The Bonanza King Page 10
John Mackay worked as hard as any miner in camp. In the three months since he’d come to Washoe, he’d helped dig tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of royal metals from what was now universally known as the Comstock Lode, the Comstock Lead, or the Comstock Ledge, more wealth than he’d ever touched in California. Unfortunately, Mackay owned none of it. All that wealth belonged to the mine owners. Mackay did receive something in addition to his wages, however, something that would serve him well over the course of the next twenty years. With his eyes a foot or two from the rock, he received an education in the new mining conditions from the face of the lead itself. Like every other man in Washoe, Mackay tried to cast his imagination into the rock, looking for clues that would lead him to a greater understanding of what wealth lay underground. He also looked for an opportunity to gain some ownership of a potentially productive mine.
While the Ophir, the Mexican, and the Central mines worked through open cuts, the California Company, south of the Central, tried a different approach. They chose to dig a horizontal tunnel back toward the ledge from a point on the hillside farther down the slope. (To facilitate drainage, it was driven on a slight upraise, making it an “adit” in technical mining parlance.) Once they hit the quartz ledge, they intended to take advantage of gravity and extract the wealth by opening an underground chamber in the ore body—a “gallery” or a “stope”—and extract the ore body above the level of the adit, mining uphill, with the aid of gravity, which required less effort, although the technique would force them to figure out how to support the gallery, not always an easy undertaking.
Indeed, if the owners of the productive mines had a problem, it was the sheer volume of ore they were extracting from the vein. The arastras couldn’t crush it fast enough, and no known mechanical and chemical milling process had any hope of keeping pace. Smelting worked only for small volumes, required large amounts of expensive fuel, and was only economically viable for the highest-grade ores. The Mexican patio process “saved” a high percentage of precious metal, but it needed from ten days to three months to reduce a few tons of ore, and it only worked in warm weather. The productive claims had already stockpiled more than one hundred tons of ore, and their miners were disgorging tons more every day. An optimist writing for the Sacramento Daily Union thought the Comstock lead “probably surpasses in richness anything recorded in the history of mining.” Such astounding reports reached the Placerville Observer that the editor lost faith in his correspondents and refused to publish their dispatches. No matter the local excitement, over the mountains in California, the Washoe silver discovery still “commanded little faith.”
That was about to change. James Walsh and his Ophir co-owners had been sending regular ore shipments to San Francisco since September. Apart from the raw ore they’d sold for overseas shipment, they’d managed to accumulate thirty-eight tons of their highest-grade stuff in the city by the end of October. After passing through San Francisco smelters, that ore yielded $114,000 worth of precious metal. Deducting transport and milling costs of $512 per ton netted them a profit of nearly $95,000. Knowing exactly how to provoke a mining excitement, the Ophir owners piled the bars of resultant bullion in the windows of the Alsop & Company banking house on California Street—which probably had about the same emotional impact as a bullion stack worth $36 million would today. San Franciscans gathered outside and gawked at the gleaming ingots. Even the most hardened skeptics found it hard to squawk against such a tangible display. Californians struggling to recover from the Fraser River–related recession needed no great leap of insight to realize that such wealth cracked open would stimulate a world of industrial, agricultural, and transportation-related opportunities supplying California-dependent mines and new towns sure to spring into existence on the eastern slope of the Sierras. “Washoe [was] all the talk,” all over San Francisco—and all over the state. Only snow clogging the Sierra passes kept the would-be Washoe stampede pent in California.
At Virginia City and Gold Hill, snow fell “without intermission” for much of the last week of November until five feet lay atop the camp. Working with Jack O’Brien, Kinney Said, and Alec Kennedy, John Mackay excavated a dugout into the hillside below the open cuts, built walls with stacked stones slathered with mud, roughed together a door and a stone chimney, and roofed the makeshift structure with poles, brush, and dirt over which they stretched a sheet of canvas. Snug and dry inside, they wintered in reasonable comfort, as they’d done in similar winter quarters through the Gold Rush years. The foursome cobbled together bunk beds, a table, and three-legged stools from limbs of piñon pine and cedar. Later in the winter, they took in two other men, who slept on the dirt floor, wrapped in blankets. Elsewhere in Virginia City, men with coin or gold dust paid a dollar per night to pack like tinned oysters into the few public houses, where they hoped the fierce winds careening down the mountain above the camp (recently renamed “Mount Davidson”) wouldn’t blast apart the flimsy canvas walls they sheltered behind.
Temperatures bottomed at eleven degrees below zero in mid-December. All the arastras in Virginia City and Gold Hill froze solid. There seemed little hope they’d thaw until spring. Precipitation choked the surface cuts with snow and ice or water and mud and paralyzed mining activity in anything but subterranean tunnels.
A Sacramento Daily Union correspondent estimated that of the several hundred men (and a handful of women) in and around Virginia City after the first snowfalls, only about one-sixth composed the camp’s “real mining population.” The majority consisted of speculators, mercantile operators, teamsters, hotel, saloon, and boardinghouse proprietors, loafers, aspiring politicians, horse thieves, cut-throats, gamblers, and members of the “prospecting gentry.”
For serious miners pushing to develop paying claims, the foul winter weather left digging an adit from farther down the slope aimed to intersect the lode in depth as the only viable strategy. After six weeks of digging, the California Company struck the main silver lead sixty feet below the surface, deeper than any other mine had yet explored. The ore vein crosscut by the California Company adit equaled that found in the open cuts of the Central, Ophir, and Mexican mines, and although of the other three only the Ophir had gotten as deep as thirty feet, all had discerned a tendency of the quartz vein to widen with increased depth. The value of claims thought to be on the line of the lode vaulted five hundred percent.
Other mine owners wanted to emulate the California Company’s success, but not all of them possessed the large quantities of coin required to finance such construction projects as adits. However, without such major development endeavors, their mines would never pay dividends, either. Some owners became willing to trade “feet” in their claim—meaning a share of its ownership—for the construction of an adit that might reveal ore in their mine. That was exactly the opportunity John Mackay had been awaiting. Although Mackay hadn’t managed to save enough money to buy his way into ownership, his demonstrable competence, leadership ability, and initiative gave him the opportunity to work his way into ownership. He contracted with the owners of the Union mine, a mine on the line of the Comstock Lode between the Ophir and the Sierra Nevada, to run an adit from lower down Cedar Ravine designed to intersect the lode at depth in exchange for “feet” in the claim.
Each “foot” represented one share in the mine, with the number of shares determined by the length of the claim on the line of the lode. Thus, a four-hundred-foot mine would have four hundred “feet,” or shares. One “foot” in a four-hundred-foot mine didn’t pertain to one specific geographical foot, but rather to a one four-hundredth share in the mine’s ownership.
Without any capital except his native human qualities, earning sweat equity was Mackay’s best avenue to mine ownership, and for the Union owners, also without capital, trading “feet” for work was the fastest method to develop their claim. Everyone’s fortunes would be made if the tunnel struck ore. Since Mackay and his cabin mates could dig an adit regardless of surface weather conditions, they probably lab
ored at it through most of the winter. The drawback to the arrangement was that with all their remuneration paid in “feet,” they earned no cash money, and with the winter continuing severe and but scanty supplies crossing the Sierras, prices rose to what one commenter called “forty-nine prices . . . with slim prospects of a reduction this side of the spring months.” Little coin circulated, an irony considering the tens of thousands of dollars of mining wealth within a hundred yards of camp. Like many others, Mackay and his companions ran low on coin. Mackay had the cabin’s last thirty dollars. He spent it buying a sack of flour and bacon and shared it among his mates. After that, they ran out of both money and food. Fresh meat was the only inexpensive provision, ranchers in the Carson and Eagle valleys being happy to unload stock at the mercy of the keen weather. One day, the butcher they’d patronized stopped Mackay and asked why he and his cabin mates weren’t buying meat. Embarrassed, Mackay stuttered out an explanation. The butcher heard him out, then said, “You boys come and get what you want and pay me when you can.” The butcher’s extension of credit carried the foursome through the winter.
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Despite the increasing bitterness of the pro- and anti-slavery sectional disputes in the eastern nation, winter isolation seemed to diminish the importance of news from elsewhere in the nation. Local developments held more significance: improvements in the overland mail network, efforts to construct a transcontinental telegraph line, men freezing their feet trying to cross the Sierras, George Hearst’s sale of half his Ophir interest (likely one-twenty-fourth of the total) to Henry Meredith for $10,000, Hearst’s purchase of a more substantial share of the Gould & Curry claim 1,534 feet to the south, and on the day of the leap year, February 29, 1860, “a very heavy wind” that blasted apart several buildings and unroofed the newest hotel.
Tangible evidence kept the silver strike before California eyes. One Placerville jeweler displayed “a lump [of silver] about the size of a frying pan” in his shop window. The San Francisco Mint had accepted fifty-eight thousand ounces of Washoe silver in January 1860—nearly two and a half tons—and everyone was “stark, raving mad” about Washoe and silver. The fever infected all classes of inhabitants alike, from merchants, businessmen, and lawyers to mechanics, teamsters, and “hard fisted men of muscle and rude industry,” as the San Francisco Weekly Bulletin described common laborers. As a city journalist wrote during the winter of 1860, “Go where you will, in the street, in the counting-house, in the saloon, at home—and we had almost said at church—and the topic is Washoe. It is all Washoe. People think, talk and dream of Washoe.” In Marysville, “Are you going to Washoe?” was the question on everybody’s lips, and Washoe was the talk in all the saloons. “For the Washoe Country!” “Washoe!” “For the Silver Country!” “Washoe Express!” “Bound for Washoe!” “Washoe Mines!” “Washoe Mining Stocks!” “Go it, Washoe!” blared from the advertising columns of the newspapers, and all over California, would-be silver nabobs requisitioned that celebrated forerunner of migration—“the Ho!”—into service for their proposed trans-Sierran rush. No one doubted that the first blush of spring would unleash a torrent of immigration on the new mining localities of the western Utah Territory.
Only the severe winter contained the hegira. Ice formed on the Truckee and Carson rivers thick enough to support loaded freight wagons. Three to five feet of snow mantled the mountainsides around Virginia City. For sixty days, snow more than a foot thick covered the Carson, Eagle, and Washoe valley bottoms. Ranchers ran out of feed, and no resupplies came over the Sierras. Incapable of truffling through snow to reach nourishment, horses and cattle starved. When not drowned by the wind, the valleys sounded with the “heartrending” lowing of dying cattle. Nothing relieved the polar monotony of the landscape “save an occasional flock of carrion birds hovering over the carcass of some starved victim.” As many as fifteen thousand horses, oxen, cows, and swine died in the Carson, Eagle, and Washoe valleys—livestock worth a quarter of a million dollars.
With their traditional hunting grounds in the valley bottoms of the eastern slope now “owned” by white ranchers, the winter of 1859–60 visited intense suffering on the Washoe and Paiute tribes. A government official on an inspection described Indians on the Truckee Meadows “freezing and starving to death by scores.” In one Washoe hut, he found three children dead and dying. A few whites tried to alleviate the native misery, offering to share their own scant supplies of bread and provisions. Many Indians refused assistance, fearing poisoned food. They blamed the severe weather on the white immigrants.
A Sacramento Daily Union correspondent in Virginia City worried that both the quantity and quality of persons in the mining rush certain to flood over the Sierras from California would further worsen relations with the Indians. “The recent discoveries in this region will bring across the mountains some of our Digger [Indian] killing, squaw embracing Californians, who will be sure to indulge their sportive propensities . . . and bring about a serious Indian War.”
That was a prescient concern. The coming rush would also touch off the long chain of tragic events that led, many years later, to John Mackay’s meeting the lovely young widow who would become the love of his life.
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I. Mormon Station had operated in 1850 but wasn’t permanently occupied until 1851. The settlement changed its name to Genoa (locally pronounced Ge-noa, with the accent on the second syllable) in 1855; it’s the oldest immigrant settlement in modern Nevada.
II. Comstock’s few surviving contemporary communications make him sound like Penrod’s assessment—enthusiastic, visionary, and a bit self-important.
III. In mining law, those are termed “extralateral rights.”
IV. They probably made the strike between June 8 and June 12, 1859.
V. In some sources, he is called James Hart.
VI. The modern city of Reno, Nevada, is built on what were then called the Truckee Meadows.
VII. Acanthite (Ag2S) predominated among Comstock ores, but argentite, stephanite, and polybasite were also common.
VIII. William Randolph Hearst of yellow journalism fame would be George Hearst’s son.
IX. he twenty-two-mile stretch of track was the only railroad on the Pacific Slope in 1859.
X. Variously “Alvah” and “Abraham.”
XI. George Hearst would develop some of the best mines in the West, among them the Ontario and Bingham Canyon mines in Utah; the Anaconda Mine in Butte, Montana; and the Homestake Mine in South Dakota. (Hearst is “the heavy” who arrives in camp in the second season of the serial drama Deadwood.)
XII. Also “Housworth.”
XIII. Sometimes Francis J. Hughes.
XIV. An oft-told tale of Old Virginny, drunk, falling over, shattering a full whisky bottle, and using the disaster as occasion to christen the camp in honor of his home state is almost certainly apocryphal.
CHAPTER 4
The Rush to Washoe— and an Indian War
Fanciful view of Virginia City in the spring of 1860, when the “city” had only a handful of substantial buildings—and dozens of tents, dugouts, and shanties.
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Of one thing you can be assured; these mines are no humbug; they are richer than any I ever saw, and I would not give the little hill on the east slope of which Virginia is situated for a fee simple title to the whole of Fraser River.
—“Letter from Virginia City,” Marysville Express, November 26, 1859, reprinted in Daily Alta California, December 28, 1859
If the Gold Rush had proven one thing, it was that Californians were a gambling people, willing to risk a bitter fizzle for a chance at sudden fortune. In spite of all the editorial croaking, to many Californians it seemed foolish not to try to grab an early piece of the next big thing. A spell of mild weather in late March 1860 unleashed the rush.
Moneyed San Francisco speculators bolted out of Placerville astride horses or sure-footed mules, climbing the long ridge east of town. Traders led strings of loaded
pack mules, and it being “an article of faith with California teamsters that where a horse can go a wagon can follow,” stage and freight drivers hee-yawed their mule or ox teams after the hindquarters of the mounted vanguard. Affluent prospectors led mules or donkeys burdened with equipment and provisions. Men unable to afford draft animals slogged uphill on foot, straining forward under heavy packs. A few mud-splattered immigrants shoved wheelbarrows toward Virginia City, one hundred miles away, beyond the spine of the Sierras. Men who’d been born in France, England, Ireland, Germany, Mexico, and a dozen other countries plodded alongside Pike’s County Missourians, Connecticut Yankees, hotheaded southern-rights secessionists, New Yorkers, free-soil New Englanders, Ohioans, and men from all other corners of the thirty-three united states. A few women struggled along with the general migration, many wearing men’s clothes.
From atop Junction Hill, which in clear spring weather provided a commanding view of the Sacramento Valley that stretched all the way to Mount Diablo and the Coast Ranges, more than a hundred miles away, the Washoe-bound multitudes descended a heavy grade into a canyon toward Brockliss’s Bridge over the South Fork of the American River. The bridge keeper extracted a one-dollar toll for the right to make a safe, dry crossing of the snow-melt-swollen torrent and served “execrable brandy, warrented [sic] to kill at twenty paces” from a log hut. Beyond the bridge, on the north side of the river, an “exceedingly bad” road continued up canyon. Water running out from under banks of melting snow flooded the footprints and wheel ruts. Hundreds of hooves, boots, and wheels churned the track into a quagmire. Some days, it rained. Wagons, horses, mules, and oxen bogged down in the muck. Teamsters whipped and cursed exhausted, straining animals. Overloaded wagons capsized, dumping crates of merchandise into the muddy road margins. Trains of draft animals struggled past the wreckage, those of the many whisky peddlers “stopping now and then to quench the thirst of the toiling multitude.”