The Bonanza King Page 8
The Gold Hill miners soon made a most unwelcome discovery. About ten feet below the surface, the gold-bearing quartz chunks interspersed in their yellowish paydirt coalesced into a single reddish quartz mass, still friable, but nevertheless a dismaying discovery for the original locators. Suddenly finding themselves owning quartz mines instead of the rich placer ground they’d been rooting through for several weeks, they faced the same difficulties that had dogged the Pioneer Quartz Company, whose failure the previous year loomed fresh. The unwelcome revelation put many of them in a mind to sell and touched off a confused frenzy of interest in claiming the nearby quartz croppings in the hopes that some of them might prove valuable—or, better yet, sellable.
Among the dozens of vague location notices tagged to the surrounding croppings, three men drove a stake downhill from the Gold Hill mound and scribbled out a crude note: “We the undersigned claim Twelve hundred (1200) feet of this Quartz Vain including all of its depths & Spurs commencing at Houseworth claim and running north including twenty-five of surface on each Side of the Vain.” While examining the ground, one of the men bumbled into a yellow jacket nest. The ferocious little insects inspired their naming: They called their “Vain” the Yellow Jacket.
The miners didn’t create a formal Gold Hill Mining District until June 1, and the Yellow Jacket’s location notice didn’t make it into the record book for another three weeks after that. The record book, filled out in pencil and stored behind a crude camp bar, was soon so full of erasures as to render parts of it indecipherable. The barkeep, a friend to many of the miners, could easily be encouraged to wipe his whisky glasses while one of his many associates enjoyed private time with the record book. Miners had enormous incentive to keep their claim boundaries loose. No man could see into the earth, and every one of them feared cutting themselves off from a hidden bonanza. Much better the potentialities contained within fungible boundary lines. The vagaries of the Yellow Jacket’s location notice and of the many smudgy claims suddenly clogging the record book gave them a propensity to “float.” As a Comstock historian working under the auspices of the United States Geological Survey wrote in 1883, “every man naturally wished to cut off the richest slice of the prospective bonanza and was not disposed to cut the loaf until he knew its contents.” In the years ahead, only protracted, expensive, and often corrupt legal warfare proved capable of pinning down their boundary lines.
The madcap excitement boiled to an evil head on May 28. William Sides stabbed John Jessup to death with a Bowie knife over a dispute at cards. Jessup was a popular man, the first person buried in Gold Hill. Most of the local miners traveled the fifteen miles to attend and serve in the “People’s Trial” of Sides that convened in Carson City on May 31. The “mustang” court summoned 48 jurors, of whom 12 cast votes—8 for conviction, 4 for acquittal—and although Sides eluded the noose, the vigilantes still held him in custody a week later, perhaps to shield him from the reprisals of Jessup’s friends.
Two of the few miners who remained behind in Washoe were Patrick McLaughlin and Peter O’Reilly. Left out of the Gold Hill claims and fed up with their prospects, they only wanted to raise sufficient means to finance a journey to diggings on the East Walker River, one hundred miles to the south. With most of the other miners decamped to the trial for several days, McLaughlin thought it a good opportunity to try his suspicion that decent placer deposits lurked beneath the thick bed of clay that James Fenimore, Manny Penrod, and a few others had worked atop the previous year on the bench at the head of Six Mile Cañon. McLaughlin and O’Reilly didn’t own the ground in question, although the various claims could perhaps have been considered abandoned for neglect. In any case, nobody was around to say them nay, so the two Irishmen hefted their tools and hiked up the Divide and across the natural out-sloping bench to the diggings near the top of Six Mile Cañon.
To test McLaughlin’s theory, the two Irishmen hacked a trench through the clay bed near the head of the flat. With only a trickle of water “scarcely an inch and a half” wide available, they got poor results from their labors, only $1.50 to $2 per working day. To improve earnings, McLaughlin and O’Reilly needed to wash more dirt, and to wash more dirt, they needed more water. In an effort to maximize their supply, they decided to shovel out a reservoir in the little rivulet some yards above their cut. On the chosen site, they heaved out spadefuls of yellowish sand mixed with lumps of crumbly quartz. About four feet down, they struck a bluish-black layer of frangible rock about six inches thick. Although the crumbly substance was substantially heavier than the surrounding strata, it was barely hard enough to qualify as “rock.” They could crumble it with their fingers. They’d never seen anything like it. On a whim, they crushed some of the strange substance and ran the debris through their rocker. They gawked as the lighter sediments rinsed away. Thick lines of gold dust shimmered behind the riffle bars. Flabbergasted, they attacked the crumbly black stuff in earnest. Once crushed, each successive bucketful yielded a similar flush of color. The residue, they tossed aside. Working the trench, they’d been cleaning up about an eighth of an ounce of gold per day—now, they had whole ounces of the stuff piled behind the riffle bars. The gold seemed lighter and paler than that normally found in Six Mile Cañon, which was itself lighter in color and weight than California gold, and the two Irishmen worried that they’d uncovered some bogus variety, hitherto unknown, but pale or not, if they were fingering the genuine article, they’d picked out a season’s worth of dust in just a few hours. By evening, they’d gleaned nearly $300, with one last cleanup yet to make.IV
The overjoyed Irishmen had just paced off the boundaries of a placer claim when Henry Comstock rode up on a pony. He hadn’t attended the trial, either. Comstock’s buzzard eyes caught sight of the yellow harvest glittering on the apron of the Irishmen’s rocker. “You have struck it, boys!” he exclaimed, leaping from his horse. The gaunt miner fell to his knees and inspected the blackish streak. Although the yield of his Gold Hill claim had put Comstock into money the likes of which he’d never touched in his life, that didn’t stop him from wanting a piece of any other action that might develop elsewhere in the Washoe Diggings. Comstock hoisted himself up and gave the Irishmen a trifecta of bad news—that James Fenimore, Joe Kirby, James White, and William HartV had a prior placer claim to the location, that he and his friend Manny Penrod owned nine-tenths of the water from the spring they were using (Old Virginny owned the last tenth), and that he, Henry Comstock, claimed the surrounding 160 acres for “ranching purposes.” They were therefore trespassing on his land and using his water. To make things right, he demanded the two Irishmen take him and Manny Penrod into their location as equal partners.
Although O’Reilly and McLaughlin recognized that Comstock’s land claim had just sprung full grown from his imagination, proving otherwise was difficult, especially to the satisfaction of a jury in a miner’s court packed with his longtime friends. After a brief consultation, the two Irishmen quieted Comstock’s demands by admitting him and Penrod to their claim. As compensation, having two additional men in the group meant they could stake off more ground, which, if the strike proved extensive, would increase the value of their holding.
“Clearing title” to the claim was the next order of business. The new partners camouflaged the strike and called Penrod into consultation. If the four previous claimants got any inkling that $300 had been washed from their formerly modest placer ground in a single day, they’d manifest renewed interest in a property they were currently neglecting. Given Penrod’s reputation for “honesty and good sense,” O’Reilly and McLaughlin wanted him to approach the others and acquire their interests. Penrod suggested otherwise. His straightforward, businesslike demeanor might tip the others to the fact that the ground held “something good.” Considering Comstock’s well-known propensity to buy most anything put up for sale, and to pay with cash if he had it, Penrod thought Comstock better suited to getting signatures or the marks of illiterate men on bills of sale and quitc
laim deeds without raising the other men’s suspicions. Hoary mining legend says that Comstock traded a “superannuated,” “bob-tail horse” and “divers [sic] bottles of exhilarating fluids” to Fenimore for his share of the spring—“a fact which no one having any acquaintance with the convivial habits and commercial usages of those Washoe Pioneers [would] feel inclined to call into question,” Henry de Groot wrote many years after he had worked alongside them in the diggings. No matter the exact particulars, Old Virginny, Joe Kirby, and James White made themselves the butt of what is perhaps the worst deal in American mining history when, for either thirty-five or fifty dollars in coin (supplied by Manny Penrod), and with or without the bob-tail horse and the ardent spirits, Comstock secured all three of their signatures on a quitclaim and bill of sale for the water and the claim. Comstock was unable to locate William Hart, who had left the area.
Despite that point of remaining vulnerability, with the grimy, smudged documents in hand, Comstock, Penrod, O’Reilly, and McLaughlin resumed mining, stripping the overburden from the pay streak as they worked uphill. According to Penrod, they all thought they were mining “a continuation of the placers that had been worked lower down on the flat.” Crushing the bluish, blackish substance, and washing the results through three rockers, the cleanup continued to be spectacular, about $300 per rocker, per day, even as the dark, auriferous streak thickened and solidified. Their only real complaint was the difficulty the heavy, bruise-colored substance gave their quicksilver. “The troublesome black stuff,” as they termed it, clung to the mercury and hindered its ability to amalgamate with the gold. But however annoying, it was hard to take such an objection seriously when some single pans filled with the crushed substance yielded multiple ounces of gold.
About June 12, their pay streak “dipped,” as miners say, meaning that it suddenly changed directions and angled down into the ground at about forty-five degrees. The blackish substance had continued to harden, and Penrod became convinced they were working a quartz lead and should claim it as such, since that would allow them to reserve much more ground. The others scoffed, saying it was “only a crevice washed out by a current of water.” They were on to the richest placer ground they’d ever imagined. They didn’t want to mine quartz. The character of the rock hadn’t changed, washing the pay streak continued as rich as ever, and if they staked off a much larger quartz claim and it eventually proved to be placer ground, they would be rendered vulnerable to “jumpers.” Penrod harangued his partners until Comstock agreed to help him stake and measure the ground as a quartz claim, which allowed them to reserve three hundred feet per man, plus an additional three hundred feet for discovering the lode. In total, the four partners claimed fifteen hundred feet “on the line of the lode.”
In such a small mining district, with such a tight-knit group of men, most of whom had known each other for several seasons, containing news of such magnitude proved impossible. Comstock’s disappearing over the Divide to Six Mile Cañon for a few days running when he held excellent ground right in front of the camp at Gold Hill would have been remarked upon, as would their fat dust pouches. Nothing prevented other men from wandering over to have a look, and within a few days, the Gold Hill and Gold Cañon miners cottoned to the fact that O’Reilly, McLaughlin, Comstock, and Penrod were harvesting gold by the pound. (Penrod claimed they were making $300 per day, per rocker, which means, if calculated from the $12.50-per-ounce value of the local gold, they were rocking out roughly four and a half pounds of gold per day.) With the ground staked off, title apparently cleared, and Comstock running his fingers through dozens of ounces of gold, nothing could stop him from crowing about the mine, “his mine,” as he told it. Word of the strike spread to townsfolk and ranchers in and around Carson City, Genoa, Washoe and Eagle valleys, and the Truckee Meadows. Men flocked to the site like condors drawn to an ox carcass, and all comers raced to stake claims as close as possible to the strikes, just as had happened at Gold Hill.
When local miner and rancher Joseph Winters learned that William Hart’s signature wasn’t on the bill of sale and quitclaim, he found the man and got his signature for “a horse and $20 in coin.” Winters returned to Six Mile Cañon with the bill of sale. McLaughlin, O’Reilly, Comstock, and Penrod bowed to the inevitable and admitted him to their partnership.
Although the pay continued superb, the sooty, bruise-like streak solidified into what was definitely a rock, in places obligating the little company to crush it with axes and hammers and to further pulverize its harder nodules in a mortar. Then, about a week after its discovery, the streak merged into a quartz lead about four feet wide. In gratitude, the three other members of the company awarded Comstock and Penrod one hundred feet of the claim in compensation for the one day of work they’d sacrificed to measure out the ground as a quartz claim and for the nine-tenths of the small spring Comstock said they owned. Penrod and Comstock took their segregated section two hundred feet from the south end of the claim, a nice little hundred-foot slice just the two of them owned.
The unwelcome quartz discovery obligated the company to invest in arastras. On June 22, they drew up a contract with J. A. Osborne, a Kentucky native known locally as “Kentuck,” admitting him to the company as equal partner in exchange for building two arastras and providing horses or mules to power them. Jolts of whisky probably cemented the deal, “a drink all ’round” being, for the Washoe pioneers, “not only a pledge of friendship but a token with which they sealed all bargains.” The agreement brought to six the total number of people in what, in the record book, was officially termed “Penrod, Comstock & Co.” (which wasn’t the same Comstock & Co. that owned a slice of Gold Hill).
Miners wouldn’t understand the exact nature of what the two Irishmen had found for another several years, but they’d struck the top of a truly gigantic “fissure vein” that came to the surface along the out-sloping bench running across the eastern slopes of Sun Mountain. The flurry of claiming activity kept the recorder of the local mining districts furiously busy—one for Gold Hill and another for the area of the new diggings at the top of Six Mile Cañon. Amid the claiming frenzy, fourteen men banded together into the Sierra Nevada Mining Company and “located” thirty-six hundred feet immediately north of the Union mine, which had already claimed ground adjacent to Penrod, Comstock & Company’s north line. Two members of the Sierra Nevada group were B. Augustus Harrison, who ran cattle on the Truckee Meadows,VI and J. F. Stone, keeper of Stone & Gates’ crossing on the Truckee River. Stone had formerly mined quartz in California, and the “blasted black stuff” being crushed and cast aside on the Comstock claim piqued his interest. The rock’s weight made him suspect a high metallic content. Stone scavenged a few chunks and gave them to Harrison, who took them over the Sierras to Judge James Walsh, another veteran quartz miner. Like everybody else who had thus far encountered the odd blackish material, Walsh had never seen its like before. Walsh gave specimens to two professional assayers: J. J. Ott in Nevada City and Grass Valley’s Melville Atwood. The assayers tested the material on June 27, 1859. Ott’s investigation returned a value of $840 per ton in gold. That was itself a fortune, but Atwood’s results were so astounding that he felt compelled to repeat his examinations. The second test confirmed the first. Besides the gold, the “black stuff” contained three thousand dollars per ton in silver. Over in Washoe, Comstock and his companions had been crushing it and washing out the gold for two weeks, but just casting aside the bluish-black tailings.
Atwood and Walsh showed the substance to an Irish metallurgist named Richard Killaha and several German assayers with experience in the silver mines of Saxony. All of them identified the black rock as a rich “sulphuret of silver,” as nineteenth-century miners termed the many varieties of silver ore formed around silver-sulfur combinations, none of which looked anything like “native” silver.VII
Walsh asked the others what they thought he should do.
Go to Washoe, they said.
• • •
Nobody who came into contact with the ore proved capable of keeping their lips sealed. Judge Walsh and his partner, Joseph Woodworth, headed for Washoe on Wednesday, June 29, 1859. Among the first in the know was Almarin B. Paul, who owned a quartz mill in Nevada City. Paul told his friend George Hearst, a Missourian who owned a moderately profitable quartz mine and mill nearby. Reared on the harsh Missouri frontier, Hearst had managed crude iron mines and a small farm manned by a few slaves before coming west to California in 1850, where he had mined placers, kept a store, farmed, raised cattle, and worked quartz, all without much distinction. He was one of the first to dog Judge Walsh’s tracks into the mountains.VIII
Sixteen years of ferocious, greed-driven corporate and legal warfare resulted in these 1875 mine claim boundaries. Resolving the legal conflicts and meticulously clearing title to the claims allowed John Mackay and his partners to invest massive sums without worry that they would lose the gold and silver they extracted in a lawsuit.
Judge Walsh and his cohorts needed several days to cross the spine of the Sierras and reach Washoe. According to an article written five months later, when Walsh arrived as the first man bearing the fantastic secret of the soft bluish-black rock, he found Comstock, Penrod, Winters, O’Reilly, and McLaughlin casually working their claim, content to turn themselves out long after sunrise, set mules to work turning the sweeps of their arastras, and then spend a few hours either hacking gold-bearing quartz and the soft black rock out of their lead or washing the previous day’s arastra crushings through rockers with the scarce midsummer water. They laid off every afternoon, content to clean up a hundred dollars from half a day of halfhearted labor without doing much to explore or test the diggings, while a mile and a half to the south, over the Divide on Gold Hill, the miners, according to the article, “united the usual vice and recklessness of mining with indolence,” and used “the rocker mainly to pay their gambling debts.” Old Virginny James Fenimore excepted—according to the story, he was using his rocker to wash out “whisky money.”