The Bonanza King Page 9
The article’s author cast Judge Walsh as the first of the “intelligent gentlemen” to push Washoe mining development, but his scorn did a grave injustice to the original locators in both Gold and Six Mile cañons. Although none of them possessed the black stuff’s secret, they were placer miners with many years of experience who knew they’d made an incredible strike. They suspected the presence of silver, but considered it a bad indication. Silver ores were notoriously “stubborn,” “refractory,” or “rebellious,” meaning difficult to reduce, and everyone knew the famous Spanish mining aphorism that went, “To work a mine of silver, one needs a mine of gold.” The owners of the claim just south of Comstock, Penrod & Company had struck the vein and found a one-ounce chunk of native silver. They showed it to Manny Penrod and swore him to secrecy, not wanting the silver discovery to “injure the sale of their mine as a gold mine.” Worse, if the black stuff and the quartz continued to solidify, they’d soon have a hard time crushing it without industrial-scale investments for which they had neither the capital, the know-how, nor the inclination. With notions of selling out, absolutely the last thing in the world they wanted to do was expose the bottom of the vein. They had no way of knowing whether they were ingesting the best portion of a rich quartz vein that pinched off thirty feet below the surface or nibbling at the top of a massive underground bonanza. Given the unhappy history of quartz mining, the former seemed by far the more likely alternative. That being the case, it served the best interests of the original locators to chip at the rich ore without working overhard to plumb the mine’s dimensions.
The strategic intelligence of the original locators lounging under the shade trees was therefore on perfect display when Judge Walsh rode onto the diggings and found that the only one of the original company’s assets doing a full day’s work was Henry Comstock’s mouth. From the minute the trail-weary judge and his companion dismounted, Comstock extolled the wonders of the mine. To them and to everybody else drawn to the site in the coming days, Comstock lauded the strike from the moment he shook loose from his bedroll until long after the sun dropped behind Sun Mountain, and people soon found themselves referring to the location as “Comstock’s ground,” “Comstock’s mine,” “Comstock’s lead,” or “Comstock’s vein,” where, as Henry Comstock never tired of telling, he and his mates had hacked open the apex of the biggest, richest, deepest, most wonderful mine ever revealed in North America. And since, in the real world of sweat, dirt, toil, and quartz beneath the unblinking sun, neither Henry Comstock nor anyone else could see farther into the ground than the point of the next pick stroke, Comstock’s relentless “puffery,” which would both affix his name to the greatest lode of precious metals ever discovered in the United States and cut him from its ownership, was nothing more than the diligent endeavor of a hardworking salesman. As he was the mouthpiece of a company of original locators interested in selling for a high price, Comstock’s braggadocio made perfect sense. Quite simply, he was “kiting” the mine.
• • •
Judge Walsh, George Hearst, and a few other Grass Valley and Nevada City miners remained in Washoe for a week, and although they probably didn’t communicate the full extent of what they knew about the ore to the men of the original company, that knowledge coupled to what they saw inclined them toward buying the ground. They went back to California to secure financing.
In truth, buying into the mine would be an enormous gamble. Even the men with knowledge of the Grass Valley assays didn’t have total confidence in the results, since the assays had tested only small ore fragments. The only way to know if bulk quantities were as rich as the assays claimed was to reduce the ore in large quantities, and nobody had anything except guesses as to how much that might cost.
James Walsh returned to Washoe toward the end of July, his financial resources augmented by those of his partner, Joseph Woodworth. The two men camped with Comstock near the claim, which the original locators had started calling “the Ophir mine” or “Ophir Diggings” in honor of the mythical gold mines of the Old Testament. Henry Comstock sang its praises at every opportunity, declaring with complete conviction that the mine he was considering selling would “turn out to be one of the biggest in the world” and that the barren site where they sat would blossom into a great city.
To be induced to sell, Comstock wanted monies sufficient to set himself up in business and free him from the rigors of mining. Walsh wouldn’t pay over any cash without the opportunity to test a bulk quantity of ore. Negotiations between Comstock and Penrod and Judge Walsh dragged on for more than a week before the parties agreed to contingent sales on August 12. Provided a large-scale test of the “blue stuff” in San Francisco satisfied Walsh’s expectations, Walsh would pay $11,000 for Comstock’s one-sixth of the original locators’ claim and the half-interest in two hundred feet of ground in a nearby claim Comstock had somehow managed to acquire, Comstock’s interest in the spring water, and his mysterious “ranche on the aforementioned village of Ophir” on which so much had hinged, and $5,500 for Penrod’s one-sixth portion of the original claim. (Penrod may have accepted the smaller sum because he didn’t own an interest in Comstock’s “ranche” and held none of the nearby ground.) Walsh gave Comstock ten dollars in coin to secure the deal and began stowing ore into sacks for mules to freight over the mountains to the Fulsom railhead, by train to Sacramento,IX and thence downriver to San Francisco on a steamship. The arrangement delighted Henry Comstock. He expected it to fix him for life, and he still retained one-half interest in the hundred-foot section segregated to him and Penrod for staking off the claim. To the miners who’d been working the Washoe Diggings for years, $11,000 seemed a fantastic amount of cash money to pay for a one-sixth interest in an unproven mine. Beyond Walsh’s hearing, Comstock and his Washoe cronies called Walsh “the California Rock Sharp,” with disparaging irony.
• • •
Despite the plethora of activity spread across the eastern and southeastern flanks of Sun Mountain, the only profitable locations remained those in the rich quartz at Gold Hill and those near the site where Patrick McLaughlin and Peter O’Reilly had cut the ore lead three months before. Nobody knew whether the region’s mineral wealth concentrated into a narrowly defined lode or diffused throughout the dozens, even hundreds, of quartz croppings that laced the local mountainsides. The perceived value of the mining claims rose and fell as the picks and shovels uncovered new evidence.
Over the summer, Alva Gould and Abram CurryX had acquired what they thought was twelve hundred feet of ground on the direct line between the Ophir strike and Gold Hill. Alva Gould couldn’t believe his good fortune when he found a newcomer willing to pay $450 in gold coin for his share of what had become known as “Gould & Curry’s ground.” None of the Washoe miners thought him a dunce when he got boiled on rotgut whisky the night he closed the deal and rode a horse down Gold Cañon yelling, “I’ve fooled the Californian!”
Not a trace of ore had turned up on the claim he’d just sold.
Carrying some three thousand pounds of the blue-black ore, Judge Walsh’s mule train started the 125-mile plod over the mountains on August 14, 1859. Walsh’s departure precipitated a cascade of deals as, one after another, the original locators succumbed to the temptation of a sure thing and sold out. Perhaps fearing the failure of Walsh’s large-scale test, Patrick McLaughlin granted George Hearst a $3,500 option to buy his one-sixth interest in the Ophir mine. Hearst raced back to Nevada City to hunt up coin.
James Walsh returned to Washoe from San Francisco on September 9 and closed his deals with Comstock and Penrod. On the three thousand pounds of ore Walsh had taken “below” and smelted at Mosheimer & Kustel’s Smelting Works in San Francisco, he’d profited $4,871 after deducting the costs of transportation and smelting. Hearst completed his purchase of McLaughlin’s interest on September 23, 1859, the first example of his uncanny ability to acquire profitable mining property at bedrock prices.XI
John “Kentuck” Osborne and V.
A. Houseworth,XII another old Washoeite who’d located ground adjacent to the Yellow Jacket near Gold Hill and had managed to gain a fractional slice of the original Ophir company, sold soon thereafter, for modest four-figure sums. Patrick O’Reilly held out for another month and did much better, selling his one-sixth interest for $40,000 on October 20. O’Reilly’s compatriots ridiculed the “wild enthusiast” who paid such a fantastic sum. Of the original company, only the Winters brothers refused to sell. They joined Walsh, Hearst, and several other California purchasers and incorporated what they called the Ophir Mining Company.
Comstock and Penrod also sold the segregated hundred feet they owned independent of the original company that season. That ground ended up in the possession of Gabriel Maldonado and Thomas J. Hughes.XIII Maldonado, a Sonoran with experience in Mexican silver mines, set the mine to work in the fashion of his homeland, and Washoe miners began calling the location “the Spanish Mine,” or “the Mexican.” To capitalize on his certainty that the mines would birth a great city, Henry Comstock invested the proceeds of his sales in mercantile supplies. In the grand tradition of Sam Brannan, crier of the Gold Rush, Comstock intended to open a store.
Similar sell-outs and consolidations occurred in the surrounding ground and over the divide in Gold Hill. Old Virginny parted with his remaining Gold Hill interests for $2,000, likely the largest sum of money he’d ever held in his life. The confusing array of joining and dividing transactions left the Gold Hill mound striped with many small claims. The end of October saw most of the original sales completed.
Among those in the know in Washoe, the new mines provoked wild excitement. However, on the other side of the Sierras, the California mining community took the reports at a substantial discount, and although the state’s newspapers teemed with articles extolling the rich discovery through August, September, and October, they provoked no general rush over the mountains. The Washoe population grew from a few dozen to several hundred.
• • •
John Mackay probably arrived at “Comstock’s Lode” and the Ophir mine around the time Henry Comstock, Manny Penrod, and Judge Walsh settled on the terms of their contingent sales. Those three fortunate men and others of the old Washoe miners, such as James Fenimore and J. A. “Kentuck” Osborne, controlled either thousands of dollars’ worth of coin or valuable mining property. John Mackay didn’t own an inch of ground and he didn’t have so much as a dime.
Flat broke, and with other men already holding the most promising ground, Mackay didn’t bother locating a claim, and he didn’t try to horn his way into one already existing, as so many others had done. Nor did he join the herd of prospectors grubbing over the surrounding mountainsides in hopes of finding their own rich location—or one with “indications” they could “puff” and sell to an unsuspecting “flat,” as “sharps” called overeager mine investors. Instead, John Mackay did what he’d done all his life, what he did best. He went to work. With the sleeves of his flannel shirt pushed up his arms, Mackay hefted a pick and shovel and hacked at the ore lead, a common miner in one of the surface pits on or around Ophir Diggings, sweating in the late-summer sun and earning four dollars a day. He came to know the local lore and all the significant local characters, at least by sight, and he participated in and observed all mining developments firsthand as a core member of the local mining community.
With the mines developing nicely, the camp at the site of the strike in upper Six Mile Cañon needed a name. The Washoeites proposed various options. Ophir, Ophir Diggings, Ophirtown, Pleasant Hill, Mount Pleasant Hill, and Win-e-moca, for the esteemed chief of the Paiute Indians, all received consideration. On September 24, the Territorial Enterprise reported, “The miners at Ophir Diggings have changed the name of their locality to Virginia City, in honor of Mr. Berry” (a misprint of “Finney”).XIV A letter to the Sacramento Daily Union explained that the name hadn’t been bestowed as “indicative of his immaculate virtue,” but to honor the man most responsible for Washoe development.
“Virginia City,” “Virginiatown,” or just plain “Virginia” wasn’t an immediate success. Through the fall, Washoe residents continued to roll the various options off their tongues and write them into their correspondence. Ophir variants lost adherents once someone recollected the mines of the biblical Ophir as famous only for gold. Silver differentiated the new mines. Henry Comstock advocated for “Silver City” in a letter to the Sacramento Daily Union published on October 31, 1859, but with Comstock’s name perhaps already too prominent about the lode, his suggestion didn’t catch. However, by early November, the naming of the camp in honor of Fenimore had been settled upon. “Virginia City is the absurd name the miners have given to the little settlement of thirty or forty houses and tents a hundred yards or so below the excavations in the silver lead,” wrote a Sacramento Daily Union correspondent. That same week, a reporter for the North San Juan Press called it a “savage and dirty” mining camp.
The men lived in rough circumstances. At night, some sheltered in the makeshift constructions and canvas tents erected in a haphazard line along what would become A Street. Dusty “Washoe zephyrs,” the savage winds that scoured the east side of Sun Mountain, “often blew the shelters apart.” Other men scraped aside the surface rocks and slept under the stars, nestled in blankets beside clumps of sagebrush. The most comfortable slept in the hay piles hauled up the cañons to feed the mules that turned the dragstones in the fifteen arastras working below the open cuts. Wells, Fargo & Company transacted banking and express business from a location nearby. Loftily named Virginia City didn’t yet have a hotel, although several were under construction, and it possessed only one restaurant, an establishment more tent than building “at which six persons on a watch may partake of poor quality of victuals, at seventy-five cents per head.” As a correspondent of the Daily Alta California noted, “Rum mills are becoming numerous, as also gamblers, the usual concomitants of a new and rich mineral country.” Most groggeries hosted gambling tables under canvas and sold whisky over a board by the gill, pint, quart, or gallon. None had yet graduated to selling individual drinks, although one had gone to the trouble to have teamsters freight in a billiards table.
Conditions a mile and a half away in Gold Hill mirrored those of Virginia City, albeit on a smaller scale. The camp boasted one store, three or four drinking and gambling establishments, and a population of about one hundred. The effects of the strike began to reverberate into the surrounding economies. Recrossing the Sierras after making an inspection of the new mines, the mayor of Placerville met more than seventy-five freight wagons heading for Washoe laden with merchandise, comestibles, and mining supplies. Around Carson City’s thirty buildings, the value of vacant lots boomed from $5 to $600. A communications company hurried to extend a telegraph line to Virginia City, a step in an ambitious endeavor to link California to Salt Lake City and the rest of the nation with a transcontinental telegraph line. “Below,” in San Francisco, at the behest of leading Comstock mining interests, several of the city’s iron foundries tooled up to manufacture steam engines and stamp batteries for crushing quartz, and the deepwater steamship Uncle Sam had just left for Central America, carrying four tons of high-grade Washoe ore bound for Le Havre, France, via New York, one among several shipments of Washoe ore to European smelters.
On Gold Hill, the miners worked through open surface pits and a few small tunnels to extract paying dirt and decomposed gold-bearing quartz. Mules plodding endless circles around several arastras crushed the richest quartz. The Gold Hill mines reaped a phenomenal “yellow harvest,” but it was all gold. They dug no silver, and yet it was silver at the center of everybody’s obsession over the Divide in the ragtag camp at Virginia City. The legendary silver mines of Mexico, Bolivia, and Saxony had disgorged metal for centuries. One man who claimed Spanish American mining experience described the Washoe ore as “far richer than any he had ever handled.” The thought that they were onto such a discovery overvaulted the excitement of the large
daily earnings. As a correspondent of the Marysville Express reported, “It is the universal opinion among miners here that silver leads never give out.”
By the end of October, the ore lead around the original strike in the Ophir mine had been exposed on four adjacent claims over a linear distance of five or six hundred feet. From north to south they were the Mexican, the Ophir, the Central, and the California mines. In total, they employed about forty or fifty miners, among them John Mackay and Jack O’Brien. Ophir miners delved into the ore seam in two separate open cuts about forty feet apart. The north and south ends of both twenty-foot excavations exposed the cross-section of the lode—yellowish surface dirt covered a broken and seamy ledge of whitish, gold-bearing quartz that varied in width from nine to twenty feet and angled down into the heart of Sun Mountain on a westward dip of forty-eight degrees. The silver-laden treasure vein of bluish-black ore ran through the center of the quartz mass, four to fifteen inches wide and soft enough for a man to crumble in his fingers. Miners sacked the dense, dark sulphuret for shipment to San Francisco. With ten men hacking at the lode and wheelbarrowing ore and waste out of the pits on inclined ramps cut through the downhill sides of the excavations, the Ophir extracted about one ton of the sulphurets and eight tons of the whiteish quartz per day. Immediately south of the Ophir, the Central Company’s six owners supervised a similar operation. The two companies had mined about fifty-five tons of the blue-black sulphurets and about one thousand tons of gold-bearing, lower-grade quartz. On the hundred-foot Mexican claim, miners had recently exposed the blue vein in a surface cut, and it promised to be just as rich as the Ophir.