognized that his reticent demeanor hid a burning desire to make something of himself.

  Mackay and O’Brien adjusted their loads and traversed the last few miles down and across the eastern slope of Sun Mountain. Skirting the base of Cedar Hill, they passed stakes and rock piles marking the claims of hopeful men. Scattered miners hacked at chunks of outcropping quartz, eager to reveal an ore lead. From test pits farther up the slopes of Sun Mountain, men threw up piles of brownish-yellow dirt that from a distance resembled gopher mounds. Soon, Mackay and O’Brien looked across a shallow ravine to a nexus of activity around the base of a little knoll, the site of the original strike. Mackay saw at a glance that the mining in front of him was of an entirely different kind than what he’d known in California. In an open pit, a handful of men worked with picks and shovels to expose a vein of bluish-black ore. A few others loaded black rock into sacks. A string of pack mules waited near a handful of canvas tents. Other draft animals plodded in circles, harnessed to the sweeps that pulled the dragstones that pulverized chunks of ore to dust in circular, rock-paved patios sunk twelve or eighteen inches into the ground called “arastras” that resembled the rings of a small circus. Several men nearby used trickles of available water to wash the resultant crushings through miners’ rockers—cheap, easily cobbled together rectangular wooden boxes that relied on a small stream of water and a gentle side-to-side rocking motion to trap precious, and dense, gold flakes behind one-inch-high “riffle bars” while the water carried off the lighter worthless material in which the gold had been embedded. Mackay had heard that ore dug from this barren mountain held gold and silver twinned together. He knew gold, having served a long, hard apprenticeship in the gold-bearing streamway sediments and ancient riverbeds of California. He knew nothing about silver and itched to hold a chunk of the veinstone in his hands, to feel the ore’s weight, to learn how the royal metals had been locked up inside—and more important, how to get them out.

  Before they walked the last few yards into the new camp, O’Brien asked Mackay if he had any money about his clothes.

  Mackay said that he didn’t have a cent.

  Thinking they ought to walk into the new camp penniless, “like gentlemen,” O’Brien fished his last fifty-cent piece from a pocket and heaved it down the hillside into the sagebrush.

  Asked about the incident years later, Mackay acknowledged that it did happen, then grimaced. “That’s what Jack did with his money all his life,” he said.

  Mackay turned his attention back to the bleak landscape and the mines. The bustle put his blood up. He didn’t know it, not yet—and neither did anyone else—but the men hacking at the ore lead before him were scratching at the tip of the most concentrated storehouse of gold and silver ever discovered in the United States and one of the richest ever discovered anywhere on earth. The work of understanding, finding, extracting, and controlling the vast treasure vaults beneath their feet would mobilize the energies of thousands, raise a city from the bleak desert wilderness, play a vital role in helping stabilize the Union economy through the Civil War, give birth to a state and an entirely new industry, transform San Francisco from a trading port into the innovative financial powerhouse it still is today, precipitate some of the great corporate struggles of the ninet
eenth century, and create one of the biggest fortunes in the world.

  That work would shape John Mackay’s life—as would his fight to seize some portion of the riches beneath his feet.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Rough Irish Lad

  Tens of thousands of destitute Irish immigrants lived packed into the rickety tenements of Five Points in lower Manhattan. It was the most notorious slum in the world.

  * * *

  The poorest and most wretched population that can be found in the world—the scattered debris of the Irish nation.

  —Archbishop John Hughes, 1849

  Few great men ever started further down the ladder of success than John William Mackay. He was born into dire poverty near Dublin, Ireland, on November 28, 1831. Mackay, his younger sister, and his mother and father shared a crude cottage with the family pig. That was in no way unique, for grinding need wore at the foundations of nineteenth-century Ireland. Walls of loose-stacked stone slathered in mud enclosed the one-room shelters that housed fully half the Irish population. Most didn’t have windows. A roof of tree branches, sod, and leaky thatch protected them from the worst of the Atlantic rains; an open peat fire warmed them through the dark winter months. Beds and blankets were rare luxuries. Most Irish families slept on bare dirt floors alongside their domestic animals. A British government official reporting on the living conditions of the Irish peasantry noted that “in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water. . . . Pigs and manure constitute their only property.” Like many Irish families, the Mackays didn’t always get enough to eat.

  They were Catholic, and in the eyes of Ireland’s Gaelic Catholic majority, theirs was a conquered country, subjugated to the foreign English crown since the mid-seventeenth century. Although Catholics constituted more than three-quarters of Ireland’s population, by 1800, 95 percent of the country’s land had passed into the hands of English or Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocrats. Interested only in extracting rents and raising grain and cattle for cash sale in England, those absentee owners typically spent the bounty of the Irish countryside supporting lavish lifestyles in England while the laborers and tenants who worked their estates endured desperate poverty.

  Irish tenants exchanged their labor for the lease on the small plots of dirt they needed to feed themselves. On such meager acreages, only the potato yielded sufficiently to feed a family. Poor Irish men and women ate them at almost every meal. Chronically indigent, often underfed, unable to purchase land, deprived of political power, and ferociously discriminated against for the sin of being Catholic, more than a million people left Ireland in the first four decades of the nineteenth century.

  The Mackays held firm until 1840, but when young John reached the age of nine, the family immigrated to America. In 1800, some 35,000 Irish men and women lived in the United States. When the Mackay family arrived forty years later, that number had bloated to 663,000, the overwhelming majority of them poor and barely educated. Unskilled laborers nailed to the cross of extreme poverty, most Irish male immigrants did casual day labor, taking whatever employment they could find. Ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, they performed the brutal, backbreaking toil nobody else would do, for paltry wages, digging sewers and canals, excavating foundations, loading ships and wagons, carrying hods of bricks and mortar for skilled masons, paving streets, and building railroad beds. Irish women worked as washerwomen and domestic servants, or sewed piecework in the needle trades. Widows took in boarders and collected rags they recycled into “shoddy,” a cheap cloth made from shredded scraps of wool. In New York City, Irish peddlers lugged merchandise to every neighborhood, hawking sweet corn, oranges, root beer, bread, charcoal, clams, oysters, buttons, thread, fiddle strings, cigars, suspenders, and a host of other inexpensive items. Rag-clad Irish children scavenged wood, coal, scrap metal, and glass, swept street crossings for tips, shined shoes, dealt apples and individual matches, and sold newspapers.

  Rather than be grateful for their inexpensive labor and service, established Yankee Protestants despised the Irish immigrants, scorning them as “superstitious papists” and “illiterate ditch diggers.” The huge numbers of Irish-born Catholics enfranchised by the universal white male suffrage of Jacksonian democracy terrified native-born Americans. Many Protestants judged Catholicism—with its devotion to an imagined papal dictatorship—to be philosophically incompatible with the ideals of American democracy. Established, respectable Americans discriminated ferociously against the filthy Irish suddenly infesting the slums of eastern cities and manning the work camps of railroad- and canal-building concerns. Help wanted advertisements often carried the qualifier “any color will answer except Irish.” The twin millstones of being Irish and Catholic kept most Irish immigrants firmly anchored to the bottom of the American social spectrum.

  In 1840, the year the Mackay family crossed the Atlantic, nearly half of the eighty-four thousand immigrants received in the United States came from tiny Ireland, and like thousands of their countrymen, the Mackays settled in New York City. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 had transformed the city into the most important port in the Western Hemisphere. Dense forests of masts and spars sprouted from ships docked against the piers, wharfs, quays, and slips cramming the southern shores of Manhattan Island. Banking, insurance, and manufacturing industries developed alongside the trade. New York’s population grew from 123,700 in 1820, five years before the canal opening, to 202,000 in 1830 and roughly 313,000 in 1840, making New York three times the size of Baltimore, America’s second largest urban concentration.

  The Mackay family took quarters on Frankfort Street in the heart of the Fourth Ward. In their earliest days, the city’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth wards running from the East River to the Hudson River between City Hall Park and Canal Street had housed a mixed community of free blacks and French, German, Polish, and Spanish immigrants, but as more and more people abandoned Ireland for the United States, those neighborhoods acquired a distinctly Irish flavor, an influence that spread north into the Fourteenth Ward and east to permeate the Seventh. When the Mackays arrived in 1840, the Irish presence filled much of lower Manhattan,I and it centered on the Five Points intersection, just a few hundred yards from the Mackay family’s front door. At that time, Five Points was the most notorious slum in the United States.

  Originally, Five Points had been an attractive marshy pond, the Collect. As the city expanded, tanneries and slaughterhouses set up on its banks and dumped their effluents into the pond. The Collect grew so disgusting that it depressed local real estate values. The municipality dug a canal to drain it (and gave a name to Canal Street), and when that didn’t improve conditions, filled in the pond. Without bedrock beneath it, the landfill proved too unstable to support major construction. Speculators bought the land and erected cheap one- to two-and-a-half-story wooden houses among the businesses of the neighborhood.

  Property owners originally designed the houses for artisans, their families, and their workshops, but as budding manufacturing industries undercut the prosperity of individual craftsmen, landlords discovered that they made much larger profits by partitioning the buildings into tiny rooms rented to immigrants. Originally known as “tenant houses,” the term morphed into the word “tenements.” The rickety wooden fabrications were damp and frigid in winter, sticky and sweltering in summer, and always choked with foul, smoky air from the fires of cooking and warming. Inside, entire families crammed into single rooms entered from dim, lightless corridors. Unceasing din harried the inhabitants. Street noise reverberated in the front rooms. Rooms in the rear filled with the sounds of neighbors facing the backyards and alleys—spouses argued, babies screamed, siblings fought. Occupants shared filthy, overflowing outhouses with dozens of neighbors and drew water from common hydrants outside. The horses, mules, and oxen used everywhere for drayage defecated in the streets. The municipal government sponsored no garbage collection. Foot, animal, and wheeled traffic churned the improperly drained streets and alley
s into fetid quagmires choked with animal corpses, human and animal waste, kitchen slops, and ashes. The stench was overwhelming.

  Mice, rats, roaches, fleas, lice, maggots, and flies thrived in the squalor. Thousands of feral pigs roamed the streets. Despite the pigs’ grotesque snouts, coarse hair, and black-splotched skin, New York residents tolerated them because the pigs were far and away the city’s most effective street cleaners, even as they waged pitched battles with wild dogs for choice morsels of food. Among their own kind, the pigs rutted with loud, gleeful abandon. Refined Knickerbocker ladies sent up howls of protest, complaining that exposure to such indiscriminate sexual behavior undermined their respectability and lowered the moral tone of the whole city. For Irish women, most of whom had been raised in a rural countryside, fornicating domestic animals barely seemed worth a raised eyebrow. Besides, the pigs supplied valuable meat.

  The outrageous quantities of animal and human feculence contaminated local wells. Dysentery, typhoid fever, diarrhea, and other waterborne diseases wreaked far more havoc in the immigrant wards than they did in the rest of the city, as did tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox, measles, mental disorders, and alcoholism. Crime and prostitution were ubiquitous, murder commonplace. Astronomical mortality rates haunted New York’s immigrant neighborhoods.

  America’s new penny newspapers thrilled readers with lurid descriptions of the violence, dirt, mayhem, poverty, and moral depravity of Five Points. Visiting journalists could seldom resist characterizing the Irish neighborhoods as nests of vipers and sinks of filth and iniquity, unable or unwilling to do justice to the poor, working-class families who lived there. Most scribes, making brief forays into the slums, had eyes only for the dark side of the Irish wards. They failed to credit the immigrants’ ferocious struggle, or to perceive the community strength building in their churches, saloons, benevolent societies, fraternal orders, and fire companies. Immigrant families bent on improving their lot in the new country fought a constant battle to maintain any semblance of dignity in the face of such filth, squalor, and anarchic ruckus. The vast majority of Irish immigrants worked as hard as humanly possible to better their lives and the lives of their children as they fought to claw their way up from circumstances so desperate they were difficult for established Yankees to comprehend.