UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 
BUILDERS OF THE NATION 
 
 OR 
 
 From the Indian Trail to the Railroad 
 
 National Edition 
 Complete in Twelve Volumes 
 

 - 
 
From an 
 
 Btfirimer a 
 
 i! painting by /). ( . Hutchison. 
 
NATIONAL EDITION 
 
 COMPLETE IN TWELVE VOLUMES 
 
 guflde^Nation 
 
 THE MINE 
 
 Charles Howard Shinn 
 
V 
 
 Copyright, 18% 
 By D. APPLETON & COMPANY 
 
 Copyright, 1908 
 By THE BRAMPTON SOCIETY 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAQK 
 
 XIII. MINING LITIGATION 123 
 
 XIV. STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS . . 136 
 
 XV. BOBRASCA AND BONANZA 154 
 
 XVI. DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA .... 173 
 
 XVII. THE SUTRO TUNNEL 194 
 
 XVIII. OUTSIDE VIEW OP A MINE 209 
 
 XIX. THE CITY UNDERGROUND 222 
 
 XX. THE MINING COMMUNITY 239 
 
 XXI. THE COMSTOCK AS IT is 259 
 
 XXII. THE AMERICAN MINER OF TO-DAY . . .267 
 
 The Mine. II. 
 
 21 j 184 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PROSPECTORS DISCOVER A GOLD LEDGE . FRONTISPIECE 
 
 From an Original Fainting by D. C. Hutchison 
 
 PAGE 
 ON THE WAY TO THE MINE 123 
 
 EUREKA MINE 163 
 
 DOWN IN A GOLD MINE 182 
 
 ENTRANCE TO THE SUTRO TUNNEL, SUTRO, NEVADA . 205 
 
 THE MOUTH OF A SHAFT 217 
 
 THE BOTTOM OF A SHAFT , 234 
 
 The Mine. II. 
 
On the Wav to the Mine. 
 
THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 CHAPTER XIIL 
 
 MINING LITIGATION. 
 
 IT would be easy to moralize about the "general 
 cussedness " of all mining, particularly silver mining, 
 "which is full of dips, spurs, and angles," and, like 
 gambling, extremely uncertain. This remark applies 
 with peculiar force to the Comstock .camps.. There, 
 as Calvin would have said, the hanfl of Satan was daily 
 manifest. Never since the world began were conflict 
 ing interests, honest and dishonest, more wildly en 
 tangled than in that early Nevada. 
 
 The trouble began in the carelessness, or worse, 
 of the prospectors of 1858 and 1859. I have alluded 
 in a previous chapter to some of their meetings to de 
 clare laws respecting claims, and to the Gold Hill black 
 smith who kept his record book in a saloon where all 
 and sundry could and did alter the entries. If prop 
 erly carried out, the district regulations might have 
 done good service; but they were so sadly neglected 
 that none of the early miners had what lawyers 
 would call a title. Lord, in his history, cites the 
 example of the original claim of O Biley, McLaugh- 
 lin, Penrod, and Comstock, now held by the Ophir and 
 Consolidated Virginia and California companies. The 
 four men put a stake on the line of the croppings fifty 
 ieet south of the place where the strike was made, and 
 another one fifteen hundred feet north of the first stake. 
 This gave one claim to each of the four, and one extra 
 
 133 
 
124: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 claim for the discovery, which was the custom at the 
 time. They posted no notice (as the rules required), 
 they recorded no notice either then or afterward (ex 
 pressly stated to be the most important evidence of 
 ownership). Then came one James Cory, a chum of 
 Comstock s, and asked for a share. Not receiving it, 
 he posted a notice and claimed four hundred and fifty 
 feet adjoining the claim of Comstock & Company. 
 This was half as much again as he had a right to under 
 the district laws. Big John Bishop and a miner named 
 Camp told him that it was their ground, and the three 
 finally divided but did not record the claims. Several 
 other overlapping claims were made informally, and 
 shortly afterward the miners discovered that upon 
 one part of the lode, seven hundred and ten feet long, 
 they had actually taken up and recorded fifteen hun 
 dred and fifty feet! Compromises and various read 
 justments followed, but so obscure and conflicting 
 were the records and the " memory of witnesses " that 
 titles in this part of the Comstock have always been 
 unsettled. 
 
 There is a very strong reason in the nature of mines 
 and miners for many of the delays in properly defin 
 ing a claim. Every part of a ledge is not equally rich. 
 Ore occurs in " seams," " chimneys," or " chutes," and 
 as soon as a man " struck it rich " his first thought 
 was usually to explore it until he could select and stake 
 out the best three hundred feet. Nearly all of the 
 early locators on the Comstock were trying to get the 
 richest slice in the lode, and they kept away from the 
 recorder s office; or if they entered a claim, they took 
 care to leave it in such shape that it could be altered, 
 like some of the Spanish land grants of California 
 that were " floated " ten or fifteen miles, much to the 
 subsequent profit of attorneys. 
 
MINING LITIGATION. 125 
 
 Even when the " metes and bounds " were well 
 denned the guileless miners could not always be de 
 pended upon to leave them so. One of the pioneers 
 mentions a mining suit in which the matter hinged 
 upon the location of a stump that marked the corner. 
 Judge and jury adjourned and went to look at the 
 stump. It had been dug up bodily during the night 
 and carried off, and the ground was so levelled that not 
 the slightest clew remained. Each side accused the 
 other, and the case was never decided. 
 
 All the American mining camps have maintained 
 in the case of quartz ledges the right to an inclined 
 location that is, the right to take a claim of definite 
 size and follow it downward at any angle or angles, 
 taking all the ore in the vein and in its legitimate 
 branches. A miner, according to this idea, takes up 
 a piece of ground simply for the lode, and goes wherever 
 it goes. Spanish mining law, on the contrary, recog 
 nises only the square location. According to the Span 
 ish plan, as soon as a ledge passes beyond the boundary 
 of a square piece of ground of given size it belongs 
 to the man in whose tract it lies. One can easily see 
 that the Spanish system must prevent much trouble 
 and render the single-vein problem immaterial. In 
 fact, it rules out of court nine tenths of all the cases 
 that lead to lawsuits. Matters rapidly went from bad 
 to worse on the Comstock until the most casual ob 
 server would have seen a wild Walpurgis-night revel 
 of conflicting claims of every size, shape, and age tum 
 bling over each other three and four deep. It is hardly 
 surprising, for the Comstock was not the only vein 
 on the side of Mount Davidson, nor even the most 
 prominent one. The Virginia lode was nearly parallel, 
 and other veins, too many to name and hardly worth 
 while digging up from the dust of forgotten records, 
 
126 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 crossed and recrossed the original Comstock until even 
 ideally honest and painstaking miners, geologists, and 
 courts would have found it impossible to straighten 
 out the tangle that began when the first stake was 
 driven at Gold Hill. When, as of course soon hap 
 pened, the miners became very much excited, when 
 courts and lawyers were subjected to enormous tempta 
 tions, and when it was found that geologists and min 
 eralogists could not settle the question beforehand, 
 the result is easy to sum up. Everywhere in the period 
 of litigation there were almost inconceivable expenses, 
 ruining the lesser mines, preventing dividends even 
 where miners were working rich bodies of ore. Titles 
 were clouded for years, and the finest legal intellects 
 in America wrestled on the Comstock in cases that are 
 still famous. 
 
 Let us turn again to the genial Koss Browne for a 
 characteristic picture of the contentious miners. He 
 says that when he entered Virginia City by way of fitly- 
 named Devil s Gate a fraction of the crowd " were en 
 gaged in a lawsuit relative to a question of title. The 
 arguments used on both sides were empty whisky bot 
 tles, after the fashion of the Basilinum or club law 
 which, according to Addison, prevailed in the colleges 
 of learned men of former times. Several of the dis 
 putants had been already knocked down and convinced, 
 and various others were freely shedding their blood 
 in the cause." The Comstock ledge, Mr. Browne 
 thought, was very fine, but it was held at a thousand 
 dollars a running foot " when not even the great Com 
 stock himself could tell where it was running to." The 
 whole region was in the midst of a free fight among 
 the various claimants. The Comstock was " in a mess 
 of confusion." Its shareholders had the most enlarged 
 views, but those who had struck croppings around 
 
MINING LITIGATION. 127 
 
 the Comstock were just as liberal in their ideas, so 
 that, in brief, " everybody s spurs were running into 
 everybody else s angles/ The Cedar Hill Com 
 pany was spurring the Miller Company, the Virginia 
 ledge was spurring the Continuation, the Don Com 
 pany was spurring the Billy Chollar, the Washoe 
 was spurring everything else, and all these, the 
 Comstock, and a dozen others, were interlocked 
 spurs with spurs and angles with angles, like a Chinese 
 puzzle. 
 
 A study of the map of the United States Geological 
 Survey, showing the locations at even a later date when 
 many of the earlier claims had been consolidated out 
 of existence, will convince any one that the preceding 
 description of the Gordian knots left for the lawyers 
 are only the merest glimpses of a state of things that 
 should never have existed, and that cost the young 
 mining communities of Nevada uncounted millions. 
 Still the age of litigation, here as elsewhere, only proved 
 the existence of a rich camp. Men do not fight " like 
 grim death " for worthless ground. 
 
 Contests in the courts began as soon as the promi 
 nent mines had cut far enough into the ore bodies to 
 be ready to infringe upon each other s claims. The 
 real geology of the district then became a pressing 
 problem. Since the miners were determined to hold 
 fast to the " inclined-location " method, the main 
 problem was as follows: Were the quartz bodies nar 
 row veins separated by barren rock, or was all the vein 
 matter deposited in one great irregular fissure, partly 
 filled with wedges and masses of porphyry? Did the 
 Comstock really consist of a single vein, or was it a 
 multiple vein? Such were the questions that divided 
 the miners into two hostile camps. What is now uni 
 versally recognised as a monster lode then seemed 
 
128 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 to consist of a number of narrow, well-defined ledges, 
 two of which were very prominent 
 
 But to call the system a single lode was to entitle 
 the first locators to divide among themselves nearly 
 everything along the hill slope and over the whole 
 Comstock basin, and the rows of later locations, east 
 and west, were annihilated at a blow. Even the Cali- 
 fornians who had bought out the original claimants 
 of the Comstock did not dream of such wide-reach 
 ing ownership. Besides, the great majority were out 
 side, and naturally held to the popular many-ledge 
 theory. A few strongly organized and wealthy com 
 panies, holding what turned out to be the main ledge, 
 ultimately decided to push the single-ledge theory, 
 but at first all the evidence was dead against them. 
 
 Since the Comstock near the surface dipped toward 
 the west, it separated more and more from the line of 
 claims on the east, and the first conflict was therefore 
 with the nearest line of claims on the west. The small 
 ledges here seemed very rich and were perpendicular, or 
 nearly so. Thus the sloping shafts of the Ophir, Mexi 
 can, and other mines soon came in contact with the ver 
 tical shafts on what was termed the " middle lead." The 
 result was the case of Ophir versus McCall, which came 
 up in Genoa, September 3, 1860, before Judge Cradle- 
 baugh in the loft of a livery stable. Several hundred 
 armed men sat behind the respective parties to the suit. 
 One witness was shot at a number of times as he rode 
 down the ravine at night. Although the famous Wil 
 liam M. Stewart rugged, masterful, full of vitality, 
 already recognised as the coming king of the Com 
 stock was attorney for the Ophir, he could only 
 force a disagreement of the jury. 
 
 Mining cases accumulated steadily until Judge Mott 
 opened the First District Court in February, 1862. 
 
MINING LITIGATION. 129 
 
 By that time every valuable claim in the region was a 
 " fighting claim " that is, it was deeply and violently 
 in litigation. Suits to dispossess claimants,, suits to 
 prove trespass, perjury, or fraud, single-ledge suits and 
 multiple-ledge suits these were as thick as blackber 
 ries. Wrote a correspondent of the San Francisco 
 Bulletin: "We shall never outgrow this perpetual 
 litigation until the courts rule that all indefinite or 
 floating claims are worthless. If you find anything 
 worth having, some one will levy blackmail." 
 
 Fights between rival claimants were frequent and 
 bloody. Sometimes such fights took place " at the 
 front" that is, at the end of a drift. If there was 
 reason to believe that a rival company was working 
 on disputed ground, the superintendent of the first 
 company took steps to drive them away either by smok 
 ing them out with sulphur or other substances, or by 
 running a drift into the place and sending a body of 
 miners with picks and shovels to overpower the enemy. 
 " Fighting men " were hired at ten dollars a day in 
 some cases, armed with knives and pistols, and sent to 
 disputed territory. In fact, while cases were being 
 argued in the courts, miners were sometimes fighting 
 underground. The men of the Keystone Company 
 drove away the miners of the Peerless, took possession 
 of their shaft, and filled it with waste rock. The Grass 
 Valley miners were assaulted through a drift by men 
 of the Bajazette and Golden Era and driven to the sur 
 face. The Uncle Sam boys drove out the Centreville 
 men in a similar manner. Yellow Jacket sappers cut 
 into the Gentry shaft and smoked out their rivals. The 
 Gentrys countermined and blew " all sorts of stinking 
 smudges " into Yellow Jacket until the people of Vir 
 ginia protested against the unendurable odours that 
 filled every house in the city. 
 
130 THE STORY 0$ THE MINI. 
 
 One of the most famous suits of the period was 
 brought by the heirs and old-time backers of the Grosh 
 brothers, who,, it will be remembered, had been pros 
 pecting for silver and had organized several companies 
 before the Gold Hill discovery. The shareholders in 
 these forgotten enterprises now formed the " Grosh 
 Gold and Silver Mining Company " and claimed 3,750 
 feet in the best part of the Comstock. Capitalized at 
 $5,000,000, and afterward at $10,000,000, they soon 
 sold enough stock to make a long and brilliant fight. 
 The Nevada newspapers, like Silas Wegg, " dropped 
 into rhyme " such as the following: 
 
 The Ophir on the Comstock 
 
 Was rich as bread and honey ; 
 The Gould and Curry, farther south, 
 
 Was raking out the money ; 
 The Savage and the others 
 
 Had machinery all complete, 
 When in came the Groshes 
 
 And nipped all our feet. 
 
 After long and costly litigation the heirs of the 
 Grosh brothers failed to secure any foothold, and so 
 dropped into oblivion. 
 
 Another most difficult, protracted, and expensive 
 mining suit was between the famous Billy Chollar and 
 the Potosi (pronounced by old Comstock Potosee). The 
 Chollar Company, after a long series of minor difficul 
 ties with the adjoining claim (Potosi), claimed that 
 theirs was the original ledge, and brought suit to " re 
 cover possession of a surface claim four hundred feet 
 wide and fourteen hundred feet long," including, of 
 course, a large part of the Comstock lode with the in 
 evitable "dips, spurs, and angles." The companies 
 fairly locked horns over this difficulty in 1861, and 
 
MINING LITIGATION. 
 
 spent about a million and a half before they concluded 
 to unite their shattered fortunes in the great Chollar- 
 Potosi. 
 
 When this suit was brought, Judge Mott, who was 
 on the bench of the First Territorial District, favoured 
 the Chollar side in their geological theory that the 
 Comstock was only an offshoot from their vein. Mott, 
 to quote from Bancroft, " was therefore bribed or wor 
 ried into resigning." The new incumbent, Judge 
 North, finally decided in favour of the Potosi crowd. 
 North was soon afterward forced to resign " to avoid 
 the scandal of which he was the subject." Chief- 
 Justice Turner was persuaded to follow his example, 
 and finally the members of the bar asked the one re 
 maining judge to resign, which he did. Both sides had 
 received conflicting decisions in the course of this piti 
 able affair, but neither side, as it turned out, felt will 
 ing to have their methods of conducting litigation made 
 public, and so, as I have said, the companies consoli 
 dated. 
 
 The great fight, however, unique in many respects 
 among mining suits, was that instituted at a very early 
 date by Burning Moscow against Ophir. The new 
 company, under the title of "Burning Mosca Ledge 
 Lucky Co.," claimed, in April, 1860, 2,400 feet " west 
 of Virginia City, between the Central and Virginia 
 ledges." Their ledge was said to be distinct from that 
 of the Ophir, and to be "twenty-three feet wide in 
 good ore." The stock was " boomed " in San Fran 
 cisco, and soon the company had the sinews of war 
 and came to the front in support of the favourite many- 
 ledge theory as against the belief that ledges a mile 
 away sprang from the roots of the Comstock and would 
 eventually fall into the hands of the "only original 
 Jacobs," the first line of locators. 
 10 
 
132 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 Burning Moscow made an assault with terrible 
 effect. All the wheels of the courts were set in motion. 
 Ophir began buying out interests in other claims on 
 the rival lode. The Garrison Company also brought 
 suit against Ophir; the Whitbeck Company did the 
 same, and the McCall Company followed, until Ophir 
 purchased all their claims, which were on three so- 
 called ledges lying within fifteen hundred feet of each 
 other. Old Virginia made his last public appearance 
 in connection with these Ophir purchases. Some of 
 the claims they secured depended upon the original 
 notice of location. Finney would not or could not find 
 it until the superintendent of Ophir persuaded him 
 into a tunnel and locked an iron gate upon him. In 
 the morning he was sober and willing to produce the 
 notice. He went to the disputed ledge, pried off a 
 weather-beaten slab, and found a yellow paper, the 
 original location notice that he had put there in 1858. 
 
 Burning Moscow, whose location was disputed in 
 a similar manner by claims on sub-ledges, consolidated 
 about this time with its several tormentors, increased 
 its capital stock from half a million to three million 
 dollars, and returned with multiplied energy to the 
 assault upon Ophir. California and Nevada courts 
 were shaken by the tumult of the struggle. The first 
 onslaught of the Moscow supporters had lasted for two 
 years, and the second lasted quite as long. The pioneer 
 Comstockers were again and again questioned and 
 cross-questioned, until the little that they knew was 
 inextricably confused with the host of mining romances 
 of the period. Some of them fairly lived on witness 
 fees. The district record book was made to uphold 
 each theory by turn. Meanwhile the real question 
 in dispute could not be determined except by actual 
 exploration. 
 
MINING LITIGATION. 133 
 
 Gradually this view of the case began to prevail. 
 The community felt that the development of the dis 
 trict was fatally handicapped by such gigantic litiga 
 tion. Suddenly Burning Moscow discovered that what 
 ever might be at the bottom of their ledge, the top was 
 chiefly lead and base metal. It was no Comstock, but 
 contained only a very low-grade ore that could not be 
 milled at a profit after a few surface stringers were 
 mined out. Burning-Moscow stock fell from four hun 
 dred dollars to five dollars a foot, and Ophir bought the 
 disputed property. First and last, the direct expenses 
 of the fight had been more than a million dollars. 
 
 The mining suits which have been briefly described 
 were only a few out of a great multitude. In 1863 
 some thirty cases, involving property valued at fifty 
 million dollars, were in the district courts. " We had 
 to fight fire with fire in those days," said an old Cali- 
 fornian. Men who saw their whole fortunes at stake 
 were not always scrupulous about ways and means, 
 and their active agents were less often so. The atmos 
 phere in which these interminable litigations were car 
 ried on became heavier and blacker every year. Pub 
 lic confidence in witnesses, juries, attorneys, and judges 
 was sorely shaken. The Attorney-General of Nevada in 
 one of his State reports, referring to the period under 
 consideration, said: " Chicanery won more suits than 
 eloquence and learning, and corruption more than solid 
 merit." Mne tenths of the voting population of Storey 
 County once signed a petition asking all the judges to 
 resign. 
 
 Nevada s peculiar pre-eminence in the matter of 
 litigation from 1860 to the end of 1865 is clearly ex 
 hibited by the Court records for that period. Ophir 
 was in thirty-seven suits, in twenty-eight of which 
 she was plaintiff. Yellow Jacket came next, with 
 
134: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 thirty-two suits, being plaintiff in twenty-four. Sav 
 age was nearly as litigious, having had twenty-nine 
 suits and acting as plaintiff in twenty-two. Gould 
 and Curry conies next, with twenty-seven suits, twenty 
 of which were " actions brought." Overman had 
 twenty-three suits. Eight more of the leading Corn- 
 stock mines of the period under consideration (not 
 including Consolidated Virginia, California, or the later 
 combinations) had from nine to seventeen suits apiece. 
 The total for twelve mines is two hundred and forty- 
 five lawsuits, in seventy-seven of which the companies 
 named were defendants and in one hundred and sixty- 
 eight of which they were plaintiffs. In other words, 
 more than two thirds of the suits were to dispossess 
 the claimants of ground the plaintiffs considered as 
 belonging to the Comstock lode under the single-ledge 
 theory. The direct cost of all this litigation was ten 
 million dollars one fifth of the entire product of the 
 Comstock during that period. What an illustration of 
 the wasteful yet magnificent energy of the early Com- 
 stockers is the fact that this heart-breaking litigation 
 began almost as soon as the discovery of silver was made, 
 and rose to its greatest developments at the same time 
 with the gigantic mechanical achievements and the 
 vast underground works of the epoch! Five of those 
 Nevada years were the equivalent of half a century 
 of every-day life and of ordinary enterprises. 
 
 Great were the legal intellects that were at the dis 
 posal of the mining hosts fighting so steadily for con 
 trol of what began to be called on the Pacific coast the 
 " Treasure-house of the World." Some of the famous 
 cases were tried in San Francisco, where the leading 
 companies soon had their places of business; but Vir 
 ginia City and (after the admission of Nevada in 1864) 
 Carson, the State capital, were the principal battle 
 
MINING LITIGATION. 135 
 
 grounds. The leading Comstock lawyers became fa 
 mous throughout the United States. Young attorneys 
 trained on the Comstock followed the prospector, the 
 miner, the mill owner, and the freighter to camp after 
 camp in the desert and the high Rockies till the prin 
 ciples of American mining law were expounded in 
 Dead-Sea hollows below the ocean level, and in clusters 
 of pioneer cabins above the clouds, ten thousand feet 
 higher than the ocean floor, in the Alps of Colorado. 
 William M. Stewart, the " old invincible/ tireless in 
 devotion, incapable of fatigue, master of mining-camp 
 juries, received from Belcher $165,000 and from Yellow 
 Jacket $30,000 as single fees. His professional income 
 during the years of litigation was $200,000 a year. 
 General Thomas H. Williams made four million dollars 
 from mining property deeded to him as fees for his 
 legal services. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV. 
 
 STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATOES. 
 
 IN these days nine men out of ten know something 
 about mining stocks and methods of dealing in them. 
 At the time of the discovery of the Comstock there 
 was no such thing on the Pacific coast as a stock and 
 exchange board where shares in mines or companies 
 could be listed and transferred. But the people of the 
 entire Pacific coast were highly prosperous and ready 
 for speculative investment. There were few manu 
 factures, so that real estate and mines offered almost 
 the only opportunities. The invention of methods by 
 which the dollars of the servant girl and the farm 
 labourer could be used to speculate with suited all 
 classes alike. Assessments furnished the impetus that 
 carried the Comstock mines safely over periods of de 
 pression. 
 
 Men were trading and selling not shares, but feet 
 and inches, on the various ledges of the Comstock 
 group all through the eventful summer of 1859. The 
 first trouble was that no one had any cash, excepting 
 a few newly arrived Californians. The second trouble 
 was that nothing was developed sufficiently to show 
 other than a speculative value, even on the main Com 
 stock lode. Buying such property seemed to cautious 
 men the wildest of gambles, even at absurdly low prices. 
 Prospectors and speculators were staking out the coun 
 try for miles around. There were times when, if quartz 
 
 136 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 137 
 
 ledges could be supposed to take a personal interest 
 in their fortunes, the Comstock would have been seen 
 to stand abashed, flushing with indignation at the way 
 in which its sworn lovers were flirting with base-metal 
 outcroppings in the sage brush and deserts. 
 
 One will fail to appreciate the completeness with 
 which the Pacific coast became in a day captive to sil 
 ver unless he accepts the great rush to Washoe as mere 
 ly the outward and visible symbol of things spiritual 
 and intellectual. Men, women, and children yielded 
 gladly to the spell the story of another Peru, and 
 the eager silver hunters were met on the summits of 
 the Sierras by ragged, hungry, but desperately happy 
 prospectors who told them that Washoe was richer 
 than their dreams had pictured it, and who offered 
 them mining feet in claims here, there, and everywhere 
 for a few dollars. 
 
 "The truth is," they whispered to the incoming 
 Calif ornians " the truth is that I am dead broke, but 
 I have a fortune sufficient for any man in even the poor 
 est of these claims which I have taken up or traded for. 
 Five feet is enough to make a man rich, and if you can 
 not take more, take five feet, it makes no difference 
 where, at ten dollars a foot." Then they showed speci 
 mens so rich, black, and heavy that the Californians 
 held their breath with envy, and, whether they bought 
 or not, hastened on with redoubled energies. There 
 was something wonderfully childlike and confiding 
 about the bargains and transfers often made after pre 
 cisely this manner in the Sierra passes between entire 
 strangers. 
 
 In a few months the professional speculator, " the 
 man who worked claims with his jaw instead of his 
 pick " (to quote a common Washoe sentiment), was 
 to be seen everywhere. Such men "huddled about 
 
138 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 corners of Virginia City consulting in low tones about 
 various claims " ; they straggled in from the Flowery 
 diggings or other supposedly rich places with speci 
 mens in their hands, " offering bargains," as Ross 
 Browne writes, " in the Eogers, the Lady Bryant, the 
 Mammoth, the Woolly Horse, and Heaven knows how 
 many other valuable leads, at prices varying from ten 
 to seventy-five dollars a foot." The old, old games, 
 as ancient as human capacity for swindling and being 
 swindled, were everywhere in full operation, though 
 no one as yet called the process " dealing in stocks." 
 They were " bucking and bearing " (the term " bull " 
 was not then known on the Comstock). They were 
 " trading claims." They were " stuffing each other " 
 after every conceivable manner and diligently blowing 
 " Washoe bubbles." Mad speculation was everywhere, 
 but no money was to be seen except in gambling rooms 
 and saloons. Silver was everywhere underground, if 
 reports could be credited; lawsuits, deeds, mortgages, 
 and agreements to transfer everything on top of the 
 earth or within it were as thick as autumn leaves and 
 hardly as durable. Everybody was a billionaire in 
 silver-claim inches, feet, yards, and rods, "including 
 dips, spurs, and angles," from the top of Mount David 
 son to the bottom of Devil s Gate. 
 
 Ross Browne, whose genius caught many a glimpse 
 in the rapidly turning kaleidoscope of the Comstock, 
 remains our best guide through the " horrible confusion 
 of tongues," the crowds of roaring, raving drunkards, 
 " swilling fiery liquids from morning to night " ; the 
 " flaring and flaunting gambling saloons " ; the " tor 
 rents of imprecations " ; the feverish, unhallowed 
 thirst for gain; the crowds of crazy-looking wretches 
 running hither and thither, hurrying to assay offices, 
 pulling out papers, exchanging mysterious signals 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 139 
 
 these Washoe millionaires with their outcroppings and 
 indications from the " Wake-Up Jake/ " Eoot Hog or 
 Die/ " Wild Cat/ " Dry-Up/ < Grizzly-Hill/ Same- 
 Horse/ " Let-Her-Kip," "Yon-Bet," "Gouge-Eye," 
 and other famous ledges and companies. All night long, 
 as Browne elsewhere reports, these fiendish noises con 
 tended, and his ears were overwhelmed with unintelli 
 gible jargonings and the difficult slang of the new min 
 ing camp. He tried one night to sleep at " Zip s/ 
 where twenty bunks were in the room, and found that 
 every inmate except himself was bent on passing the 
 entire night trading and transferring claims in the 
 midst of shouting and universal pandemonium. He 
 and the late Henry De Groot fled for refuge to a hole 
 in the hillside and wrote letters to the New York Times 
 and the San Francisco Bulletin describing in most real 
 istic language the strange scenes about them. 
 
 What most surprised and often shocked the visitor 
 was the fact that all this turmoil, this restless con 
 course of amateur stockbrokers and new-fledged specu 
 lators whose ranks increased daily, this howling and 
 perennial insanity, occurred in a frontier camp in the 
 midst of noble mountains where only a short time 
 before the profound peace of an untroubled wilder 
 ness had reigned supreme. One writer suggested that 
 if the New York Stock Exchange should hold its meet 
 ings on the top of Mount Eigi the scene would be paral 
 leled, but in many respects it was a situation that was 
 entirely new .to the history of speculation in America, 
 and the strangely mingled Comstock crowd of 1860 
 was certainly more wildly picturesque on the windy 
 flank of Mount Davidson than even the most turbulent 
 of well-dressed New York brokers and speculators. As 
 they swayed through alleys between flapping canvas 
 tents they seemed the chattering, half-dazed, wild- 
 
140 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 eyed survivors of all nations and races thrown shattered 
 and homeless into the desert after some vast world 
 catastrophe that had erased from existence everything 
 except the wealth passion and the ledges of Washoe. 
 
 But prices of mining claims could not rise forever. 
 "With drastic sarcasm an " old resident of Washoe," 
 who is supposed to have been the late J. W. Simon- 
 ton, one of the owners of the San Francisco Bulletin, 
 described the situation in May, 1860: "We are in 
 formed that there is a panic in San Francisco in rela 
 tion to our mining stocks; that nothing will sell; that 
 even Ophir, Washoe, Chollar, and Corsair are drugs 
 in the market; that banks won t discount Washoe specu 
 lators paper; that Lady Bryan sells for fifteen dollars 
 and Eogers for forty dollars; that the bottom has fallen 
 out. Two months ago," he continues, " these wise 
 men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl and got badly 
 wet. Two months ago everything would sell. People 
 bought blindly in the Bob Eidley, Last Chance, and 
 Bob-Tail Nag. Where they were located, what was 
 the character of the rock, who were the locators, and 
 what the title, were not matters of inquiry. Fools at 
 your end of the telegraph were deceived by knaves at 
 our end; we sent to you mysterious hints of new discov 
 eries that never existed, strikes in mines never located, 
 accounts of sales that never took place. Your prudent 
 men who would not buy a foot of land in San Fran 
 cisco or make a loan without careful search of title have 
 risked thousands without a thought. Your greedy 
 folly was taken advantage of by our avarice; you be 
 came the victims of your own sublime stupidity and 
 dishonesty." 
 
 A conservative estimate made in 1860 placed the 
 number of claims located, interests in which were in 
 most cases on the market, as five thousand within a 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 141 
 
 radius of thirty miles from Virginia City! Only three 
 hundred of these claims were ever opened at all, and 
 only twenty were considered by careful outsiders as 
 " thoroughly well established mines." Time was to 
 show that only eight or nine of the twenty which were 
 considered absolutely certain investments were to pay 
 dividends. The majority of these five thousand claims 
 lay forever idle. One would not have known that they 
 were called mines except for an occasional claim stake 
 or a fluttering, badly spelled notice on " indications " 
 which were seldom attractive to competent mineralo 
 gists. Iron pyrites and all sorts of worthless metals 
 were as good as gold and silver to the enterprising ad 
 venturers. Gopher, squirrel, and coyote holes fur 
 nished indications on the strength of which claims 
 were laid out. Ignorant and plausible speculators 
 with a smattering of geology added to the confusion. 
 Before long men were claiming to have ledges of ind 
 ium, platinum, plumbago, and various other valu 
 able substances. One Washoe prospector being in 
 formed by a San Francisco man that he wanted an 
 ambergris mine, replied that he had one already staked 
 out and for sale. A group of men under direction of 
 the " spirits " tunnelled for weeks into the granite of 
 Mount Davidson in order to tap an alleged lake of 
 coal oil. 
 
 Besides the five thousand actual claims there were 
 many more prospect holes a few feet across mere 
 ragged pits or cuts in the yellow sand, clay, or rocks 
 of the barren hillsides. Prospect holes, too, were about 
 all that one could see on the vast majority of claims 
 already held. They dotted the whole region in wind 
 blown heaps and hollows between dismal clumps of 
 sage brush and the dull yellow of coarse sunflowers 
 that occasionally bloomed in the freshly broken slopes. 
 
14:2 THE STORY OF THE MINE, 
 
 This was the sort of thing, for the most part, that the 
 staid old merchants of San Francisco and Sacramento 
 had been fighting over in the spring of 1860! Vir 
 ginia City and Gold Hill record books show that nearly 
 sixteen thousand claims were recorded in those dis 
 tricts in the twenty years after 1859. 
 
 Donald Davidson, the first ore buyer on the Com- 
 stock, was soon introduced to one of the favourite jokes 
 of the fun-loving miners who were quite well aware 
 of the innate absurdity of claim-staking the whole of 
 Nevada. After he had agreed to buy two hundred 
 tons of selected Ophir ore at two hundred dollars a ton 
 and to ship it at his own expense per Carson mule fast- 
 freight train, the miners celebrated the important 
 event by a trip to the top of " Sun Peak," which then 
 and there was rebaptized Mount Davidson. They 
 showed the honest old Scotchman dozens of quartz 
 veins on the way up, and told him they were fairly run 
 ning over with richness. After their return in the 
 evening they proposed to locate claims on these new 
 ledges for the banker and all his personal friends. The 
 recorder was called in, and Davidson gladly put up 
 fifty cents apiece for some twenty-five claims in the 
 granite masses of the grand old mountain. Then the 
 jovial recorder suddenly invited the crowd to aid him 
 in the liquid transmutation of some of the Davidsonian 
 gold. 
 
 Throughout the entire period of stock speculation, 
 in all its ebbs and flows here and elsewhere as well, 
 every student is surprised at the fewness of the paying 
 mines and at the number that hang helplessly upon 
 reputations made for the various districts by one or two 
 magnificent properties in each. The bullion reports 
 from these stir the pulses of investors and speculators 
 alike, and they often pour successive assessments into 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 143 
 
 worthless and barren places for years. The sum total of 
 the dead- work of the Comstock period is almost incalcu 
 lable. Men of large capital and the millions with their 
 small savings united to explore the ledges of Nevada 
 at an enormous expense, and often upon entirely un 
 profitable mines, or rather not mines. To individual 
 ize these cases of profligate outlay, writes one of the 
 old Virginia City editors, " would be simply to cata 
 logue the leading enterprises carried on during this 
 epoch of prodigality and mistake." Ten million dol 
 lars was spent in sinking shafts and running drifts 
 about Virginia City without finding a single large and 
 lucrative mine. 
 
 There are the forgotten Palmyra and Indian Spring 
 districts in Pine Nut Eange where two pretty little 
 towns once stood, but now only the graveyards remain. 
 There is that Nevadan Golgotha of speculators, Es- 
 meralda, where millions of dollars were wasted. Be 
 yond, toward the Humboldt, in range after range of 
 bleak, desolate mountains, or in the tawny desert, are 
 the ruins of abortive mining enterprises. In every 
 direction east, west, north, south credulous stock 
 holders staked and lost vast sums of money before the 
 close of the 60 s. Over in the lava of Pine Woods dis 
 trict in 1863 some Virginia City men sold a group of 
 mythical mines and received a very large payment 
 down. The New York buyers spent another fortune 
 and departed, leaving the holes in the desert. Every 
 where, for hundred of miles, on steep ranges, in sandy 
 wastes, money was spent without stint upon misguided 
 and foolish mining enterprises, supported almost al 
 ways by associations and companies. Said Dr. De 
 Groot, who had visited nearly every camp on the Pacific 
 coast, " That s the dilapidated mill of the Let-Her-Eip " 
 and, true to its name, it burst the financial integu- 
 
144 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 merits of every stockholder. " I haven t time," he con 
 tinues, "to relate the story of the Wild Emigrant/ 
 the Shamrock/ the Silver Lyre/ the i Pungle- 
 Down/ " and he makes passing mention of many other 
 wildcats and abandoned districts of the 60 s, such as 
 the " Lunar Rainbow/ the " Bloody Thunder/ and the 
 countless host of unproductive mines in Cortez, Silver 
 Bend, Reveille, Pahranagat, and classic White Pine. 
 
 Later came others, dragging luckless speculators 
 down the paths of ruin barren Panamint, on the edge 
 of the terrible Death Valley; Marietta, in the Excelsior 
 Mountains, where the whole deserted town still lies 
 bleaching in the sun; emptied, ghostly camps by the 
 score, dead, unburied, weighted down by human curses. 
 Each one of them was hailed in its day as a new and 
 greater Comstock; each one in its fall destroyed homes 
 and made suicides. The smallest and most ephemeral 
 of them all has had a history which, had it occurred in 
 some staid farming community, would have made the 
 place memorable as the scene of an awful disaster. But, 
 spread widely over time and space, the ruin that fol 
 lows the failure of a promising camp is difficult to trace 
 or measure, especially in these lesser instances. The 
 Amazonian current of Comstock speculation sweeps far 
 out into the ocean of human life, strewn with its multi 
 tudinous social wrecks, and it still remains the pre 
 eminent type of its class. 
 
 As time passed, mining stocks became more and 
 more the typical and most popular form of speculation 
 in California and Nevada; often the whole community 
 seemed to be dealing in them. There have been periods 
 when leading brands of goods have been named after 
 favourite mines, when streets, squares, parks, and chil 
 dren were christened in the same way, and when the 
 slang of the mining market was used by every class of 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 145 
 
 society and in every learned profession. The bar 
 keeper mixed "bonanza" drinks and talked of his 
 stocks. Boys and girls, servants, labourers, mechanics, 
 and clerks were calculating upon gaining fortunes with 
 their little savings. All classes alike helped to sustain 
 the stupendous game of silver mining in Nevada. 
 " The market," said the Mining Review in 1870, " ex 
 tends everywhere; the buyers and sellers of stock in 
 clude the millionaire and the mendicant, the modest 
 matron and the brazen courtesan, the prudent man of 
 business and the gambler, the maidservant and her 
 mistress, the banker and his customer." 
 
 The whole history of the Comstock lode is revealed 
 in the assessments, dividends, and fluctuations of the 
 stocks of the separate mines. There every consolida 
 tion of interests, every lawsuit, every period of ex 
 travagance and of economy is written so that he who 
 runs may read. Before the end of 1861 eighty-six com 
 panies were organized and working the Comstock and 
 adjacent mines; their aggregate capital was $61,500,- 
 000. Only a few were paying at the time, but every 
 one fondly believed that they would all wheel into line 
 before long. The prodigality that followed in the days 
 of the earlier bonanzas was partly the free-handed lib 
 erality of Californians trained in the schools of the 
 placer camps, and partly the unchecked extravagance 
 of gambling stockholders. Gould and Curry, a mar 
 vellously rich mine, took out nearly nine million dol 
 lars and declared $2,908,800 in dividends during 1863 
 and 1864. The actual investments made by its owners, 
 who bought it for a few thousand dollars, had been 
 less than $200,000; but the expenses of the company 
 during that two years was close upon six million dol 
 lars, or more than twice the dividends. It has been 
 reckoned that the dividends from the nearly 110,000 
 
146 ME STOEY OF TfiE MINE. 
 
 tons of ore milled during those two years might just 
 as well have been four and a half millions, as less than 
 three millions, if the company had worked all its ores 
 in its own mills and with less haste. But, as the presi 
 dent of Gould and Curry said, " every stockholder 
 wanted it snaked out at once, at any cost, and so we 
 wasted a third of our profits. 7 
 
 The first great depression in mining stocks (after 
 they had any commercial value at all) began as soon 
 as the rich ore chutes near the surface had been worked 
 out and the search for new deposits had begun, with 
 consequent assessments. Shares rained on the market 
 from all directions, and hundreds of prominent men 
 were ruined. Gould and Curry, which in 1863 sold 
 at $6,300 a square foot, fell to $900 in 1864. Ophir 
 dropped from $1,580 to $300. Savage went down 
 from $2,600 to $750. Every mine on the Comstock 
 suffered in a similar proportion, and the " wildcats " 
 of the outside districts were " out of sight, under 
 ground." 
 
 While the leading mines were drifting for more 
 silver along the east wall, some directors, who desired 
 to keep the news of any " find " from reaching the ears 
 of the public, conceived the idea of confining miners 
 to the mine for days at a time. They received the best 
 of care and often had increased wages. In 1868 Hale 
 & Norcross tried the experiment. When the men were 
 released the superintendent reported a strike, and the 
 stock rose from $1,300 to $2,200, though the mine did 
 not justify the increase. Speculators soon became so 
 suspicious of the plan that the stocks of a mine were 
 quite as apt to fall as to rise when the miners were im 
 prisoned. 
 
 According to the present plan, when a mine reaches 
 rich pay-ore the superintendent, who has long watched 
 
STOCK AttD THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 
 
 the process of the work, generally knows it first. The 
 doors of the building over the mine are closed and 
 admittance is refused to all outsiders, even to reporters. 
 Only a few of the men in the mine have had a chance 
 to find out anything, because, if the superintendent 
 knows his business, a " secret shift " has done all the 
 work for weeks at the advanced point in the drifts 
 where ore is expected. The oldest and most reliable 
 miners are chosen for the shift. They are seldom 
 ordered in set terms to hold their tongues, but if any 
 thing regarding the mine gets abroad every man on 
 the shift is discharged. The truth about the inside 
 of a mine can seldom be obtained from a miner that 
 works there. Loyalty is ingrained in the very nature of 
 the man. Though nearly every miner buys stock, and 
 it would be strange if he did not, he is up to all the 
 points of the game, and if he is on a " secret shift " can 
 manage to conceal his information from the shrewdest 
 of " curbstones brokers " or mining spies. 
 
 Virginia City in times of stock excitement was 
 honeycombed with newspaper reporters, agents of deal 
 ers, and outsiders whose business it was to obtain by 
 fair means or foul an exact knowledge of the condition, 
 present and prospective, of the Comstock mines. Every 
 one who was connected with the suspected mine or 
 mines was shadowed as closely as if he was a counter 
 feiter. A Comstock tradition is to the effect that on 
 one occasion when the air was full of hints of a strike, 
 but nothing could be gleaned in any direction, a shrewd 
 mining detective hid in the works, saw the superin 
 tendent come out and take off his dirty mining clothes. 
 He slipped in, and finally managed to scrape a few 
 ounces of dust and clay from boots and overalls. This 
 waste, when assayed, showed that some drift the super 
 intendent had been examining was in a new and very 
 11 
 
148 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 rich formation. He wired his backers to " buy hard/ 
 and they made vast profits. 
 
 During every great stock excitement the mining 
 towns themselves are loud-buzzing beehives, sending 
 out the latest news, buying and selling stocks with 
 feverish haste. In Virginia City as well as in San 
 Francisco at such seasons fortunes have been made and 
 lost in an hour. It is curious to see how people behave 
 when stocks start upward again. Those who lost in 
 the previous spurts remark calmly to their friends: 
 " Now this time I shall sell at a fair profit; let the other 
 fellow make somthing too." Pretty soon stocks jump 
 a little higher. " Now when I can double my money, 
 off I go for a vacation." Then stocks fall off a few 
 points, " get soft," then harden, then " run again 
 softer." " Some one has been telegraphing lies about 
 the mine to San Francisco," says our friend. But mat 
 ters grow worse, the holders are called upon to make 
 good their bargains, and the boom ends in a crash, with 
 our luckless friend still holding his shares. 
 
 In Dan De Quille s Big Bonanza is a letter said to 
 have been received in Virginia City from a Frenchman 
 who had become acquainted with the meaning of the 
 term "mud," and I quote a portion: "By zee advice 
 of our goot friend," as the inquirer stated, " I have 
 procured some time past on what you call ( on zee time 
 many shares of zee Bobtaile. He, mine friend who 
 repose on zee inside, express himself of zee mine wis 
 moche enthusiasme. Zee mine be one merveille de la 
 nature; zee works un chef-d ceuvre de Part. But now, 
 pretty soon le diable! Zee brokaire man use zee ex 
 pression to me as follows: more mud/ So many, five, 
 seex time have he, zee brokaire, desire of me some leetle 
 more mud that now I mus make one gran sacrifice 
 pecuniare. It be now become scandaleuse. Pretty 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 149 
 
 soon you have one crash financial I gone bust me. 
 I be ver moche perplex wis zee stroke of prices. He 
 viggle up, he viggle down, all zee time. Will you have 
 ze complaisance to inform me how soon he will viggle 
 high up, an remain to pass some time up dare? " 
 
 In order to illustrate more forcibly the fluctuations 
 of the stock market during the ten years following 
 1867, I have gathered the following notes upon two 
 typical mines from the commercial columns of the San 
 Francisco newspapers: 
 
 Alpha, an assessment mine, sold for $1,570 in 
 February, 1868, fell to $33 in September, rose to $62 
 in February, 1869, sank to $11 in October, rose to $21 
 in March, 1870, sank to $3 in September, rose to $20 
 in September, 1871, and to $240 in April, 1872, then 
 sank to $15 in July, 1873, and rose again to $100 in 
 September; in February, 1874, sank to $9, rose to $45 
 in June, 1875, and sank to $3 the same month; in 
 May, 1876, it rose to $67, and sank in December to 
 $18; in 1877 it fluctuated between $5 and $23. Alpha, 
 with 30,000 shares, levied $330,000 in assessments up 
 to 1880, and has never declared a dividend. 
 
 Belcher, unlike Alpha, was a great dividend pro 
 ducer, one of the three leading mines of the period, 
 having paid in thirty-eight dividends up to 1880 nearly 
 sixteen million dollars, with assessments of less than 
 two millions. It had 104,000 shares after 1869 (1,100 
 to the foot). The price of the stock sank from $430 
 in April, 1868, to $110 in July. Then, the capital 
 stock being largely increased, the price per share be 
 came proportionately less. In 1869 prices ranged from 
 $12 to $35; in 1870 sank from $35 to $1; rose to $6 
 in January, 1871, and to $450 in December; sank to 
 $6 in January, 1872, rose again to $1,525 in April, 
 fluctuating all that summer, down to $1.50, up to $95, 
 
150 ME STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 down to $9, and so on. In 1873 there were again great 
 variations; the stock sold down to 25 cents a share and 
 up to $113 with many surprising eddies, going down to 
 $1.50 in August, and then rallying until in January, 
 1874, it was at $120, breaking by November to $42. 
 
 It would be easy to go on with these comparisons 
 from which an instructive chart might be constructed to 
 exhibit the rise and fall of stock values. For the pur 
 poses of speculation, the mines that did not pay any 
 dividends were often exactly as good as those that did 
 pay. This was fortunate for the stock owners and for 
 the miners, mill men, superintendents, and all who 
 made a living from the business, either directly or in 
 directly. Out of one hundred and three Washoe min 
 ing companies reported and regularly listed, only four 
 teen paid any dividends at all, and only six of these 
 paid more dividends than assessments. The six were 
 Consolidated Virginia, California, Belcher, Crown 
 Point, Gould and Curry, and Kentuck. 
 
 Some of the assessments paid upon mines that 
 never yielded a profit and paid unflinchingly for years 
 by successive legions of stockholders were unparalleled 
 in mining history. Alta put in $1,317,600; Baltimore 
 Consolidated, $1,015,000; Bullion, $3,352,000; Cale 
 donia, $1,935,000; Consolidated Imperial, $1,125,000; 
 Justice, $3,230,000; Mexican, $1,243,000; New York, 
 $900,000; Overman, $3,162,800; Silver Hill, $1,620,- 
 000; Utah, $1,030,000. Here were ten mines that 
 sank in assessment work nearly seventeen million dol 
 lars, while many other mines that paid some dividends 
 lost very large sums: in the case of Yellow Jacket, 
 $2,454,000; and of Sierra Nevada, $3,747,500. Hun 
 dreds of thousands of investors in every part of the civi 
 lized world have reason to remember one or another 
 of this list of non-producers. 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 151 
 
 It has been estimated by many writers that if the 
 highest price be taken which each mine at one time 
 or another has brought (as figured out from the number 
 of shares and the stock-board maximum) the Comstock 
 has cost $700,000,000, but there never was a single 
 time when the entire lode, even in the stock market, 
 was being sold at this valuation. The only possible 
 way of estimating the profits of a mining enterprise 
 is to take the difference between the total yield and the 
 total expense. The currents, undertows, eddies, whirl 
 pools, and enormous maelstroms of the mining-stock 
 markets are of oceanic vastness, crowded with unfore 
 seen perils, and throbbing with immeasurable energies, 
 expressed all too feebly in billion-dollar estimates, 
 but the actual available capital of the stock market 
 is many times less than its fictitious valuation. If 
 it were not so there could never be any stock market 
 at all. 
 
 In the year 1877 the total sales of mining shares 
 on the three San Francisco stock boards amounted to 
 very nearly $120,000,000. This was two years later 
 than the height of the greatest speculative period in the 
 history of the lode, and may serve to illustrate what 
 used to be called a prosperous year. Without some 
 such method of speculation no mine that did not pay 
 its expenses from the start could ever have been de 
 veloped except by wealthy owners; no ten or a hundred 
 men would have taken the risks and invested the capi 
 tal required to push work on Comstock mines as rapidly 
 as it was pushed for fifteen or eighteen years after their 
 location. The division of the various mining interests 
 into hundreds of thousands of small shares gave every 
 one an opportunity to invest in the game of chance. 
 As long as many thousands chose to invest, the high- 
 pressure system continued. 
 
152 "THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 Eeports from the San Francisco boards were bul 
 letined in Virginia City as soon as received in times 
 when stocks were rushing upward like auroras or fall 
 ing like rocket sticks. Everybody ran to see them 
 flour-dusted bakers, blacksmiths with sledge hammers, 
 white-aproned butchers, Jare-headed clerks, miners on 
 the way to the shafts, a teamster " thrusting his black- 
 snake under the housing of his saddle mule " all 
 hurrying to the bulletin boards to see their fates. The 
 streets became blocked so that the police had to clear 
 a passage, and the town quivered with joy or sorrow 
 with each change in the figures. Sometimes a long- 
 drawn sigh, mysterious, universal, sought expression as 
 values slipped away down to the depths. 
 
 As for the successful mining operator, time was 
 when he was the most aggressive and scintillant figure 
 in the social and business worlds of the Pacific coast. 
 Such men as " Jim " Keene, " Bill Lent, " Johnny " 
 Skae, General Gashwiler, and others still remembered 
 on Pine Street, were men who in their time knew every 
 curve and twist of the Comstock market. Hundreds 
 of others linked their names with famous mines and 
 with thrilling chapters of speculation. Group after 
 group rose to power, ruled after their kind, and fell 
 from authority. Some few there are who have survived 
 many a successive dynasty and are still Eajahs of the 
 White Elephant. In flush times the leaders of stock 
 operations were known by their purple and fine linen, 
 their splendid equipages and their lavish expenditures, 
 generally in San Francisco, but sometimes in a trail 
 of corruscating glory across the continent. But every 
 now and then a man was caught on the wrong side of 
 the market, which fluctuated at times much more vio 
 lently than anything on Wall Street. Down he went, 
 down and under, and new men took his place. Per- 
 
STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 153 
 
 haps in the course of time, soured and blunted by mis 
 fortune, the unfortunate operator joined the ranks of 
 the please-lend-me-a-dollar denizens of Pauper Alley, a 
 narrow street in San Francisco between Pine and Cali 
 fornia, where the hopeless wrecks of forgotten storms of 
 speculation are drifting to and fro. 
 
 There, in Pauper Alley, one can walk, any time in 
 business hours, and see creatures that once were million 
 aires and leading operators. Now they live by free 
 lunches in the beer cellars and on stray dimes tossed to 
 them "for luck." Women, too, form a part of the 
 wretched crowd that haunt the ends of the Alley where 
 it joins its more prosperous neighbour streets and beg 
 every speculator to give them a " pointer " or to carry 
 a share of stock for them. These are the " dead mud- 
 hens," as the men are the " dead ducks," of the Corn- 
 stock share gamblers. Horrible things one sees and 
 hears of here. Old friends you thought were pros 
 perous but had not heard of for years shove themselves 
 out of the huddle and beg for the price of a glass of 
 whisky. There stands a once-prosperous printer, in 
 rags he took flyers on the street too many times. 
 Yonder beggar lost $400,000 in a single summer, all 
 good gold. The ghost of many a murdered happiness 
 walks unseen among these half -insane paupers as they 
 chatter like apes of lost fortunes and of the prospects 
 of their favourite stocks. Eeally it is a frightful thing 
 to walk there and look at the seamy side of the silken 
 garment of fortune. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 BOKRASCA AND BONANZA. 
 
 A STUDENT of mining interests must rise to a 
 broader view than that suggested by the artificial 
 stimulus of the stock market. It is something, of 
 course, to know what has been wasted in assessments, 
 how stocks have fluctuated, and what fortunes have 
 been gained or lost therein. But it is in every respect 
 more important to observe the development of the 
 mines from the standpoint of legitimate business enter 
 prises, entirely independent, in the last analysis, of 
 outside gambling elements. Individuals have been 
 impoverished, but has the Pacific coast and the world 
 at large gained or lost in a financial sense by the mil 
 lions spent upon the Comstock? 
 
 The answer is given in official records. If we take 
 the summer of 1859 as the starting point and sum up 
 the assessments made by the several Comstock com 
 panies for twenty-one years, we shall arrive at the grand 
 total of $62,000,000, according to Government reports. 
 Dividends paid during the same period aggregated 
 $116,000,000, and to this the statisticians add $2,- 
 000,000 for unreported individual profits on mines 
 before they were incorporated. Striking a cash bal 
 ance, the Comstock ledger thus exhibits an actual profit 
 of $56,000,000. In round numbers, the bullion yield 
 of the group of mines for the same period was valued 
 at $306,000,000. Subtracting the profits, we have as 
 
 154 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 155 
 
 the cost of the purchasing, maintaining, defending, 
 and developing the great lode for twenty-one years, 
 $250,000,000. Three fourths of this sum, it must not 
 be forgotten, came from the mines themselves; the 
 other fourth was the result of direct assessments upon 
 the stockholders. 
 
 Turning to consider the other elements of cost, 
 we find that the prospectors and original locators upon 
 the lode received less than one hundred thousand dol 
 lars for their claims; also that subsequent owners paid 
 less than a million dollars out of their own pockets 
 as " working capital " before the levying of assess 
 ments began. Practically, therefore, and viewed as a 
 whole, the Comstock lode in twenty-one years created 
 from its yield, and at the cost of only about sixty-three 
 million dollars (adding the assessments as previously 
 noted), all the values of towns, mills, mines, machinery, 
 and other co-ordinate actualities too numerous to cata 
 logue. 
 
 The one distinguishing feature of all mining is the 
 fact that the finest engineering skill, the special train 
 ing of geologists and mineralogists, the hereditary in 
 stincts of the descendants of generations of miners, 
 are, and always will be, incapable of mapping out min 
 ing territory except by tedious and expensive explora 
 tions. There are in all mines periods of high produc 
 tion separated by periods of low production. There 
 must be " bonanza " and " borrasca." 
 
 Both these words are borrowed from the Mexican 
 miners. They have musical and expressive phrases 
 for cuts, adits, hanging wall, foot wall, tunnels, shafts, 
 and every part of a mine, as well as for every operation 
 connected with mining. Two Mexican mining terms 
 are now generally known to Americans. When a mine 
 is not in pay ore, or the vein has "pinched out" or 
 
156 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 disappeared, it is "en lorra" or " emborrescada" or 
 " lorrasca." As one hears it on the Pacific coast, it 
 implies ill luck or hard times, coupled with stern reso 
 lution to keep pegging away. 
 
 I once heard a rancher greet a friend with, " How 
 are things with you, Jim? " 
 
 " Still in borrasca, but it can t last forever," was the 
 reply. 
 
 "How did it happen, Jim?" 
 
 "Well, I struck pay rock buying cattle in Modoc 
 an tradin that-a-way. Then things sorter dribbled 
 out till I dropped down to sheep herding up on the 
 Chowchilla, an you know that s borrasca." 
 
 " So it is, sure! Well, here s wishin , as the Greasers 
 say, that you may hev as many days in bonanza as you 
 hed in borrasca." 
 
 The antithesis is plain. Bonanza a large body of 
 pay ore has come to mean especial prosperity. The 
 allusion is to a cheerful proverb of the Mexican silver 
 miners, which runs: "As many days as you spend in 
 borrasca you will surely spend in bonanza." Mexicans 
 have often been willing to take leases of non-paying 
 mines based upon the condition that if they find a 
 bonanza they shall be allowed to work it for as many 
 days as they had laboured to find it. Such a lease was 
 once given on the Comstock, and the Mexicans spent 
 six months tunnelling through barren rock before they 
 gave up in despair, much to the joy of the superintend 
 ent, who had begun to think they had really found a 
 bonanza and were only trying to lengthen their time 
 sufficiently to be able to " clean up everything in sight." 
 
 It is one of the striking features of the story of the 
 Comstock that some companies have usually been in 
 bonanza while others were in borrasca. Something 
 on the great lode has been paying dividends even at 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 157 
 
 times of greatest depression. The working theory 
 of mines is to be exploring for new ore bodies while 
 working out the ore in sight, so as to occupy both work 
 men and mill. But in practice this is often impossible, 
 so much " dead work " has to be done to find and work 
 the ore bodies and so much barren space is passed over. 
 As long as active exploration is being kept up in a mine 
 there is always a chance of a strike. Many stock specu 
 lators depend upon the simple rule of buying whatever 
 has been a long time out of luck. This rule has made 
 and lost fortunes on the Comstock. 
 
 There is something sudden, unexpected, and tem 
 porary involved in the term " bonanza." No one expects 
 or plans for a bonanza of any sort; it means much more 
 than merely pay rock. So it usually happens that when 
 a company strikes a bonanza the stock has been " kick 
 ing about the street," to use the broker s phrase, which 
 means that it was like so much waste paper. The 
 chief owners of the mine and their friends try to gather 
 in all the stock they can; pretty soon there is a whisper 
 of a new bonanza on the Comstock, and up the prices 
 go, far above their true value, then they tumble back 
 again. The hope of a bonanza, or the rumour of its 
 actual presence, has been at the bottom of every stock 
 excitement. Safe, steady pay ore produces no such 
 flurry on the street. 
 
 What is known on the Comstock as the " old suc 
 cession of bonanzas " began comparatively near the 
 surface. Ophir, Mexican, Savage, Gould and Curry, 
 and Hale and Norcross, all found much ore along the 
 first line of work. After the vein was discovered to 
 dip toward the east the second line of shafts was con 
 structed with larger and better works, and when the 
 vein was again reached a large number of very rich 
 deposits was found. The gross yield of the various 
 
158 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 mines during this entire period was as follows: Ophir, 
 $20,000,000; Savage, $16,500,000; Hale and Norcross, 
 $11,000,000; Chollar and Potosi, $16,000,000; Gould 
 and Curry, $15,000,000; Yellow Jacket, $16,500,000; 
 Crown Point, $22,000,000; Belcher, $26,000,000; Over 
 man, $3,250,000; Imperial, $2,750,000; and Justice, 
 Kentucky, Sierra Nevada, and many others, from a 
 hundred thousand to more than a million dollars. By 
 1865 the total bullion yield of Storey County, most of 
 it from the Comstock, was about nine and a half million 
 dollars. During the first twelve years after 1859 the 
 production of all the mines on the Comstock averaged 
 a little 6ver $12,000,000 annually, or a total of $145,- 
 000,000. The actual yearly yield, however, fluctuated 
 greatly; it rose to seventeen or eighteen millions and 
 sank as low as two millions. Work went on with un- 
 diminished zeal in every mine on the lode during all 
 these twelve years, and those mines that were in bor- 
 rasca kept going by means of their monthly assess 
 ments. 
 
 According to modern methods of managing rich 
 mines, this enormous yield ought to have made some 
 stir abroad, but it hardly seemed to cause much excite 
 ment. Conditions which prevailed on the Comstock 
 were such that the larger part of every bonanza went 
 into running and extraordinary expenses. I have de 
 scribed a few of the costly mechanical developments 
 required, but all along the line magnificent enterprise 
 and the most reckless waste went hand in hand, par 
 ticularly in the four or five years after 1860. Money 
 was spent lavishly; wages were very high, cost of liv 
 ing was enormous, and the miners had the best of every 
 thing. Behind all this, tens of millions of dollars went 
 for experiments with mills and machinery. As for 
 salaried officials, the number of relatives and friends 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 159 
 
 that the owners of the famous mines managed to sup 
 port by obtaining them sinecures will never be known. 
 Clerks by the score were paid with Comstock silver 
 until, as the writer of the time casually remarks, " it 
 seemed as if half the young men in San Francisco were 
 directly or indirectly supported by the Nevada mines." 
 
 How great was the total of this astonishing waste 
 fulness may be gathered from a few statistics. The 
 grand old Ophir, after taking out $15,000,000, had 
 paid only $1,400,000 in dividends. Half a million, 
 to be sure, was in the new Washoe Valley mill, and per 
 haps a million in machinery on the mine itself, but 
 the rest went for salaries, labour, and " supplies." The 
 last elastic word had to answer for many missing divi 
 dends in every mine of the epoch. 
 
 As far as Virginia City was concerned, an assess 
 ment mine was often nearly as good as a dividend mine. 
 Every one in its employ received just as high wages, 
 paid with as much promptness, as the wages at the 
 other mines. Lumbermen, freighters, merchants, had 
 almost as much support from a mine that was in bor- 
 rasca as from one in bonanza, provided that the bor- 
 rasca did not prove so continuous as to cause the stock 
 holders to quit work. It was generally thought as 
 cheap to keep on doing something as to let the mine 
 go to ruin and the machinery become worthless. 
 "Whether the advance drifts were in barren feldspar, 
 in pay ore, or in bonanza, the great mines went on sum 
 mer and winter alike. 
 
 I have already illustrated the expensive processes 
 by which the rich ore of the first line of bonanzas was 
 wasted, in a previous chapter, by reference to the use 
 less Gould and Curry mill. In those days the stock 
 holders of the mines walked the streets of Virginia 
 City " as if pacing the roof of an unfathomable treas- 
 
160 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 lire-house," says Mr. Eliot Lord, " and their heads were 
 continually in the clouds. They saw a network of silver 
 beneath their feet and the fine strands widening into 
 solid wedges of ore/ No metaphor can exaggerate 
 the prevailing delirium. " Men were drunken with 
 the wine of sudden success, and scattered their money 
 broadcast." A superintendent of Overman filled his 
 water tank with champagne for his guests at a wedding. 
 Another Nevada mining man put door handles of solid 
 silver throughout his entire house. The works, offices, 
 residences, and stables of officials were constructed 
 on a scale of expenditure that would have befitted an 
 Oriental prince. Terraces, fountains, thoroughbred 
 horses, libraries in morocco " bought by the foot " like 
 silver ledges, the costliest of whatever can be worn, 
 drank, or eaten these were counted among the neces 
 saries of existence. 
 
 When the free-handed Californians led in such 
 lavishness, the few old-timers who were left soon caught 
 the pace. One of these was Sandy Bowers, once a 
 Gold Hill placer miner, whose claim was ten feet on 
 the Comstock. A washerwoman who was in the camp 
 owned ten feet adjoining. Bowers married her, and in 
 a year or two, their ground proving to be in the heart 
 of the surface bonanzas, they became extremely rich. 
 Bowers began in 1861 a stone mansion which finally 
 cost him $407,000. While the contractors were at 
 work upon the house the wedded pair went to Europe, 
 spending three years there with great comfort to them 
 selves. Before they left, Bowers hired the International 
 Hotel and gave a banquet to nearly the whole of Vir 
 ginia City. Every luxury that San Francisco could 
 furnish was ordered for the occasion. Bowers s speech 
 was long quoted on the Comstock: " I ve had powerful 
 good luck in this country, an now I ve got money 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 
 
 to throw at the birds. Ther arn t no chance for a gen 
 tleman to spend his coin in this country, an 5 so me an 
 Mrs. Bowers is goin ter Yoorup to take in the sights." 
 He proceeded to explain that there were few or no people 
 worth seeing in America. He considered Horace 
 Greeley worth looking at, " likewise Governor Nye and 
 old Winnemucca." But what he had really set his heart 
 upon was to see "the Queen of England and all the 
 other great folks of them countries." Sandy Bowers 
 continued to throw his money at the birds chiefly 
 birds of prey, as may easily be conjectured. He died 
 in 1868, the mine ceased to pay, and Mrs. Bowers, re 
 duced to poverty, became widely known as the " Seeress 
 of Washoe," the most popular fortune-teller on the 
 Comstock. 
 
 During the first few years of the Comstock the domi 
 nating individual was undoubtedly the well-known 
 William A. Stewart, afterward United States Senator. 
 He was a man of large plans, immense fertility of re 
 source, and unblenching courage. Burly, frank- 
 spoken, powerful mentally and physically, he was said 
 by the Gold Hill News to " tower above his fellow-citi 
 zens like the Colossus of Ehodes " and to " contain as 
 much brass in his composition as that famous statue 
 ever had." If the flush times had continued, one can 
 hardly see how the authority of " Bill Stewart of Ne 
 vada " could have been shaken. But the times when the 
 control of a great mining district passes from one man 
 or set of men to others are undoubtedly the times when 
 bonanzas fail and stockholders begin to despair. Then 
 occurs a general readjustment, and new men force 
 themselves to the front as captains of industry. 
 
 Ophir, which had spent a million dollars or more 
 in litigation over a piece of mining ground that it after 
 ward bought for seventy thousand dollars; Gould and 
 
162 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 Curry, whose bonanza was plainly at an end by 1864; 
 Savage, and others of less importance these began to 
 retrench in every possible way. The trained business 
 man began to be in demand; the virtues of adversity 
 began to be developed. The wild and passionate min 
 ing-camp leaders,, whose impulses were as strong and 
 fierce as the waves of the ocean, were slowly giving 
 way before a new epoch that of the close organiza 
 tion of capitalists for motives of self-interest. Gone 
 were the Comstocks and O Kileys, gone was old Finney, 
 the Rip Van Winkle of Washoe. Going, too, were 
 the early Californians, the supplanters of the first Com- 
 stockers, the early mill-builders, the first lumberers 
 in the Washoe foothills, the men of the first line of 
 bonanzas. They had spent too royally; the mines were 
 in borrasca, money was scarce, and every one was in 
 debt. 
 
 A small, quiet, reserved man, a born financier 
 William Sharon became in the spring of 1864 the 
 manager of the branch of the Bank of California at Vir 
 ginia City. It is said that he had devoted much of the 
 preceding year to study of the Comstock; he had lost 
 a moderate fortune in stocks, and was anxious to re 
 cover himself. For several months before his appoint 
 ment he had been a private financial agent of Ealston s, 
 and had saved large sums to the bank. Though almost 
 unknown, a few men saw in him the coming master 
 of Nevada. 
 
 Local banking houses were lending money to busi 
 ness men and mill owners for from three to five per 
 cent a month; Sharon offered loans on the same se 
 curity at two per cent, and made large advances on 
 these terms. While the mines were turning out ore 
 the mills could easily pay such interest and make 
 money, but as soon as the ore product was checked and 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 163 
 
 the music of the stamps ceased, the mill owners were 
 in trouble. A mill in White Pine district that had 
 cost $200,000 was once vainly offered, when in per 
 fect condition, for $5,000. Sharon himself once sold 
 a mill for $3,000 that had cost him $60,000, the original 
 loan, and interest. Here in the shadow of dull times 
 along the lode were the beginnings of what the public 
 soon called " an infamous, fortified monopoly system." 
 The bankers became the mill owners, and ultimately 
 managed to control the mines also. Sharon s oppor 
 tunity came through the few years of leanness in the 
 producing mines. 
 
 Mill after mill fell into the hands of the Bank of 
 California until seven large and well-equipped quartz 
 mills with all their water rights, contracts, and privi 
 leges belonged to that institution. Sharon had investi 
 gated every mine on the lode, and believed that there 
 was a future for the Comstock far brighter than the 
 past. Ralston, though always a daring operator rather 
 than a banker, felt doubtful of the future of the mines. 
 If they should fail, the abandonment of the district was 
 sure to follow, and not only the large sums he had ad 
 vanced upon milling property, but the equally large 
 amounts loaned to mining companies (not to individ 
 uals) would be entirely lost. The security was practi 
 cally ore (as yet undiscovered) ; none of the mine owners 
 were personally responsible under the laws of that 
 period for company debts. Mills, machinery, all the 
 towns of Nevada even, were not worth tuppence if the 
 fissure, so barren at the levels being worked in 1865, 
 continued barren much below that depth. An absolute 
 collapse of the mines and all interests dependent upon 
 them was looked upon as a not unlikely event. Large 
 owners began to try to sell, with the usual result of 
 breaking the stock market completely. 
 12 
 
164 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 At this time Ralston visited the Comstock. It pre 
 sented a melancholy picture of a mining camp in eclipse, 
 and he became very uneasy at the situation. How much 
 the Bank of California then had invested is not known, 
 but it was said by Mr. Sharon, years later, that at one 
 time before 1870 three million dollars of the five million 
 dollars capital of the bank was loaned on the Comstock. 
 The leading bank of the Pacific coast had virtually 
 become a mine-supply company for a group of silver 
 mines in Washoe! It already controlled some of the 
 mines at the time the mills began to fall into its pos 
 session, and, upon Sharon s advice, the policy of con 
 quest was pursued with redoubled energy. The bank 
 in the hands of Ealston and his friends was liberal, 
 enterprising, speculative, and at times enormously 
 profitable, but it was managed in a spirit that was far 
 removed from safe commercial methods. One may 
 even say that the whole reckless audacity of the mining 
 era of the Pacific coast found its apotheosis in the his 
 tory of the Bank of California, and its typical men in 
 Ralston and his group. 
 
 Sharon advised that a corporation should be organ 
 ized by some of the leading men of the Bank of Cali 
 fornia to buy and manage the mills which had come 
 into its possession, and that these men (who were al 
 ready holders of much mining stock) should concen 
 trate their energies upon such mines as were producing 
 or likely to produce ore for milling. The possibilities 
 of profit to this company in case of new ore bodies being 
 found were very great, for they would be making con 
 tracts with themselves whenever they sent the ore to 
 a custom mill. In June, 1867, therefore, the famous 
 Mill and Mining Company was formed by W. C. Ral 
 ston, William Sharon, Alvinza Hay ward, D. 0. Mills, 
 and others. They were soon called the " fortified mo- 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 165 
 
 nopolists," and nearly all the vested interests of the 
 State of Nevada other than their own were soon arrayed 
 against them. 
 
 There are but two systems of handling ores: each 
 mine can own its own mill, or it can send its ores to 
 a custom mill. In the one case the mine owners build 
 and carry on the mills, managing them through salaried 
 employees; in the other they contract with the lowest 
 bidders who can and will guarantee fair returns. Both 
 systems have drawbacks. On the Comstock the experi 
 ment made by some mines of building their own mills 
 had been a sad one; the free, energetic mill owner 
 became a more efficient ore-worker than the hired mill 
 superintendent. But the Comstockers did not protect 
 the permanent interests of the mill men to whom they 
 owed so much. What Prof. Raymond has called the 
 piratical policy of gutting the mines was carried on at 
 such a shocking rate of speed that it first unduly stimu 
 lated the building of mills and afterward left the mines 
 totally unable to sustain any of them. 
 
 Ralston s Mill and Mining Company in two years 
 was the owner of seventeen mills, some obtained by 
 foreclosure of mortgages, others by purchase. While 
 outside mills could not make a living, those of the 
 syndicate were kept running night and day, crushing 
 nearly all the ore of the region. Naturally, the syn 
 dicate fought everything that threatened to reduce its 
 profits or check the progress of its plans to become 
 absolute master of the Comstock and its allied interests. 
 It fought Sutro, because his tunnel might permit out 
 side mills on the Carson Eiver to work ore even 
 cheaper; it fought the independent mines and mills; 
 it entered politics and fought against certain laws and 
 for other laws after the manner of similar syndicates 
 the world over. It began to hedge about the free Com- 
 
166 THE STO&Y OP THE MINE. 
 
 stock miner, and slowly but surely all men became aware 
 that the substitution of the Sharon group for the Stew 
 art group as the leading personal influence in Nevada 
 was a complete revolution the greatest that the sage 
 brush land had yet seen. 
 
 During this period of depression, when the Corn- 
 stock lode fell measurably into the hands of this small 
 group of Bank of California men, almost the first 
 scheme of Sharon and his associates was the building 
 of a railroad to connect the mines with more distant 
 mills owned by the syndicate, and both with the main 
 Central Pacific line. It was an old idea, like every 
 thing else, long rolling about a mere tumble-weed 
 of the desert. Legislatures, both Territorial and State, 
 had granted charter after charter to different parties 
 who agreed to build railroads after a manner which 
 looked excellently well on paper. But these premature 
 and miscellaneous projects of universal railroad build 
 ing in that wild mountain land were without definite 
 purpose, and soon sank into a state of innocuous desue 
 tude. 
 
 Then Sharon, the man of affairs, sent for the best 
 mining surveyor on the Comstock. This was Superin 
 tendent James, of the Sierra Nevada Company. The 
 conversation that follows is from his own statement. 
 Sharply, and without a word of explanation, Sharon 
 said: 
 
 " James, can you run a railroad from Virginia City 
 to the Carson Eiver? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Do it at once." 
 
 The next day a party of surveyors were in the field 
 along the mountain trails and highways. In a month 
 the twenty-one miles of the route were mapped out, 
 grading had been already commenced, and the rails 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 167 
 
 had been ordered in England. Sharon himself had not 
 been idle. He had formed his company, had bought 
 out the necessary rights of those who had several mori 
 bund charters, and had obtained from the Legislature 
 a new charter. More than this, he had secured legis 
 lative authority for the issuance of $500,000 in bonda 
 by the counties of Storey and Ormsby as a free gift 
 to the railroad. It is needless to add that the counties 
 duly issued the bonds, and without making any condi 
 tions whatever. The mining companies on the lode 
 subscribed $700,000. Eather a busy thirty days this, 
 and well worth noting as an instance of Comstock 
 energy. 
 
 Before April 750 men were at work, and by May 
 1,200, distributed in thirty-eight camps, strung along 
 the line from Carson to Virginia City. Other gangs 
 were hewing ties in the Sierras. On September 28th, 
 the English rails having arrived, the first one was laid, 
 and on November 12th the first engine reached Gold 
 Hill. The road cost $1,750,000, and as much more 
 was spent the next year in extending it to a junction 
 with the Central Pacific at Reno. 
 
 What the engineers had done in the construction 
 of this little railroad was to lay out a line with a grade 
 of about 1,600 feet in thirteen and a half miles. The 
 maximum grade is 11.6 feet to the mile, and the curves 
 of the road in thirteen and a half miles of mountain 
 distance make seventeen full circles of the track. It 
 justly ranks as one of the noteworthy achievements 
 of American mining camps. 
 
 Trouble followed fast enough: the fine old silver 
 freighter, in Nevada slang the mule-skinner, the bull- 
 puncher, swinging- his oxen around the logging camps 
 west of Washoe Valley, even that aristocrat of the 
 fraternity, the lordly " silk-popper," flicking his play* 
 
168 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 f ul whip at the leaders as he skilfully steered his loaded 
 stages along the precipices down Gold Canon to Silver 
 City and Dayton these, all these, after loud complaint 
 and unavailing struggles, went their ways into the un- 
 railroaded distance in search of new camps. " Sharon s 
 iron mules/ 7 as they said, were too much for them. 
 Some teamsters redoubled their efforts, determined to 
 " beat Sharon or bust." One " train " hauled to John- 
 town in 1870 weighed, according to the Gold Hill News, 
 90,690 pounds, including the wagons; the ore alone 
 weighed over thirty-six tons. But the locomotive beat 
 them, for the engineers sought to surpass each other 
 and made some astonishing records for the freight en 
 gines then in use. Finally a fourteen-horse team fell 
 over the grade, breaking up the wagons and disabling 
 the horses, and the freighters reluctantly retired from 
 the unequal contest. 
 
 Cost of transportation was decidedly reduced by the 
 railroad. Ore went to Carson for two dollars a ton 
 where before it had cost three dollars and a half, and 
 this made it possible for the mines to work lower grades 
 of ore, long thought too poor to pay expenses. Cord 
 wood fell from fifteen dollars a cord to eleven dollars 
 and a half. As many as forty-five freight trains went 
 daily over the road. The mines, the mills, the freight 
 age, were now in the hands of the syndicate, and it began 
 to reach out to control both the timber supply and the 
 water supply of the Comstock. 
 
 Meanwhile the real condition of the mines had been 
 a constant source of profound anxiety to Sharon and his 
 associates. None knew better than they did that al 
 though borrasca had put them into possession, a few 
 more years of borrasca would utterly smash their for 
 tunes. They had acted with singular discretion and 
 energy, had originated and carried out great concep- 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 169 
 
 tions, Jiad dared to build their railroad in the darkest 
 hour of their enterprise. What next? They held many 
 an anxious consultation about the mines. The bullion 
 product of the lode which had been $16,000,000 in 
 1865 fell to $11,739,100 in 1866, rose somewhat the 
 next year, fell heavily to $8,499,769 in 1868, and still 
 further to $7,528,607 in 1869. Fewer tons of ore were 
 being raised, and the ore was of lower value. The 
 " bonanza raisins " in the great Comstock plum pud 
 ding, to use a comparison once made by John W. 
 Mackay, were taken out, and, so far as any one knew, 
 there might be no more. In fact, the most experienced 
 miners now held that any future deposits of ore would 
 be smaller and leaner than before. Mining observa 
 tions elsewhere had seemed to show that there was a 
 line a few hundred feet down that marked the limit 
 of pay ore. Besides, the Comstock lode was different 
 from any other in the impossibility of tracing much 
 if any connection between one ore body and another. 
 The ores as the mines descended were not only poorer 
 but more refractory, and the quartz " gangue," or vein 
 matter, was changing to carbonate and sulphate of lime, 
 which seldom contained ore. 
 
 There had been eleven bonanzas up to 1869, and all 
 of these were now nearly exhausted. Ophir was with 
 out pay ore; Gould and Curry and Yellow Jacket were 
 yielding less than one fourth their usual product; at 
 the south end even the richest of the Gold Hill mines 
 were in a bad way. The solitary cause for hopefulness 
 was the fact that a very narrow vein of promising ore, 
 a mere stringer that might develop into something 
 better, had been found in Yellow Jacket in November, 
 1868. It was on the 900-foot level, and had been care 
 fully studied by all the members of the syndicate, but 
 for some time it led to nothing. A struggle with the 
 
170 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 Miners Union and a disastrous fire in the mines added 
 still greater intensity to the situation. Some of the 
 members of the syndicate began to weaken toward the 
 end of 1870; it was whispered everywhere that the 
 Comstock had paid its last dividend; the cities on the 
 lode were already trembling upon the verge of panic- 
 when an apparently barren portion of the Comstock 
 became of the first importance. 
 
 Crown Point mine, 540 feet on the lode, had paid 
 no dividends for some time; had in fact levied $240,- 
 000 assessments. The superintendent was the noted 
 John P. Jones, since United States Senator, an old 
 Californian who had been in Nevada only a short time. 
 From the spring of 1868 till November, 1870, he had 
 hunted in vain for ore by drifts on the 9 00-, the 1,000-, 
 and the 1,100-foot levels. Everywhere were barren 
 quartz and porphyry. The stock fell to a price which 
 rated the total value of the mine with its $140,000 in 
 vested in machinery alone at only $24,000; the owners 
 would not pay another assessment. But late in 1870 
 the character of the rock in a new drift that Super 
 intendent Jones was running showed slight changes. 
 The hard, gray porphyry that the miners had been 
 cutting through in every direction for years began to 
 grow softer, with streaks of quartz and red, rusty lines. 
 Some two hundred and forty feet from the beginning 
 of the drift a seam of clay was found. They cut this, 
 and soft white quartz was entered which proved to con 
 tain small knobs of ore. The value of the stock rose to 
 ninety dollars on the strength of this promise. By 
 May a cross-cut from the 1,200-foot level entered the 
 same formation, and the price of shares went to one 
 hundred and eighty dollars. 
 
 Alvinza Hayward, receiving private information, 
 began to purchase at two dollars a share, and finally ob- 
 
BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 171 
 
 tained control of the mine, but he did this as an individ 
 ual, not as a member of the famous Bank of California 
 syndicate. This was Sharon s first and almost only de 
 feat during his career on the Comstock. The Union 
 Mill and Mining Company lost because Crown Point 
 made contracts elsewhere, and its new owners organized 
 the Nevada Mill and Mining Company as a rival to the 
 Bank of California. 
 
 But the lesser defeat was merely an incident of the 
 larger success of Sharon and his group. Every other 
 mine on the lode became much more valuable. Money 
 poured into the emptied treasuries of the mining com 
 panies still in borrasca, and the Bank of California 
 was placed out of danger for the first time in several 
 years. 
 
 Crown Point was one of the Gold Hill group. Its 
 bonanza increased the total yield of the district from 
 upward of eight millions in 1870 to upward of eleven 
 millions in 1871, and this total, swelled by contribu 
 tions from other mines that had begun to get into the 
 line of deep bonanzas, was $13,569.000 in 1872. The 
 total yield of Crown Point between May, 1864, and May, 
 1877, is estimated as close upon twenty-five million dol 
 lars. Crown Point stock reached its highest point in 
 1872, when it sold for $1,825 a share a valuation of 
 about twenty-two millions for a property that only 
 eighteen months earlier had been rated at $24,000. 
 This shows the popular estimate of the new bonanza. 
 
 Thus, as we have seen, the period of litigation over 
 the surface bonanzas was followed by a long and almost 
 universal depression in the values of the various mines, 
 which was suddenly ended by discoveries made in a 
 hitherto barren mass of porphyry. The uses and op 
 portunities of mining adversity were never more evi 
 dent, for the period of borrasca enabled the Bank of 
 
172 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 California syndicate to accomplish what would have 
 been impossible a few years earlier or a few years later. 
 A new group of men had found their longed-for oppor 
 tunity and had many times multiplied their fortunes 
 by the dangerous venture. Even Sharon in the ful 
 ness of his power could not prevent others from sharing 
 in the results of his organizing abilities; and although 
 he had long planned to be master of every bonanza on 
 the lode, through prior information and larger capital 
 than his associates, he was finally conquered by Jones 
 and Hayward in the struggle for Crown Point. 
 
CHAPTEE XVI. 
 
 DAYS OF THE GEEAT BONANZA. 
 
 THE discovery of Crown Point s bonanza in 1870 
 had increased the value of all the mines on the Corn- 
 stock by about $45,000,000. A still greater bonanza 
 the one by which the fame of Nevada was spread 
 abroad in every land and every tongue was near dis 
 covery, even while Senator Jones was running the fate 
 ful drift that raised Crown Point stock within a year 
 from $2 a share to $1,825 and lifted stock of Belcher, 
 the adjoining mine, from $1.50 a share to $1,525. 
 
 Even while Hayward and Jones were dividing con 
 trol of the productive mines of the lode with Sharon 
 and other members of the Bank of California syndicate, 
 two Irishmen, John W. Mackay and James G-. Fair, 
 were obtaining the fulcrum upon which to poise and 
 turn to their own purposes the most valuable portions 
 of the whole Comstock lode. Three San Francisco 
 men James C. Flood, William S. O Brien, and J. M. 
 Walker were soon joined with them in mining enter 
 prises. Flood and O Brien had been retailing liquors 
 in a large San Francisco saloon. Walker soon sold out 
 his interest to Mackay for $3,000,000, lost it in bad in 
 vestments, and died in poverty. The others became 
 the four "bonanza kings" of the period, and their 
 rise forms one of the most romantic chapters of mining 
 life in America. It seems to represent in a typical way 
 the splendid and fortunate element that one likes to 
 
 173 
 
174: THE STOHY OF THE MINE. 
 
 think of as belonging to every mining district. It better 
 explains the fascination that abides in the very name 
 " Comstock " than all the strange and interesting de 
 tails about the mines themselves. 
 
 There was a Dublin-born youth of eighteen named 
 Mackay, a shipbuilder s clerk in New York, who was 
 placer mining in California in 1852. He saved a little 
 money and lost it, saved a little more, and moved to 
 Virginia City in 1860. Here he began to run a tunnel 
 on a claim, used up his available funds, and went to work 
 in the Mexican mine as a timberman underground at 
 four dollars a day. That job finished, he swung a shovel 
 and pick for the same wages. 
 
 James G. Fair was a Tyrone lad of eighteen when 
 he took the California gold fever. He mined on the 
 Feather Kiver bars for several years, with little success. 
 Then he tried quartz, and became superintendent of 
 a Calaveras mine. In 1860, like Mackay, he went to 
 the Comstock, and was made superintendent of the 
 Ophir, on a good salary, of course, but otherwise, seem 
 ingly, as far from the ultimate ownership of any mine 
 on the lode as the most ordinary miner under his super 
 vision. 
 
 In 1860 both Fair and Mackay (like John P. Jones, 
 the discoverer of Crown Point bonanza) were poor and 
 obscure men. Finney, Comstock, O Biley, McLaughlin, 
 and the rest of the first owners of the lode had much 
 more money and far better opportunities than Mackay, 
 Fair, or Jones, who became the three most famous 
 miners of the district, and, it is no exaggeration to add, 
 the three leading silver miners of America. Flood and 
 O Brien were mere speculators, not miners. They 
 paid assessments, but did nothing else to find and gather 
 the golden harvest. Flood developed great financial 
 ability, but O Brien was, and remained till the day of 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 175 
 
 his death, a very commonplace individual of mediocre 
 talents. 
 
 Sharon had come to the Comstock with capital in 
 his control,, so that at one time it was said he directed 
 the management of every productive mine and every 
 operating mill, besides the waterworks, the lumber sup 
 ply, and the railroad altogether some twenty-five mil 
 lion dollars of real property aside from stock values. 
 The new bonanza monarchs, Fair and Mackay, were 
 about to raise a piece of seemingly barren territory, 
 neglected and despised by Sharon, to the rank of an in 
 dependent and more powerful kingdom, so that the 
 Bank of California syndicate, rapidly recovering from 
 the blow dealt it by the defection of Jones and Hay- 
 ward, was to be permanently made a " second-rate 
 power " on the Comstock. 
 
 Mackay and Fair, even as young men, deserved 
 large success as far as constant labour and study and 
 steady habits may be said to deserve it. One easily sees 
 that both were strongly imbued with the narrow but 
 powerful ambition to become extremely wealthy; that 
 each in his especial line of work Mackay as a miner, 
 Fair as a mining superintendent saved all he could 
 and speculated with it for the sole purpose of becom 
 ing a mine owner; and, finally, that both were very 
 hard students of mines and of everything connected 
 with mines. When they met, each recognised in the 
 other a kindred spirit, and they immediately joined 
 forces. 
 
 But Mackay outranks the rest of the Comstock 
 leaders, because his rise was more remarkable and his 
 grasp of circumstances more firm. From a day labourer 
 toiling in the lower levels he became superintendent 
 of the Caledonia Tunnel and Mining Company. This 
 was at Gold Hill. It had a hundred thousand shares, 
 
176 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 had yielded by 1878 $345,000, and had assessed its 
 stockholders nearly a million and a half dollars. A 
 few years later he became one of the principal owners 
 of Kentuck, a very rich mine ninety-four feet on the 
 lode, which up to 1880 had paid $952,000 in excess 
 of dividends over assessments. Beyond a doubt, this 
 purchase was made because of Mackay s rare and valu 
 able faculty of discerning the best time to buy or to 
 sell mining stocks. His cool brain, long weighing the 
 chances of every inch of explorations in any mine he 
 thought of speculating in, was steady in the midst of 
 wildest excitement. His own statement is that he 
 sought with all the powers of his mind and body to be 
 come "master and manager of the greatest mines in 
 the world." Mackay s swift imagination and sanguine 
 temperament, controlled by his ambitions, were secret 
 ly on fire with the possibilities he saw in the great lode. 
 He dreamed and toiled, hoping to win in some way 
 such power as Sharon had. Somewhere in that moun 
 tain mass, pierced a little way here and there by pin- 
 holes of drifts, there doubtless lay another bonanza. 
 But in which mine? 
 
 After Mackay became part owner of Kentuck he 
 received large dividends and was able to make another 
 move. Hale and Norcross has been mentioned frequent 
 ly in these pages. It was a mine from which much was 
 hoped by the most competent authorities. It had im 
 mense unexplored territory and its equipment was un 
 surpassed. Mackay and Fair studied this mine; 
 watched its shares rise early in 1868 from $1,260 to 
 $2,100; saw also a complete collapse, until by Sep 
 tember the price was less than forty-two dollars a 
 share. This gave them a chance, and they controlled 
 the mine at the annual election in March, 1879. 
 Fair, leaving the Ophir, went in as superintendent, 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 177 
 
 and in a few months it was again on the dividend 
 list. 
 
 Old Comstock miners still speak with admiration 
 of the " fine nose for ore " that Fair displayed as super 
 intendent. His watchfulness, energy, and strictness of 
 discipline were never surpassed in the mines of the 
 period. He knew every inch of the miles of under 
 ground workings as well as the rooms of his own house, 
 and far better than the miners themselves, each of whom 
 stays on the level to which he is assigned. The new 
 Hale and Norcross bonanza which he discovered and 
 worked out at this period paid $728,000 in dividends 
 in 1869 and 1870, more than half of which, of course, 
 went into the pockets of himself and his partners. 
 
 One barren section of the lode is between the Gold 
 Hill group and the Virginia City group of mines. On 
 about twenty-five hundred feet here mere assessment 
 work had sunk several million dollars; the stock was 
 consequently at a very low figure. Mackay had always 
 wished to conduct a thorough exploration of one of 
 these barren mines. In 1869 he put money into Bullion 
 and became its superintendent. Fair, a year later, 
 was elected superintendent of Savage, still retaining 
 his interest in Hale and Norcross. Four mines of note 
 were now controlled by Mackay, Fair, and their allies; 
 and they were too shrewd men not to get back all their 
 investments as long as there was a stock market. 
 Bullion, however, was always a badly named mine; 
 no bonanza was ever found there, nor in Savage. The 
 Bank of California group of operators began to feel 
 better; it had not been much of a storm anyhow. In 
 a few years more the million or so that Mackay, Fair, 
 and the others had made by accident or by speculation 
 would be sunk in unproductive mines. Mackay would 
 be back in the face of a drift at four dollars a day; Fair, 
 
178 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 who was somewhat of a superintendent, could be made 
 very useful if he would only give up his notions of being 
 an independent owner. Meanwhile the Mackay firm, 
 weakened financially but still undismayed, were de 
 termined to thoroughly explore another portion of the 
 Comstock. 
 
 At the North End, between Ophir and Best and 
 Belcher, there was a long-neglected chain of small loca 
 tions occupying in the aggregate 1,310 feet. Only very 
 small deposits of pay ore had been found in this group, 
 near the surface, and the owners had lacked capital 
 for extensive explorations. Still, the neglected 1,310 
 feet lay in the midst of rich property. Beginning at 
 the north end of the Comstock and coming south, 
 toward Gold Hill, Sierra Nevada held 3,300 feet, and, 
 although paying no dividends, was being magnificently 
 conducted, exploring every foot of its territory, and 
 had its great shaft well down in the second thousand 
 feet of distance. Next came Union Consolidated with 
 600 feet, followed by Mexican, of equal size. Ophir, 
 which came next, held 675 feet. South of Ophir were 
 the 1,310 feet of neglected claims. Still farther south, 
 adjoining these claims, was Best and Belcher with 224 
 feet; then Gould and Curry s 921 feet of very rich 
 ground, followed by Savage with its 800 feet, and this 
 again by the 400 feet of Hale and Norcross. Here 
 were two great groups of paying mines, equipped in the 
 best manner, controlled by millionaires, and able to 
 continue operating through a long period of borrasca. 
 It is one of the most curious facts in the story of the 
 Comstock that this little row of long-despised claims, 
 flanked on either hand by great rich and prosperous 
 mines, should have sat so long disconsolate, a mute 
 Cinderella in ashes of pioneer hopes. 
 
 In the course of time several of these minor claims 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 179 
 
 were united into Consolidated Virginia, 710 feet on 
 the lode. Then the new owners spent $200,000 in vain 
 prospecting till the shareholders refused to pay another 
 assessment. By February, 1871, actual sales showed 
 that the mine was worth only $26,000, or less than a 
 quarter of the price of the machinery. As for Cali 
 fornia ground, the 600 feet between Ophir and Consoli 
 dated Virginia, it had now sunk even lower in public 
 estimation. The entire 1,310 feet was a bankrupt piece 
 of property worth in the market less than $40,000, as 
 shown by occasional sales; really not worth half so 
 much, good operators said, for an investment or as a 
 speculation. 
 
 Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O Brien, regretting their 
 losses in Bullion, had resolved to stake their fortunes 
 upon the exploration of this comparatively virgin 
 ground to great depths. The four operators began 
 to gather in stock, but even the most consummate 
 skill and caution could not secure control at the lowest 
 figure that of less than $40,000 for the whole 1,310 
 feet. They paid, it is said, about $100,000 before they 
 were satisfied to announce their control, by which time 
 they had about three fourths of the stock of both Cali 
 fornia and Consolidated Virginia locked up in their 
 safes, and they took possession in January, 1872. 
 
 The new mine owners first turned their attention to 
 the development of the 710 feet known as Consolidated 
 Virginia. During 1872 they levied assessments to the 
 amount of $212,000 upon Consolidated Virginia stock 
 and spent it all in development. They sank a 
 large shaft and pushed a drift north from Gould and 
 Curry through Best and Belcher (1,167 feet below the 
 surface) into the ground of Consolidated Virginia. 
 This was done, of course, under especial arrangements 
 with the owners of those mines. 
 13 
 
180 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 
 
 Fair was superintendent, and at last, in driving 
 this costly drift through barren rock, his experienced 
 eye discovered a slight change and a narrow seam of 
 rich ore hardly thicker than a knife-blade. He ordered 
 the men to follow it with the drift inch by inch through 
 the vein matter. They did so, even where only a film 
 of clay showed where the thin ore streak had " pinched 
 out." After a while the slender clew was again picked 
 up, and so Fair and his workmen followed the dark 
 line of silver sulphurets through the labyrinths for 
 hundreds of feet. Fair became ill, and the drift, though 
 managed by old and experienced miners, was run far 
 east of the clew while he was absent, but on his 
 return he went back and picked up the ore thread. 
 The drift was now a hundred feet into Consolidated 
 Virginia without anything of importance having been 
 found. The value of the mine, which had greatly in 
 creased when the four bold speculators gained con 
 trol, began to decrease, and it was thought that out 
 siders would hardly stand another assessment. 
 
 While matters were in this condition and people 
 were saying that the daring operators had come to 
 grief, the metallic film so long followed by Fair with his 
 " fine nose for ore " rapidly widened to a seven-foot 
 vein averaging sixty dollars to the ton. Cutting across 
 this vein and extending the cut at each side, two nar 
 rower veins were found. After a month s further 
 progress the main vein was twelve feet wide. The shaft 
 which was to reach this ore body was being pushed 
 night and day until early in October it reached the de 
 sired point, and the exploration of the ore body was then 
 carried on with system. Where the shaft struck ore, 
 at the depth of 1,167 feet, the width of the body was 
 now forty feet. The miners were not yet " in bonanza," 
 but they felt themselves very near to it. Plenty of pay 
 
BAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 181 
 
 ore was in sight, and they had an ore body of unknown 
 size to explore, measure, and assay before taking it out. 
 Eunning a drift southeast from the bottom of the shaft 
 for two hundred and fifty feet, it cut into a very rich 
 body of ore, a true bonanza, as they knew at once, 
 though they were of course ignorant of its extent. 
 
 It was high time to have some recompense for years 
 of costly and unremunerative exploration. On October 
 16th the skilled and athletic miners began to " breast 
 out " and extract the ore in the chamber. By the end 
 of the month they had hewn out a space twenty feet 
 high and fifty-four feet across the bonanza, supporting 
 it with square sets of timbers as fast as they removed 
 the ore. They had also extended the drift one hundred 
 and forty feet farther through the vein, and every 
 inch of it was still in ore. The sides, the floors, and 
 the roofs of chamber and of drift assayed everywhere 
 at rates that ranged from $90 to $630 per ton. The 
 top had been pried off from Nature s huge treasure- 
 vault. 
 
 October was a month of such work as had never 
 been seen before on the Comstock or in any other mine 
 known to history, and it was only the beginning of 
 still greater exploits of disciplined labour, as shifts 
 of brawny men, stripped to the waist, toiled in the 
 depths in the way that sailors toiled at Trafalgar be 
 tween the decks of fighting ships of the British line. 
 The shaft was sunk steadily three feet a day, and at 
 the 1,200-foot level a drift showed that the ore body 
 continued and grew wider. By this time it began to 
 be said in Virginia City that the Consolidated Virginia 
 " had a good mine." That was all. The matter was 
 kept so quiet that no excitement occurred in the stock 
 market. The directors had met, however, and had 
 increased the capital stock of Consolidated Virginia to 
 
182 MB STORY OF THE 
 
 108,000 shares of $100 each; they soon put the Cali 
 fornia upon the same basis, and retained control in 
 both mines. Consolidated Virginia was taking out 
 two hundred tons of ore a day at the close of October, 
 and in a short time the bullion shipments were $250,- 
 000 a month. 
 
 The work of exploration went on, and the immen 
 sity of the ore body was more and more plainly revealed 
 through the winter of 1873 and the spring and summer 
 of 1874. The bonanza was cut across at a depth of 
 1,400 feet, and also at the 1,500-foot level, in 1874. 
 Here the ore was of such unparalleled richness that 
 for the first time the outside world of mining men 
 and speculators began to talk about it. How much 
 farther it might extend in depth or width, or how 
 many of the North-End mines might finally be found 
 to have a slice of it, not even the skill of the four 
 bonanza owners could determine. But so carefully 
 and steadily had the work progressed that no one had 
 been startled by the sudden development. The richest 
 hoard of gold and silver that had ever dazzled the eyes 
 of a treasure-seeker caused for a time less excitement 
 than the every-day strikes in small mines. 
 
 The truth is, Mackay and Fair were not interested 
 at this time in the stock market. They had control, 
 and all they wanted was to be let alone. They were 
 not speculators any more; they were simply miners; 
 neither of the mines were for sale, nor did they care 
 to buy any more mines. Their restless ambitions, so 
 long unfulfilled, wished to reap golden harvests from 
 acres of ore. There was so little attempt at conceal 
 ment, in sharp contrast with the course that had been 
 pursued in regard to the earlier bonanzas, that it is 
 probable this really caused the apathy that long pre 
 vailed among the masses of stock speculators. When 
 
Down in a Gold Mine. 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 183 
 
 the capital of Consolidated Virginia was increased to 
 108,000 shares they sold at about forty-five dollars, 
 gradually rising to par value ($100), and early in No 
 vember, 1874, to $115. Shares in California were 
 much cheaper, and in September, 1874, had only 
 reached $37. 
 
 There were " short turns " and speculations num 
 berless in the stock during the year and a half that 
 followed the ore-find of March, 1873, but, all in all, 
 the inability of the stock speculators, both leaders and 
 masses, to comprehend the greatness of the discovery 
 seems inexplicable. It is better to reverse the point 
 of view and say that we have in this fact another fine 
 illustration of the uncertainties of mining. Sharon 
 and all his group of allies, and the shrewdest of outside 
 San Francisco speculators, thought for months that 
 the gigantic energies spent in further explorations 
 in Consolidated Virginia was because the ore body 
 was not very large after all, and because new deposits 
 were being sought for. As soon as they became con 
 vinced that the bonanza was really unprecedented in 
 magnitude they hastened to buy heavily, but by this 
 time the general public had been roused to a sudden 
 fever of excitement and the value of the famous mines 
 rose every hour on the stock boards. In December, 
 1874, Consolidated Virginia reached $610 per share, 
 rising again in January to $700, which made the sell 
 ing value of the mine $75,600,000. California stock 
 went even higher, for it was said that the bonanza ex 
 tended over from Consolidated Virginia in such a way 
 as to give the California mine the larger part. Cali 
 fornia shares worth $37 in September rose to $780 
 in January, 1875, making the valuation of that mine 
 $84,240,000. The 1,310 feet on the lode which had 
 been valued five years before at forty or fifty thousand 
 
184 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 dollars was now worth in the market, according to stock 
 sales, about $160,000,000. 
 
 Leaving the stock market, let us return to the 
 depths of Consolidated Virginia. During 1874 
 the miners had been searching systematically through 
 the ore bodies. They made drifts and crosscuts on 
 each level, extending their work far north into the 
 California; they made winzes from level to level to use 
 in removing ore. They proved that the width of the 
 mass w^as from one hundred and fifty to three hundred 
 and twenty feet, and that the richness continued with 
 out abatement through drift after drift, level below 
 level. The ore output increased, and a dividend of 
 three dollars a share declared in May, 1874, had been 
 followed by others. " The scene within this imperial 
 treasure-house," writes Mr. Lord, " was a stirring sight. 
 Cribs of timber were piled in successive stages from 
 basement to dome, four hundred feet above, and every 
 where men were at work in changing shifts, descending 
 and ascending in the crowded cages, clambering up 
 to their assigned stopes with swinging lanterns or 
 flickering candles, picking and drilling the crumbling 
 ore or pushing lines of loaded cars to the stations on 
 the shaft. Flashes of exploding powder were blazing 
 from the rent faces of the stopes; blasts of gas and 
 smoke filled the connecting drifts; muffled roars echoed 
 along the dark galleries; and at all hours a hail of rock 
 fragments might be heard rattling on the floor of a 
 level, and massive lumps of ore falling heavily on the 
 slanting pile at the foot of the breast." 
 
 When the fifteen-hundred-foot level was reached 
 and the ore cut into was richer than ever before known 
 on the Comstock, the Territorial Enterprise, of Virginia 
 City, came out with double-leaded columns, under the 
 heading of Heart of the Comstock. Of the lowest cross- 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 185 
 
 cut the Enterprise said: " It has been bored into the 
 bonanza through a mass of chloride and sulphuret ores 
 which excites the imagination of all beholders. It is 
 now in two hundred and five feet, ninety-five of which 
 is in the extraordinarily rich ore of which so much has 
 been heard. In this crosscut was encountered, a day or 
 two since, the stephanite, a species of ore that is almost 
 pure silver. At the distance of one hundred and eighty 
 feet from the crosscut a chamber of about ten feet each 
 way has been excavated. Its walls on every side are a 
 mass of the finest chloride ore filled with streaks and 
 bunches of the richest black sulphurets. It looks as 
 if the whole mass grew richer with every foot of the 
 advance." Ores of this kind assay up into the thou 
 sands of dollars, but it seemed impossible that such 
 large masses of silver should have been deposited, even 
 in the Comstock, so the Enterprise reporter brought 
 his estimates down to one hundred dollars a ton, re 
 duced the size of the deposit, and figured out $116,- 
 748,000 in sight. 
 
 It is no secret on the Comstock that this reporter 
 was William Wright, widely known on the Pacific coast 
 as " Dan De Quille," one of the best living writers on 
 mining subjects. He had been through and through 
 the mines hundreds of times, and had really made the 
 reputation of the Enterprise for accurate mining news. 
 There was no one else to do his work; if he went away 
 for a vacation, the proprietors were pretty sure to tele 
 graph that his substitute " was getting fooled every 
 day underground," and he had to hurry back again. 
 He was the first outsider to see the great ore body, and 
 his own account of the circumstances under which 
 he received an invitation to examine it is very char 
 acteristic. 
 
 " The San Francisco newspapers," said he when 
 
186 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 interviewed, " had been saying for a long time that 
 there was no ore in Consolidated Virginia; that people 
 were getting up a stock deal. Some of us happened 
 to know, however, that Fair had been quietly taking 
 ore out of the mine through the old Bonner shaft. 
 One day he drove up to the Enterprise office and 
 came in. 
 
 " Those city papers have been abusing us long- 
 enough/ he remarked; I won t stand it! Where s 
 Dan? I want him to go down to the mine. I ll show 
 him what we re doing. 
 
 " This was before any one had definite knowledge 
 of the strike. It was before the Enterprise had printed 
 anything important, you understand only rumours 
 or street talk. When I had been in the mine before 
 I could not get into those drifts. Fair spoke pretty 
 loud, as if he only wanted to shut up the city papers, 
 but probably he had all the stock he wanted and had 
 just got ready to tell the truth; I don t know. Any 
 way, I jumped up and ran out when I had the word; 
 you never saw a reporter go faster. We drove to the 
 mine and went down to the richest place in the 
 bonanza. 
 
 " Fair said : c Go in and climb around. Look all you 
 want, measure it up, make up your own mind; I won t 
 tell you a thing; people will say I posted you! And so 
 he went away. That just suited me. After I was 
 through I went to the Enterprise office and wrote two 
 articles, one of which you have just quoted from. That 
 was the first authentic account of the big bonanza, and 
 that was the way the Enterprise had a scoop." 
 
 A little later a visitor to the mine " stood where 
 the miners were digging ore, and looked a hundred 
 feet upward and on each side across the ore body. On 
 all sides of a pyramidal mass of timbers, growing larger 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 187 
 
 each moment under the toil of busy hands, were twin 
 kling stars of lamps where men were hewing at the sides 
 and ceiling." Often the sides of the huge cavern 
 glistened as if set with silver; but this was not silver 
 only crystals of iron and copper pyrites. There were 
 also great masses of blue, purple, and white crystals 
 of quartz, some of them weighing many pounds, with 
 crystals several inches long. The miners say of a vein 
 that contains such crystals that " it is alive " and think 
 that the best of signs of a large bonanza. Chloride 
 silver ore is pale-green and steel-gray in colour. " Sil 
 ver glance " is black and lustrous. The general colour 
 scheme of the great bonanza, despite an occasional 
 glitter of crystals, ranged from bluish gray to deep 
 black. 
 
 All of the contents of the bonanza were sent to the 
 mill just as it was blasted or hewn out. Some of the ore 
 was so rich that waste rock and low-grade ore were 
 mixed with it in order to work it better. An average 
 block of ore three feet square contained from three hun 
 dred to five hundred dollars in silver and gold. Even in 
 the widest part of the ore body, three hundred feet 
 across, the entire contents were milled without assort 
 ing. Some of the richest ore was near the line of the 
 California mine, where a mass of porphyry crowded the 
 ore into less space. The silver here was often in the 
 form of crystals of stephanite, or in bunches of pure 
 and malleable silver, in coiled wires, and in silver crys 
 tals. There is hardly any more beautiful sight in a mine 
 than a " nest " of wire gold or wire silver gleaming in 
 the dark sulphurets. A few of the more exquisite com 
 binations of metals and crystals that occur at times in 
 mines of the first rank are still preserved in cabinets, 
 but by far the greater part have been destroyed, sent 
 to the mill if valuable mineral, or to the dump heap if 
 
188 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 unremunerative. Old miners in some of the famous 
 mines tell stories of cavities as large as an ordinary 
 room into which a drift will sometimes break; cavi 
 ties set thick with rock crystals of every beautiful colour 
 known to the mineralogist white, pale pink, olive- 
 green, rose, purple, or violet. In such a glorious place 
 it seems, even to the ignorant miners, as if the jewel 
 caskets of monarchs had been surpassed, for here Na 
 ture has the hues of sapphire, emerald, tourmaline, 
 amethyst, chrysoprase, opal, and lapis lazuli. Such 
 crystal rooms are extremely rare, and more often occur 
 in New Mexico and Sonora than in Nevada districts. 
 One ore chamber ten feet square, situated about four 
 teen feet south of the California line, seemed to Com- 
 stockers the richest part of the lode, and many speci 
 mens of ore from here were saved for collectors in vari 
 ous parts of the world. 
 
 Now that the Pacific coast was stirred with the 
 great news, estimates of the actual " ore in sight " 
 began to be in order. I have alluded to the first news 
 paper estimate of about $116,000,000. Next came 
 Mr. Diedesheimer, the inventor of the " square- 
 set system" and one of the most careful mining en 
 gineers on the Pacific coast. He reported to the 
 directors that there was $1,500,000,000 in sight, and 
 added that each mine ought to pay in dividends $5,000 
 a share under proper management. A little later he 
 gave proof of his faith in his own report by putting 
 every dollar he could raise into shares in the two mines 
 at the highest price. Even the director of the Carson 
 mint, with his assistants, who examined the bonanza, 
 was unable to fix any definite limit to its yield, and 
 thought there was not less than $300,000,000 already 
 in sight. Mackay, however, a miner of unsurpassed 
 judgment, utterly refused to make any estimate, and 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 189 
 
 flatly said it was an impossible task, because barren 
 masses of rock, porphyry, the difficulty of obtaining 
 accurate assays, and many other elements of uncer 
 tainty made calculation absurd. He " preferred to 
 mine it out first and then take the milling returns." 
 
 The public made loud demands for estimates, and 
 for a thousand other details, often beyond the power 
 of human ability to satisfy. Whatever was said or was 
 left unsaid, the men who controlled the bonanza were 
 abused and misrepresented. That was a part, and no 
 small part, of the price they had to pay for their ful 
 filled ambitions. Powerful though Mackay and his 
 companions were in their own field, neither they nor 
 any other men could control the genius they had re 
 leased from the casket of the bonanza. The actual 
 available capital of the Pacific slope that could be put 
 into mining ventures in January, 1875, was not greater 
 than $20,000,000. To tie up more than this in such 
 investments or speculations would be to injure and 
 seriously check the growth of the western third of the 
 continent. Now, as I have already shown, the stock- 
 board valuation put upon the two bonanza mines in 
 that month was $160,000,000. It is not likely that 
 more than a fourth of the stock was ever in the market, 
 but the entire Pacific coast, as above stated, could not 
 have bought and paid for more than twenty millions 
 worth. 
 
 Then, too, in addition to the immense and probably 
 justifiable valuations put upon the Consolidated Vir 
 ginia and California, every other mine upon the lode 
 had greatly risen in estimated value. The prices paid 
 in January, 1875, showed that Ophir had risen to over 
 $31,000,000 because it was next to the bonanza mines; 
 Best and Belcher was rated at nearly $9,000,000, and 
 Mexican a trifle higher; Gould and Curry, Savage, 
 
190 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 Exchequer, Yellow Jacket, Overman, Bullion, Crown 
 Point, and several others were valued at from three 
 to twenty millions apiece. It made little or no differ 
 ence where they were located. Indeed, the theory was 
 now held by most speculators that every so-called " bar 
 ren " place in the lode would prove to have immense 
 ore bodies somewhere below the thousand-foot level. 
 The total valuation of all the mines on the lode at 
 this date was $393,253,440. How much gold coin 
 would really have been needed at this time to buy not 
 merely the floating stock in the market, but also 
 enough to control every mine on the lode is hardly 
 to be estimated. There was not enough coin in 
 America. 
 
 Evidently, even if all the Comstock mines had been 
 worth the price asked, California and the rest of the 
 Pacific coast did not have a tenth part of the available 
 capital to sustain such a valuation. "When the trans 
 fers at only one of the three stock boards were $50,- 
 000,000 for a single month, it is evident that the pace 
 had been set pretty fast, for prices had now become 
 so high that nearly every one was compelled to buy on 
 a margin; there was not money enough to do otherwise. 
 Naturally the "shorts" had their innings. A few 
 stories that the bonanza had given out started a ruinous 
 panic at the close of February that completely demoral 
 ized the money market. Consolidated Virginia fell 
 two hundred dollars per share in a week. California 
 lost sixty per cent of its market value. Other stocks 
 on the lode and outside fell in much greater propor 
 tion. The result spelled ruin in large capitals to thou 
 sands of families. The Bank of California failed in 
 August of that fateful year, and Ralston, the main 
 spring of countless enterprises, died in the waters of 
 San Francisco Bay. The entire community staggered 
 
DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 191 
 
 under disasters brought on by wild speculation in 
 stocks. It was the Black Friday of the State of Cali 
 fornia. 
 
 The public charged Mackay, Fair, and their com 
 rades with speculating in their own stocks, and so 
 creating the alternate panics and short-lived booms 
 of the great bonanza period. Books were published 
 sometimes novels, sometimes bitter essays that de 
 scribed with the sarcasm and emphasis or a Swift innu 
 merable supposed crimes of the bonanza kings against 
 the rest of humanity. Time, however, has caused many 
 of these hasty accusations to be forgotten. The be 
 haviour of the new-made plutocrats was not essentially 
 worse than the behaviour of the earlier groups of 
 bonanza owners. Mackay, the typical miner of the 
 company, kept himself especially free from outside 
 deals. Later, alluding to the crash in stocks, he said: 
 " It is no affair of mine. I am not speculating in stocks. 
 My business is mining legitimate mining. I see that 
 my men do their work properly in the mines and that 
 ., all goes on as it should in the mills. I make my money 
 here out of the ore." 
 
 Prices of shares had no influence upon the work 
 in the mines. Through good days and evil the ore 
 yield increased. Consolidated Virginia extracted about 
 12,000 tons in 1873, producing in bullion $645,000; 
 in 1874, 91,000 tons, of a milling value of $4,981,000; 
 in 1875, 169,000 tons, milling over $16,000,000; and 
 in 1876, 142,000 tons, milling over $16,000,000. Then 
 the product began to lessen. The exact amount of ore 
 extracted in six years ending with 1878 was 682,385 
 tons. The bullion product was $60,732,882. Cali 
 fornia in 1875 and the three years following extracted 
 486,043 tons of ore, which gave the total bullion yield 
 of $43,727,831. Nearly $105,000,000 was the product 
 
192 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 of the Big Bonanza, as Comstockers have always called 
 this body of ore. 
 
 As for dividends, everything was done to increase 
 them. The returns to stockholders were unprece 
 dented in the stories of great mining enterprises. By 
 the middle of 1879 Consolidated Virginia had paid 
 fifty-two dividends aggregating $42,120,000, and Cali 
 fornia had paid in dividends $31,050,000. A thou 
 sand miners were employed; a new and much larger 
 shaft was sunk. Mills and machinery had been re 
 built and enlarged at great expense. But all other 
 duties had given way to the imperious necessity of tak 
 ing out ore as fast as possible, so great were the dangers 
 of a frightful accident. Every difficulty met with in 
 removing other bonanzas seemed intensified in this 
 case. The hot clay, feldspar, and ore seethed and 
 swayed as the men worked. Forests of timbers, con 
 tinually needing care and renewal, were rotting, break 
 ing, and being crushed together. A single spark might 
 make the mine a pit of flame, and probably would so 
 cave and ruin it that it could only be reopened by years 
 of labour and at vast outlay. Mackay, keenly alive 
 to the ever-present dangers of fire and collapse of the 
 supports, left nothing to chance, but inspected the 
 drifts in person night after night. His tireless vigi 
 lance had its rewards, for no accident happened until 
 the bonanza was fairly worked out. A few years later 
 fires broke out in some of the abandoned levels of both 
 the mines, and the men bulk-headed all the connecting 
 drifts so as to shut the air out. The timbers smouldered 
 for weeks, and the drifts finally became totally unfit 
 for passage a very labyrinth of traps and pitfalls 
 shunned by every miner to this day. 
 
 After 1879, the close of the bonanza period came 
 with exceeding swiftness. The stock of the thirty 
 
BAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 193 
 
 mines on the lode, valued in 1875 at over $393,000,000, 
 sank in February, 1880, to something less than $7,- 
 000,000. California sold for $1.25 a share and Con 
 solidated Virginia for $1.90, and so on down the for 
 lorn list. How had the mighty fallen! The great 
 bonanza, after yielding in five years nearly $105,000,- 
 000, was exhausted, and nothing even approaching 
 in value to the earlier group of ore bodies has since 
 been discovered. Hundreds of thousands of tons of 
 low-grade rock have been taken out of long-neglected 
 portions of the mines and worked at a profit, small 
 dividends have been paid by a few mines, and the work 
 ing efficiency of the lode has been well maintained. 
 There may be new bonanzas in the depths or new grains 
 of metal hidden in husks of porphyry, but nothing 
 of striking importance has since been found. Once 
 more the endurance of the mine owners and of the 
 towns on the lode is being severely tested. California 
 ceased paying dividends in 1879; Consolidated Virginia 
 paid its last dividend in 1880. Fourteen years of bor- 
 rasca have ruined successive stockholders, have caused 
 the decay of once-populous mining towns, and have, 
 in short, come near to breaking the hearts of the brave 
 old Comstockers. 
 
CHAPTEE XVII. 
 
 THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 
 
 IN the days when Virginia City was founded there 
 came to the collection of " dug-outs/ 7 tents, and brush 
 huts a young man of small means but boundless energy. 
 He was a volunteer in the Pyramid Lake battle with the 
 Indians, and gave one of the most lucid and trustworthy 
 accounts we have of that disastrous affair. He was 
 afterward in business in Virginia City, and in 1861 
 he built a quartz mill on the Carson River. In a short 
 time he became convinced that a deep drainage tunnel 
 was absolutely necessary to the continued working 
 of the great lode and he advanced this idea on every 
 occasion, until people began to consider him a crack- 
 brained enthusiast. 
 
 The notion appeared to most men entirely imprac 
 ticable. The point at which Sutro wished to see the 
 lode cut by a tunnel was nearly two thousand feet below 
 the surface much deeper than any miners in the early 
 60 s thought it possible to carry on operations. He 
 scorned the lesser and temporary usefulness of small, 
 short tunnels from the heads of the adjacent canons; 
 what he advocated was a large tunnel from the floor 
 of the Carson Valley, distant about four miles in a 
 horizontal line from the lode. 
 
 It must be explained that a tunnel run into a hill 
 so as to strike the ledge at some point below the sur 
 face is either for prospecting and ore-handling pur- 
 
 194 
 
THE STTT&O TtfNtfEL. 195 
 
 poses, or it is purely a drainage and ventilation tun 
 nel, or it combines to some extent these several uses. 
 A mining country that contains high mountains and 
 short, steep ravines is well adapted to tunnels, or adits, 
 as mining engineers often call them. Sometimes they 
 afford vastly more economical methods of opening up 
 and working mines than by shafts, but, of course, in 
 many cases there is no opportunity for tunnels. Some 
 times when a ledge has been well prospected on the 
 surface high up on a mountain the very first thing 
 done is to run a tunnel often several thousand feet long, 
 so as to strike the ledge, and then work up to meet a 
 shaft started from the top. If this is five hundred feet 
 from the end of the tunnel, the miners say they have 
 " five hundred feet of backs." That is, they can take 
 out that much ore by gravity alone, and so can handle 
 it very cheaply. 
 
 Three or four years of constant study and active 
 work had already rnade Sutro a man of note among 
 his fellows in that cyclonic vortex of life and motion 
 early Nevada. He became widely known as a man 
 of immense capacity for affairs; one who was gifted 
 with unconquerable tenacity of purpose and fertility 
 of resource. He gradually organized the enterprise 
 known by his name, and for twenty years was one of 
 the most interesting figures in the story. 
 
 Sutro soon gained the attention of Stewart, Ral 
 ston, and others; in fact, Stewart became president 
 of the company organized in 1864 to construct 
 a tunnel after Sutro s plans. The first Nevada Legis 
 lature, in February, 1865, passed an act granting a 
 franchise, right of way, and other privileges to Sutro 
 and his associates. The amount of royalty to be paid 
 by the mines that would be benefited by the tunnel 
 was left to subsequent agreement between the Tun- 
 U 
 
196 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 
 
 nel Company and the owners of the various mines. 
 After eight months of strenuous efforts Sutro secured 
 contracts from twenty-three mining companies, repre 
 senting, it is said, ninety-five per cent of the whole 
 market value of the lode. In these contracts the mines 
 were bound perpetually to pay to the Tunnel Company 
 two dollars a ton for every ton of ore taken out after 
 the tunnel had reached given points so that it could 
 be used. The mines were to also pay a fixed rate per 
 ton for the transportation of waste rock, debris, or any 
 material from the mines, and of supplies from outside, 
 besides a certain price for each and every person in 
 their employ who passed through the tunnel. 
 
 The only requirement of the State Legislature was 
 that Sutro and his allies should secure three million 
 dollars by August, 1867, and should spend a certain 
 amount annually in the enterprise. As soon as the 
 mines had agreed to the various royalties and payments, 
 which were considered very reasonable by all con 
 cerned, it seemed as if the chief obstacle was removed 
 and capital could be secured. At this time, early in 
 1866, there was unbroken harmony on the lode in re 
 spect to the tunnel proposition. Sharon, Ealston, and 
 the newly organized Bank of California syndicate were 
 foremost in approval. Sutro was now arranging to 
 obtain the capital, and Ralston furnished him with 
 letters of introduction stating that the tunnel was prac 
 ticable and could not fail to be very profitable. Mean 
 while Sutro, anxious to protect his enterprise at every 
 point, secured the passage of an act of Congress which 
 denned and secured the rights and privileges of the 
 Tunnel Company. During the fiercest of conflicts a 
 few years later this act of Congress was all that saved 
 the enterprise. 
 
 Thus protected, it would seem as if the Sutro Tun- 
 
THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 197 
 
 nel Company had nothing more to do except to sell 
 stock or bonds and begin work. The mine owners had 
 agreed to his terms; the State and the nation had given 
 the strongest possible title to its rights, franchises, 
 and lands. Its plans were now completed for a main 
 tunnel of 20,489 feet from the Carson Valley to the 
 shaft of the Savage mine. Two lateral tunnels were 
 afterward planned, following the trend of the Corn- 
 stock northerly and southerly from the Savage shaft. 
 As finished, the total length of the main tunnel and the 
 laterals is 33,315 feet, or about six and a third miles. 
 There are longer and more expensive tunnels, but the 
 reasons that make the Sutro Tunnel a remarkable 
 achievement will appear in the further course of this 
 narrative. 
 
 As soon as the Tunnel act passed Congress, Mr. 
 Sutro laid the project before leading American capi 
 talists. He finally obtained pledges to take three mil 
 lion dollars in stock, provided the Comstockers them 
 selves would do something. Returning to Nevada 
 and California, he pressed the scheme upon the mining 
 companies with such energy that they subscribed six 
 hundred thousand dollars, and granted him another 
 year in which to complete negotiations for the three 
 million dollars. Never was a project more unanimously 
 supported by press and people, by labourers and capi 
 talists, as the Sutro Tunnel scheme between the autumn 
 of 1864 and the spring of 1867. 
 
 The reasons for this general support were very sim 
 ple. The entire community followed the lead of the 
 mine owners, managers, and chief speculators of the 
 Comstock, who were supreme in politics, in social life, 
 and in business. These owners and speculators had 
 become persuaded of the need of a tunnel, and were 
 inclined to become part owners in the enterprise so 
 
198 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 as to share the expected profits in royalties and new 
 veins to be discovered on the line of the tunnel. Be 
 sides, the mines were not paying well, most of them 
 were in borrasca, and if that continued long it would 
 become necessary to reduce expenses in every possible 
 way. 
 
 Suddenly came a thunderbolt falling from cloud 
 less skies. The Bank of California syndicate, now all- 
 powerful on the Comstock, changed its corporate mind, 
 cancelled the subscriptions of its various companies, 
 and issued a decree of financial outlawry against Sutro. 
 The tunnel, it was said, could not be constructed at 
 least not by Sutro, nor by his friends. He was too in 
 dependent and altogether outside of the controlling 
 forces on the lode. A telegram was sent to the Nevada 
 senators, Nye and Stewart, at Washington, saying, 
 " We are opposed to the Sutro Tunnel project and de 
 sire it defeated." This was signed by William Sharon 
 and most of the prominent mine owners, managers, 
 and speculators. Senator Stewart instantly resigned 
 the presidency of the Tunnel Company. Virginia 
 City merchants and citizens began to fight the tunnel 
 scheme. Thus Sutro s bright prospects of obtaining 
 a million dollars in San Francisco, besides the money 
 promised on the Comstock, were ruined in an hour. 
 Everywhere, with telegraphic swiftness, active, aggres 
 sive opposition was raised. When the smoke of the 
 first tumultuous assault cleared away, all men saw that 
 Sutro stood alone, unsupported, while against him in 
 organized and well-equipped array were the hostile 
 companies, the hostile Bank of California, and the 
 hostile mining and speculating communities of Cali 
 fornia and Nevada. 
 
 It was a strange and unexpected situation. Only 
 one man out of ten thousand would have attempted 
 
THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 199 
 
 another stroke; hardly one out of a million could have 
 conquered his foes. Every pledge from New York 
 capitalists was of course nullified. He had to raise 
 between four and five million dollars for a pur 
 pose that the very persons to be benefited declared 
 against their interests. He had to prove to investors 
 that the Comstockers did not know their own business. 
 He had to counteract in the newspapers, in legislatures, 
 and in Congress itself the persistent assaults of men 
 and associations possessing almost boundless resources 
 social, political, and financial. 
 
 Sutro, however, lived for but one object to dig 
 his " coyote hole," as the contemptuous opposition 
 termed it. He went to New York and again tried to 
 obtain capital; he went to Europe and saw the princes 
 of finance. Men of science approved of his plan, but 
 everywhere a warning against his tunnel seemed to 
 forerun his coming. Undismayed, he appealed again to 
 Congress, secured the attention of the Committee on 
 Mines and Mining, and actually had a bill reported 
 recommending that the Government should loan five 
 million dollars to the Tunnel Company, taking a mort 
 gage on its property. The impeachment of Andrew 
 Johnson, soon after, prevented this bill from coming 
 to a vote. All this time the fight went on in news 
 papers and pamphlets throughout the length and 
 breadth of the land, but chiefly on the Pacific coast. 
 Sutro answered every thrust with a parry and return. 
 
 Said Sutro in conversation years after: "Ah! it 
 was a hard thing to see so many old friends in Virginia 
 City and San Francisco actually afraid to be seen talk 
 ing to me after the fiat had gone forth that I was to 
 be crushed. But I kept on fighting. There was one 
 time, I remember, when I had to go to Washington 
 to save my interests from destruction. I had no money 
 
200 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 left. All the profits of my mill had been swallowed 
 up. I had a town lot in a little California town, and 
 I sold it for two hundred dollars. With that I managed 
 to get to Washington. I staid there, somehow, all 
 winter, poor as I was; I fought my enemies and I came 
 out ahead. But they wrote to all the newspapers that 
 I had bribed Congress out of my two hundred dol 
 lars! " 
 
 At last, in sheer desperation, Sutro turned to the 
 working miners of the Comstock. He hired Piper s 
 Opera House in Virginia City and addressed them with 
 bitter eloquence, every stroke of which went home. 
 He denounced the unchecked avarice of the men who 
 ruled the Bank of California and the famous Mining 
 and Milling syndicate. What did they care for the 
 toilers? What enterprise that tended to loosen their 
 grip on every industry in Nevada could fail to gain 
 their hatred? He went on to contrast, in brief, ter 
 rible sentences, the disasters from heat and fire to which 
 the selfishness of these capitalists subjected them with 
 the comfort and safety which the tunnel would afford. 
 The increased profits under the tunnel system must 
 also, he said, enable the mine owners to continue the 
 Union scale of wages without protest for generations 
 to come. 
 
 Sutro added immeasurably to the force of his ap 
 peal by showing to the miners, and afterward circulat 
 ing among them, rude but effective campaign cartoons. 
 One cartoon represented a rich speculator driving six 
 fast horses and covering a working miner with con 
 temptuous dust; another showed "Bill Sharon s big 
 wood pile " ; and still another " Bill Sharon s crooked 
 railroad," so as to emphasize the fact that the Bank of 
 California syndicate controlled the transportation and 
 owned the forests. Still other cartoons illustrated 
 
THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 201 
 
 with ferocious sarcasm many a well-known instance 
 of careless disregard of the health and lives of the Corn- 
 stock miners. 
 
 The series closed with a huge double cartoon that 
 Milton might have conceived and Dore might have 
 executed. A few months before there had been a fire 
 in the Yellow Jacket mine and forty-two miners had 
 lost their lives. It was an awful disaster; the terror 
 of it still dwelt in the homes of the Comstock. Fire 
 was yet smouldering in the drifts of the mines and 
 likely to burst forth again, when Sutro sent forth his 
 double cartoon, headed The Yellow Jacket Fire. On 
 one side was a shaft a thousand feet deep full of burn 
 ing and falling ladders, timbers, and machinery, a vor 
 tex of whirling smoke and flame, with hundreds of 
 miners trying to escape and tumbling headlong into 
 the depths; wives, mothers, and children were running 
 to the mouth of the shaft or sinking in despair on the 
 ground. In the other half of the picture was a similar 
 shaft on fire, but with the Sutro Tunnel connection 
 below, and the miners escaping to meet their wives 
 and children. 
 
 Here are some sentences from Sutro s speech: " Will 
 the people of Nevada see me crushed out now? Will 
 you not see fair play when one man has the pluck to 
 stand up against a crowd? Come in together; let three 
 thousand labouring men pay in an average of ten dol 
 lars a month and insure the construction of the tunnel, 
 carrying with it the control of the mines." Again: 
 " The enemy who has spun his web around you until 
 you are almost helpless has bribed your judges, packed 
 your juries, hired false witnesses, bought legislatures, 
 elected representatives to defend their iniquity, im 
 posed taxes upon you for their private benefit, and now 
 dares you to expose or oppose them. ... I do not mean 
 
202 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 to incite you to any violence,, . . . but I do mean to 
 say that you can destroy your enemy by simple concert 
 of action. Let all of you join together to build the 
 Sutro Tunnel; that is the way to reach them. . . . 
 They know that the first pick struck into the tunnel 
 will be the first pick into their graves." 
 
 Thus, with tremendous invective, Sutro carried 
 the war into Africa and laughed to scorn the shouts 
 of " Demagogue! " that went up from the justly alarmed 
 capitalists. He caused such a storm that in a short time 
 he had to use all his personal influence to prevent an 
 outbreak. But the Miners Union raised fifty thousand 
 dollars by subscription and put it into Tunnel Company 
 stock. This enabled the resolute Sutro to break ground 
 October 19, 1869. He now had to provide means for 
 continuing work. He had to fight his opponents in Ne 
 vada, California, Washington, New York, and Europe. 
 It was necessary, too, that this fight should be aggres 
 sive; he must have more money. In 1870 he obtained 
 the promise of two million dollars in France, but the 
 Franco-Prussian War destroyed this combination. In 
 1871 he persuaded Congress to appoint a commission 
 of United States engineers to examine the Comstock 
 and the plans of the tunnel. They reported in the main 
 unfavourably. Such a report, if sustained by the Com 
 mittee on Mines and Mining, could only lead to one 
 end the revoking of the franchise. Sutro, as usual, 
 rose to the occasion, and forthwith succeeded in per 
 suading the committee that the report was biased by 
 his opponents; the committee reversed their first de 
 cision and advocated a loan of two million dollars by 
 the United States. This bill was finally defeated, but 
 its very presentation in Congress was a victory for 
 Sutro. Even his enemies began to yield unwilling 
 admiration to his bulldog tenacity. " That little Ger- 
 
THE SUTEO TUNNEL. 203 
 
 man Jew will undermine the Comstock" became a 
 saying among the capitalists. 
 
 In September, 1871, Sutro won his way to the purses 
 of some English investors and obtained $1,450,000. 
 This was afterward increased in America to a total of 
 two million dollars. Immediately four hundred men 
 were set at work in the tunnel and upon four working 
 and ventilation shafts. Machinery was bought, shops 
 and dwellings sprang up like mushrooms around the 
 waste heaps, and the renewed energies of this volcanic 
 man were concentrated upon a race against the Com 
 stock mine owners who were fast approaching the level 
 of the tunnel. 
 
 There was no time set by the act of Congress or any 
 obligation of the company for the completion of the 
 tunnel, but the general understanding was that the 
 main line should be finished in three and a quarter 
 years. This was based upon the calculations of the en 
 gineers, who proposed to work from four shafts as well 
 as from the end of the tunnel, thus making nine sepa 
 rate stopes or headings besides some work that might 
 be possible by drifting from the Comstock lode. But 
 when these four shafts were begun, such torrents of 
 water poured out of the porous rock that no machinery 
 could be obtained to keep the two nearest the lode clear 
 enough to work in; the other two, though finally sunk 
 to the tunnel level, were often rendered useless from 
 the same cause. Hand drills were used at first, and 
 the rate of progress was slow; it would have required 
 seven or eight years for the completion of the main tun 
 nel. Besides, the increase of heat was extraordinary, 
 and the atmosphere grew so bad at the face of the head 
 ing that competent authorities have doubted whether 
 the tunnel would ever have been completed if the costly 
 and complicated power drills just beginning to come 
 
204: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 into use at Mount Cenis and elsewhere had not been 
 greatly improved by American inventors. Burleigh 
 and Ingersoll drills soon changed the aspect of affairs. 
 An interesting comparison made at this time between 
 a famous Freiburg tunnel, the Eothschonberger Stol- 
 len, and the Sutro, is as follows: The German tunnel 
 was advancing by handwork in gneiss rock from a single 
 heading about twenty-six feet a month; the Nevada 
 tunnel was advancing in andesite from a single heading 
 one hundred and five feet a month. When power drills 
 were introduced the advance of the German work in 
 creased to eighty-four feet, while that of the Nevada 
 enterprise rose to three hundred and ten feet. The 
 monthly advance of the Sutro Tunnel during 1875 
 and 1876 maintained an average of three hundred and 
 eight feet, an unequalled record that attracted the at 
 tention of mining engineers, who declared that Su- 
 tro s " coyote hole " was the greatest undertaking in 
 America. 
 
 Meanwhile the working miners of the Comstock 
 were fighting their old enemies water, heat, and lack 
 of ventilation and hoping for the. completion of the 
 tunnel. Mining superintendents, who still claimed that 
 they needed no help from Sutro, were forced to ac 
 knowledge that the water plague was almost more than 
 they could endure. " To chronicle such a contest," 
 wrote one observer, "is to write down an unvaried 
 record of flooded shafts and levels, of temporary drain 
 age and new inbursts of water, or, more discouraging 
 still, of broken pumps and of delusive gains, when 
 the battle was really a drawn one and the pumps could 
 only hold the rising water in check." The cost of 
 pumping on the Ophir was seventy-two thousand dol 
 lars a year. 
 
 So matters progressed through the days of the 
 
f. 
 
THE SITTRO TUNNEL. 205 
 
 Crown Point bonanza and the early days of the greater 
 marvels of Consolidated Virginia and California the 
 mine owners steadily declaring that they would never 
 use the tunnel; Sutro and his men hammering on 
 beneath the mountain. Never were men and machinery 
 handled with greater skill; picked miners in short 
 shifts drove the advancing drills every moment of day 
 and night and every day in the week; skilled timber- 
 men propped the tunnel; young athletes threw frag 
 ments of hot rock into iron tram cars; long trains 
 of mules and cars went to and fro under swinging lan 
 terns. " Faster! Faster! " cried Sutro to his willing 
 workers; " every ton of ore taken from the bonanza 
 loses our company two dollars! " 
 
 In 1873 the temperature at the face of the tunnel 
 was only 72 Fahr. It rose to 83 the next year, to 
 90 in 1876, to 96 in January, 1878, and to 109 in 
 April. This was in spite of the most powerful blowers 
 to be obtained which were used to force fresh air into 
 the tunnel. The heading was nearing the Comstock 
 lode and its solfataric springs. The lamps burned 
 dimly; workmen at the front fainted at their posts. 
 Another danger threatened them. Portions of the 
 tunnel crumbled and fell, crushing the supports in 
 places, and only constant vigilance and labour pre 
 vented a catastrophe which might have crushed the air 
 pipes and killed every man at the heading. The work 
 men were two miles from the nearest ventilation shaft 
 when this terrific heat was encountered, and it grew 
 worse till the face of the rock showed a temperature 
 of 114. After May, 1878, two or three hours of work 
 were all that the strongest and most experienced 
 miners could endure. The mules often refused to 
 enter the tunnel, and they were dragged by main 
 strength from the air-escapes. It was evident that en- 
 
206 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 durance was being strained to its utmost capacity. Man 
 after man dropped down on the rocky floor and was car 
 ried to the surface, babbling and incoherent, to slowly 
 recover from the poisonous air. 
 
 At last the miners in the Savage heard the blasts 
 of Sutro s approaching tunnel, and then the blows of 
 the power drills. On July 8, 1878, Sutro himself, half 
 naked, like one of his miners, toiled at the front, and 
 toward night, when the final blast tore a jagged hole 
 through the wall of rock, he crawled through the open 
 ing, " overcome with excitement," as one of the news 
 papers said. The rush of hot air and smoke from the 
 tunnel was almost unbearable to the men working in 
 the cooler Savage drifts; clouds of dust, fine rock, 
 and impurities, gathered in the tunnel during the 
 nearly nine years that had passed since its commence 
 ment, shot upward through the shaft of the Savage. 
 
 The immediate goal was now attained, but a firm 
 treaty of peace between the contending parties was 
 essential. Most of the mine owners still said that they 
 did not need the tunnel, and refused to stand by their 
 contracts. A crisis came in 1879 when the Hale and 
 Norcross pump broke and water began to flood sev 
 eral mines. The superintendents immediately turned 
 the flow from the remaining pumps into the tunnel, 
 driving out the workmen. Sutro began to put in 
 a water-tight bulkhead. Either open war or a law 
 suit carried eventually into the Supreme Court appeared 
 the only alternatives. 
 
 Fortunately for all concerned, wiser counsels pre 
 vailed, and new agreements, which bound every com 
 pany on the lode, were entered into. A thousand work 
 men began to cut a drain channel five feet wide down 
 the middle of the tunnel floor, and by July it was in 
 full use. The temperature of the water, even at the 
 
THE STJTRO TUNNEL. 207 
 
 mouth of the tunnel,, was never below 100 Fahr., and 
 it often entered the tunnel at 130 and even 160. The 
 amount of flow in 1880 was not less than 1,300,000,000 
 gallons, and as other mines began to use the tunnel, 
 the total annual drainage rose at times to nearly or 
 quite two billion gallons. When work is again at 
 tempted on the lowest levels of the Comstock, for years 
 left idle, the value of the Sutro Tunnel will be even 
 more evident. 
 
 At the time of the completion of the tunnel the 
 leading mines were using more powerful pumping 
 machinery than had ever been applied to such pur 
 poses. Perhaps the power required in these engines 
 is best shown by the size of the wooden pump-rods. 
 Formerly made 12 by 12 inches, they were now made 
 14 by 16 inches, of sections of the best selected Oregon 
 pine strapped together by iron plates, yet breakages 
 were frequent. The Belcher pump-rod broke twelve 
 times in eight months. It is estimated that the cost 
 of handling the water in 1880 was three million dollars, 
 even with the aid of the tunnel. 
 
 When his victory was complete, Sutro retired from 
 the control of the tunnel, selling his stock at a high 
 price and removing to San Francisco, and became one 
 of the foremost citizens of California. He knew 
 Nevada and the Comstock better than most men of 
 his time, for he had been a part of the whole dramatic 
 and eventful story ever since 1860. After twenty 
 years devoted with singular courage and ability to a 
 single purpose, that purpose had rounded into well- 
 wrought achievement, and when he left the Comstock 
 he was one of the most widely known men in America. 
 
 Even after Sutro left the Comstock his memorable 
 " coyote hole " continued to share the fortunes, good 
 or ill, of the great lode it drained. According to the 
 
208 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 report of Mr. Theodore Sutro, in 1887 the main tunnel 
 had cost in round figures $3,500,000, and the laterals 
 had brought this sum up to $5,000,000. What was 
 considered in 1879 one of the larger possibilities of 
 the tunnel has never been developed. Its friends con 
 stantly spoke of the " facilities which the tunnel af 
 forded for the extracting and smelting of millions of 
 tons of low-grade ore " which lay partly exposed to 
 view in the two hundred miles of shafts and galleries, 
 and partly still concealed in the depths of the Corn- 
 stock mines. This ore was passed by in those days, 
 though worth ten or twelve dollars a ton, because by 
 the methods employed the mills, the railroad, the 
 hoisting works it could not be worked at a profit. 
 The Sutro Tunnel Company still claims that by water- 
 power mills on the Carson this low-grade ore can be 
 worked at six or eight dollars a ton, thus building up 
 a new industry without injuring the towns on the Corn- 
 stock. Unfortunately, the plan has never received a 
 full and fair test. Though the tunnel company is said 
 to have a great deal of low-grade ore in its own terri 
 tory, lack of means has prevented thorough exploration 
 of its resources, as well as the building of reduction 
 works. The tunnel, like the great lode, has long been 
 in borrasca. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII. 
 
 OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 
 
 ALL this time,, while describing pioneer life, early 
 settlement, the bonanzas, the Sutro Tunnel, and many 
 other episodes of the long story of the Comstock, one 
 has necessarily made passing allusions to the build 
 ings and machinery on the surface of the ground, and 
 to the still more interesting details of the inside 
 workings of the great mines on the lode. So much 
 remains to be told, however, respecting the appearance 
 of a mine of the first rank, " on deck " and " between 
 decks," that this chapter and that which follows are 
 devoted to mines and mine equipment as they appear 
 at times of especial activity and high organization. 
 
 When a visitor goes to the Comstock he sees the 
 ruins of many old mine buildings no longer in use, be 
 cause much larger and more complete structures over 
 the later shafts have taken their place. Of the more 
 important large shafts there were twenty-four in 1880, 
 several of them huge combination shafts used by more 
 than one mine. The surface of the lode is so irregular 
 that the altitudes of the tops of the shafts vary to an 
 extent that would be surprising anywhere except in 
 such a wild mountain region; the highest shaft, Bul 
 lion, begins 6,307 feet above the sea, and the lowest, 
 the old Overman, begins 5,731 feet above the sea, show 
 ing a difference of 536 feet on the lode enough to 
 make quite a hill on a Western prairie. The surface 
 
210 ME STOKY OF THE MINE. 
 
 workings of the Comstock are on the side of a moun 
 tain furrowed by immense ravines, where men have, 
 with marvellous persistence and energy, hewn out or 
 built up, on terraces supported by masonry, sufficient 
 room for mine and mill buildings. 
 
 Any one of the great mines when in active opera 
 tion will serve as a type of the general plan of outside 
 works, the result of thirty years of experience under 
 Comstock conditions. Nothing better can be found 
 in the way of concrete illustration than the works 
 grouped about California and Consolidated Virginia 
 with the old shafts, the new combination shafts, the 
 mills, yards, railroad tracks, trestle works, machinery, 
 and all that so well represents the modern industry of 
 mining. What one sees at the main works is a very 
 large mass of high buildings, partly on the level, partly 
 terraced down the slope, and still further complicated 
 by wings, annexes, and various additions all thor 
 oughly well made and painted with fire-proof paint. 
 Surrounding the whole and between the wings and 
 additions are piles of iron, lumber, cord wood, separate 
 buildings, and vast collections of supplies of every 
 imaginable sort. 
 
 The main mass of buildings resembles nothing so 
 much as the union of several large foundries and manu 
 factories. A row of tall smokestacks steadied by steel 
 cables mark the location of the engines, the blacksmith 
 shops, and the machine shops. As one goes around 
 the yards and the vast structures full of life and ac 
 tivity, the passing impression varies; here are flat steel 
 cables woven or twisted, copper wire, steel bars, and 
 hardware in a thousand forms; yonder are supplies 
 enough, one would think, to stock a street full of whole 
 sale houses. There is a powder house; there are 
 offices for clerks and superintendents and a build- 
 
OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MlNfi. 211 
 
 ing where bullion is melted and assaying is done; 
 there are also rooms for the surveyors, draughtsmen, 
 and civil engineers. But there is no mine in sight any 
 where. 
 
 Some idea of the variety of articles that come under 
 the general head of supplies and are gathered together 
 in the storehouses here may be obtained from a few 
 notes of purchases made by a single mine (California) 
 in 1877, when over $315,000 was spent for miscellane 
 ous supplies and over $547,000 for fuel and for the 
 timbers and iron used in the new shaft then being 
 sunk. The " regular supplies " stored up and used 
 above ground or sent down into the mines as required 
 included the following large items: Timber, over 
 10,000,000 feet, costing about $224,000; ice, nearly 
 2,000,000 pounds, costing about $22,000; powder to 
 the value of $17,000; candles worth $16,000; steel 
 and iron, $5,000. 
 
 If we take the total expense account of the same 
 mine for that year (1877), we obtain, perhaps, a more 
 striking impression of the scale of operations. Sup 
 plies, as we have seen, were used to the value of about 
 $315,000; salaries and wages came to about $788,000; 
 cost of reduction was $2,220,000; of hoisting, $186,- 
 000; and of assaying, $53,000. Office expenses, team 
 ing, surveying, taxes, litigation, and miscellaneous 
 items, added to the above, bring the total to consider 
 ably more than $4,000,000. In such a mine the value 
 of the outside works is nearly impossible to determine, 
 for it is constantly changing. If there is no mill at 
 tached, half a million dollars would be a low estimate; 
 complete reduction works add as much more to the 
 total. 
 
 Everywhere, in the first view of a mine, lumber, 
 firewood, and machinery are the most striking features. 
 15 
 
212 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 The depths of the mine in the last thirty years have 
 swallowed up fully 800,000,000 feet of timber- 
 enough,, if sawed into boards and scantlings, to con 
 struct forty thousand two-story houses of six rooms 
 each. These would provide homes for two hundred 
 thousand people. If the consumption of lumber had 
 always been at the rate of such bonanza years as 1875 
 and 1876, the Comstock lode would now contain near 
 ly three times as much lumber as this buried in its 
 shafts and drifts, or sufficient for the homes of six hun 
 dred thousand people. Hundreds of square miles of 
 forest have been cut to supply this inexorable demand, 
 and every foot of timber used has been hauled to Gold 
 Hill or Virginia City and piled in the lumber yards 
 at the works. 
 
 The fuel used during the past thirty years has 
 aggregated something like three million cords. It con 
 sists for the most part of yellow pine, pitch pine, tama 
 rack, and fir, and vast tiers of it lie piled up at all 
 seasons. In 1880 the Sierra Nevada furnaces used 
 about sixteen thousand cords of wood, and four other 
 mines used more than ten thousand cords apiece. Such 
 a mine keeps six months supply of fuel on hand, and 
 even a smaller mine always has five hundred cords 
 piled in the yard. 
 
 The machinery is of so many different types and is 
 constantly undergoing so many changes, repairs, and 
 improvements, that the foundries and machine shops 
 at the mouth of a mine often seem as if they had been 
 transplanted bodily to the Comstock from some large 
 seaport. The immense power of the pumping engines 
 has been noticed, but the total horse power repre 
 sented by all the engines used on the Comstock affords 
 a still better measure of the work done. The mines 
 in 1880 had engines of a combined capacity of 21,000 
 
OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 213 
 
 horse power. Single mines have had 2,000, and even 
 3,000 horse power in use at times. 
 
 Outside of each of the vast structures is a pile of 
 waste rock, the dump of the hidden mine. This is 
 perhaps the most peculiar feature of the place, and 
 if the mine that supplies it is of the first rank, the size 
 of the pile is mountainous. A part of the waste rock 
 sometimes goes to make acres of level ground on which 
 to place the mine buildings and the quartz mill, but 
 there is so much left to be poured down into the canons 
 that the sum total is really one of the most impressive 
 things about Virginia City. Cars run out upon a track 
 extending from the building far over the middle of 
 the dump, and are emptied automatically. They flash 
 back and forth all day, all night, every day in the week, 
 and the waste rock and debris slide slowly to the bot 
 tom of the great dusty pyramid, on which no green leaf 
 ever grows. Such a pile, much smaller, and of saw 
 dust instead of broken rock, the lumber mills make 
 along the Mendocino coast; but always these latter 
 smoke and blacken with an ever-smouldering fire that 
 burns unquenched for decades, and always the wild 
 flowers of the forest grow in the very edges of the 
 fragrant hills of sawdust. In strange contrast, the 
 waste rock mountains of the Comstock are without 
 life, colour, sound, or change, except the rattle of bits 
 of porphyry and the sharp sunlight gleaming on 
 whitening clays and splinters of stone piled on barren 
 hollows above the sage brush. 
 
 The central building over the mouth of the large 
 shaft sunk in partnership by the California and 
 Consolidated Virginia mines, is high, steep-roofed 
 and large, heavily framed, floored solidly and well, 
 open to the roof forty and fifty feet above, and in every 
 respect suited to the requirements. Men dozens of 
 
THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 them quiet, busy men dressed in woollen shirts, small 
 felt hats or caps, and blue overalls, are directing and 
 operating affairs. Those whose duties do not take 
 them down into the mines are in ordinary citizen s 
 clothes. From the middle of the floor, through a row 
 of four square openings, white columns of steam often 
 rush upward in huge volumes rolling to the roof; it 
 is the breath of the mines below, and in cold weather 
 the warm lower levels send up these whirling clouds. 
 The four openings are the tops of the four compart 
 ments of the shaft, which is not only lined on every 
 side with square timbers, but is still further divided 
 by perpendicular partitions. The timbering leaves 
 these lesser parallel shafts about five feet square, and 
 one is occupied by the pipes of the pumping machinery, 
 while the other three are hoisting compartments. 
 
 This is the top of the mine; through these small 
 shafts the business of the mine is carried on. The 
 cages that move up and down may be compared to hotel 
 elevators, only in this case the hotel is from fifteen 
 hundred to three thousand feet high and pushed down 
 into the ground so that everything except the roof is 
 out of sight. The elevators begin at the roof and go 
 down to the basement, past floor after floor, station 
 after station, passageway after passageway, until the 
 place is reached where another cellar is being hewed 
 out. 
 
 Some sixty feet from the steaming shaft top is a 
 large, square platform raised several feet above the 
 floor. Here, on frames of massive timbers built upon 
 solid rock and filled in with cement, are the hoisting 
 engines; here the engineers. sit under a placard some 
 thing like this: "No person allowed on the platform, 
 or to speak to the engineers." There is reason enough 
 for the warning, for the lives of many men are in the 
 
OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 215 
 
 hands of the engineer and his assistants. These mine 
 engineers are strong, modest, manly much such men 
 as are in similar places of responsibility in the engine 
 rooms of a Cunarder. 
 
 Before the face of each engineer is a large "in 
 dicator " like a clock, or sometimes in the form of a 
 cylinder, which shows exactly where the cage is; be 
 side it is the bell by which he communicates with the 
 officers and workmen on the different levels of the 
 mine. He stops and starts the cage, " slows up," goes 
 ahead at full speed, receives word about the contents 
 of the cage, and many other important matters. Safety 
 cages are now used, similar in construction to the ele 
 vators in large buildings but much heavier, and one 
 source of accident is thus removed. The mouth of 
 each compartment that opens through the floor of 
 the main building is closely covered with an iron grat 
 ing which each cage lifts as it comes up, and the place 
 is sometimes still further protected by a railing, so 
 that few accidents occur at the top of a mine except 
 through careless engineers. 
 
 The power of the hoisting engine is necessarily 
 great. At the Yellow Jacket the two hoisting engines 
 are each of 1,000 horse power. The main engine at 
 the California and Consolidated Virginia shaft, every 
 where known as the "C. & C.," is of 2,000 horse power; 
 it lifts a cage with two cars of rock and handles a passen 
 ger cage at the same time. What would be called an 
 average cable at one of these great mines is made of steel 
 wire, woven flat, seven inches wide and five eighths of an 
 inch thick; the pulleys are forty or fifty feet above 
 the shaft mouth on a cross-beam supported by a very 
 large and massive frame which is built around the 
 mouth of the shaft and is called the " gallows-frame." 
 
 There are two kinds of cable reels. In some cases 
 
THE STORY OP THE MINE. 
 
 the cable is coiled directly upon a short reel; in other 
 cases a drum is used. The latter is known as the taper 
 ing hoisting reel, which is a drum of very heavy wood 
 turning with a wrought-iron shaft sixteen inches in 
 diameter. On this base beam after beam has been 
 bolted until the result is a structure fifteen feet long, 
 thirteen feet in diameter at one end and twenty-two 
 feet at the other. On the outside of the truncated cone 
 thus obtained iron plates are bolted, and a deep spiral 
 groove is made from end to end in the iron to guide 
 and steady the cable as it winds and unwinds. The 
 wrought-iron shaft turns in a framework that reaches 
 quite through the floor of the building, and is sunk 
 deep in solid rock and braced against every strain. 
 
 A steel cable such as is used on the Comstock weighs 
 from twenty-five thousand to forty thousand pounds. 
 In the case of those that taper regularly toward the 
 lower end, where less strength is needed, the reduced 
 size is not obtained by leaving out some wires, but by 
 gradually tapering each wire in its manufacture. The 
 flat cables are much preferred for heavier work, and 
 were first made by Mr. A. S. Hallidie, of San Francisco, 
 the inventor of the cable system of street cars so much 
 in use in that city. 
 
 The engineers of the Comstock greatly increased 
 the efficiency of their steam engines, so as to save fuel. 
 The valve gear on compound engines was greatly 
 changed. The hoisting engines were made to act 
 directly upon the cables by keying the reel to the main 
 shaft, increasing the possible speed with which the 
 cables could be hoisted to three thousand feet per 
 minute, a rate ten times greater than the utmost speed 
 attainable before 1865. 
 
 Danger seems inseparable from such machinery. 
 If an engineer loses his presence of mind for a second 
 
The Mouth of a Shaft. 
 
OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 217 
 
 while guiding the swift-flying cage, the men may be 
 hurled to destruction. At the Union shaft, in 1879, 
 the engineer, a careful and temperate man, was hoist 
 ing a cage with seventeen men from the bottom of the 
 shaft; when they were near the top he started to shut 
 off steam, but turned the lever the wrong way and the 
 cage shot swiftly into sight. Losing his head entirely, 
 the poor engineer threw the valve still farther over, 
 and the cage, leaping upward, gleaming and terrible, 
 struck the timbers of the gallows frame and snapped 
 the seven-inch cable, which " parted like twine," mak 
 ing a report like the sound of a cannon. The cable 
 flew backward and swung on one side, mowing down 
 timbers and machinery as far as it could reach. It 
 was like that most tremendous accident known on ship 
 board, the breaking loose of a gun amidships. The 
 great building shook to the granite foundations, and 
 men cried out that one of the boilers had exploded. 
 When the cage struck, every man except two who clung 
 to the shattered frame, and one who seized the bell 
 rope, were hurled against the roof and fell dead, dying, 
 or crippled on the floor. 
 
 One must not expect to see a close-walled box or 
 steel cage for an elevator. The miners have only a 
 heavy iron cage, entirely open on two sides and nearly 
 so on the others. Some cages are single; some have 
 two floors and are called double-deckers. The old- 
 style three- and four-deckers have now gone out of use. 
 Loaded iron cars come out of the depths and are at once 
 hooked to a cable that pulls them from the cage along 
 a track on the floor of the building, or they are rolled 
 out by men in Waiting. If the contents are worthless, 
 the cars are quickly switched to the dumps and so dis 
 appear; if they consist of ore for the mill, they go to 
 one of the most important and complicated of all the 
 
218 THE STOEY OF THE MINE. 
 
 huge structures that cluster around the mouth of a 
 Comstock mine. 
 
 The Consolidated Virginia mill as built in bonanza 
 days has sixty stamps of eight hundred pounds each, 
 forty pans, four agitators, and twenty settlers, and is 
 capable of reducing two hundred and fifty tons of ore 
 daily. The California mill has eighty stamps of nine 
 hundred and eighty-four pounds each, forty-six pans, 
 four agitators, and twenty settlers, and can work three 
 hundred and eighty tons daily. The sixty-stamp Con 
 solidated Virginia mill is a good type of the more mod 
 ern improved work of the Comstock. Let us follow 
 the course of an ore car from the mouth of the shaft 
 and see what happens to it. 
 
 This mill is built near the rest of the main struc 
 ture on a lower level. A car track nearly three hundred 
 feet long leads straight from the mouth of the shaft 
 in the main building to the roof of the quartz mill. 
 It is supported forty-five feet in the air on trestle- 
 work, and is boarded over its whole length with rows 
 of windows on each side, so that it " resembles nothing 
 else so much as a ropewalk." The ore cars are made 
 up into little trains and hauled to the top of the mill 
 by mules. One of the famous mules in bonanza days 
 was known far and wide as " Mary Ann Simpson." 
 Tradition had it that she knew more about mill work 
 than any man employed in the mine, and she had cer 
 tainly hauled millions of dollars from shaft mouth to 
 mill. In some mines the ore is carried by an endless 
 belt in buckets on a cable, or the cars are drawn by a 
 cable run by a shaft from an engine. 
 
 When dumped, the ore falls into chutes in the roof 
 of the mill, and what the Californian hydraulic miners 
 first named " grizzlies " are set in the bottom of each 
 chute. A grizzly is a screen of parallel iron bars three 
 
OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 219 
 
 inches apart, in most cases, set sloping, and loose at 
 one end, so that while the finer rock goes through, 
 all larger fragments roll into the jaws of a rock breaker, 
 whence, after having heen sufficiently crushed, the 
 material goes through another chute into the main 
 ore bins to which the smaller rocks went at once. In 
 the hydraulic mines, where sets of grizzlies are some 
 times used to keep boulders out of the flumes, the 
 mingled roar of the foaming waters, the harsh crash 
 ing of rolling rocks, and the clang of quivering bars 
 of massive iron can be heard a long distance. It is one 
 of the noisiest things about such a mine, but its name 
 does not seem very appropriately taken from the mon 
 arch of the Sierran wilderness, whose tread, though 
 lumbering, is noiseless, and whose loudest utterance 
 is a menacing growl. 
 
 Keturning to our typical mill on the Comstock, 
 the ore bin where the crushed rock falls is one hundred 
 and ten feet long and the contents are fed by chutes 
 to the eight batteries of ten stamps each. The mill 
 building stands upon ground that was terraced in the 
 most careful manner, so that the different parts of 
 the structure stands upon different levels, as is required 
 for the most perfect economy of labour and time. After 
 the ore is once delivered at the top of the building, 
 gravity is made to do as much work as possible. 
 
 Beginning with the power required to run a mill 
 of this type, it is primarily a 600-horse-power compound 
 condensing engine. There are two cylinders, one of 
 twenty-four by forty-eight inches and the other forty- 
 eight by forty-eight inches; steam which goes into the 
 initial or smaller cylinder, cut off at the half stroke, 
 goes into the expansion cylinder, where it fills eight 
 times the bulk it first had. Instead of going into the 
 air, it then exhausts into a condenser which is so 
 
220 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 arranged as to counterbalance the atmospheric pressure 
 at the altitude of Virginia City. In ways like this the 
 ponderous machinery of the Comstock is all adapted 
 by a host of details to suit exactly the work and the 
 locality. The main shaft of the engine is fourteen 
 inches in diameter, weighing fifteen thousand pounds. 
 The fly wheel, eighteen feet across, weighs thirty-three 
 thousand pounds. A belt from the fly wheel, which 
 is also a band wheel, drives the stamps in the batteries. 
 A long shaft eleven inches in diameter goes into the 
 amalgamating room and drives the machinery of the 
 pans and settlers. The engine itself weighs fifty tons 
 and rests on solid masonry. There are eight boilers, 
 each sixteen feet long and fifty-four inches in diameter, 
 and four huge smokestacks, each ninety feet high, ex 
 tending forty feet above the roof. 
 
 The progress of the ore from the ore bin, under 
 the stamps, through the amalgamating room, to the 
 retort house, and finally to the melting room, where 
 the refined metal is cast into bars of bullion, would 
 require many chapters full of technical details which 
 properly belong to metallurgical treatises. It may be 
 noted in passing that there is a great deal of gold in 
 all the Comstock ore, but the quantity varies in dif 
 ferent mines and at different levels. In the whole lode 
 the average amount of gold is about forty-two per cent, 
 but the Gold Hill group contains forty-seven per cent 
 of gold in its total yield to date, and in some single 
 mines the gold has been nearly sixty per cent. 
 
 The forty-six mining companies of the Comstock 
 in 1866 had forty-four engines, of a total horse power 
 of 1,500, used for pumping and hoisting, and sixty- 
 two mills run by steam and water power, with 1,271 
 stamps crushing 57,112 tons of ore each month. Fif 
 teen years later (in 1881) the total horse power of all 
 
OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 221 
 
 the engines on the lode was nearly 21,000, and it has 
 not materially increased since that time. When all the 
 energies of the men of the Comstock are again directed 
 to going deeper there will have to be another great 
 advance in the machinery used, and the inventive skill 
 of the world will be taxed to its utmost. If new and 
 greater bonanzas are found, the mills themselves will 
 be reconstructed upon a larger scale. 
 
 We leave the deafening clang and clatter of the 
 mills and turn back to the main building. We have 
 seen the progress of the ore from the top of the shaft 
 to the retorts and the assay office. It is time to descend 
 into the mine itself, where the iron ore cars are being 
 filled and pushed along underground rails to the 
 station. It is time to study life in the chain of sub 
 terranean cities of the Comstock. 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 
 
 AT last we are ready to study at its best the great 
 subterranean city, the chain of works for whose main 
 tenance and extension, mills, machinery, and towns on 
 the surface were created. We are ready to go down 
 the main shaft, stop at a "station," explore a drift, 
 see the miners at work, and hear stories of peril and 
 adventure. 
 
 The visitor retires to a dressing room, takes off his 
 or her ordinary clothing, puts on one of the suits kept 
 there for the purpose flannel pantaloons, woollen 
 shirt, heavy shoes, and felt hat is placed in charge 
 of a foreman, and they enter the cage. The foreman 
 waves his hand; in an instant we are dropping noise 
 lessly into the darkness, lit only by the flickering rays, 
 of a lantern which shows timbers seemingly leaping 
 upward. 
 
 Pretty soon a station appears, but we pass without 
 pausing. There seems to be a large irregular room 
 opening back from the side of the shaft. Men are 
 busy there, moving about in the well-lighted space, 
 and there is machinery at work. If we went slower 
 we should see a drift extending from the station and 
 dividing into many other passages, and miners and 
 foreman would be noticed passing to and fro engaged 
 in various occupations. Every hundred feet a station 
 
 222 
 
THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 223 
 
 flashes past, and the immensity of the work begins 
 to grow upon the traveller. 
 
 Sometimes the man in charge of a station hails us 
 as we pass, and the foreman makes a reply that is 
 Choctaw to the uninitiated., for we are dropping rapidly 
 away from the sound. As we reach a depth of a thou 
 sand feet or so the cable sometimes begins to " spring " 
 with a peculiarly disagreeable bobbing motion, which 
 gives a novice a new sensation, as if hung in an abyss 
 by a rubber strap. In the midst of this we come to a 
 full stop at the fifteen-hundred-foot station and step 
 off on the floor. 
 
 A station is the office for the work done on that 
 mining level, as well as the point where men stop and 
 where freight is shipped or received. It is walled, 
 roofed, and floored with huge timbers and planks, and 
 is a large, well-lighted place crowded with mining 
 supplies, barrels of ice water, candles, fuse, powder, 
 tools, etc. If it were not for a car track which crosses 
 the middle of the floor, coming from the level beyond 
 and connecting by switches with all the hoisting com 
 partments of the shaft, the place would sometimes seem 
 a combination of office and country store. The car 
 track that extends through the main drift of the mine 
 connects by turntables with the side drifts and cross 
 cuts. Laden cars arrive regularly from the " stopes " 
 or places where ore is being taken out, and are sent to 
 the surface by the station tender. Empty cars as they 
 arrive are returned to some place where they are needed 
 by the car men, and so the work goes on steadily, ex 
 cepting when shifts are changed. 
 
 The drifts, or "galleries" as some call them, are 
 from four to six feet wide and seven to eight feet high. 
 The miners prefer to cut them outside of the vein as 
 much as possible, as there is less danger of caves. The 
 
224 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 floor of a drift is horizontal,, or slightly raised, to facili 
 tate the delivery of ore. The main north and south 
 drift is the Broadway of the level, and sometimes even 
 contains a double car track. The cross-cuts start from 
 the main drift at right angles with the vein, so as to 
 cut into the ore body if any is found. Like the levels, 
 they are about a hundred feet apart. They are ex 
 tended entirely across the lode to the other wall, and 
 are connected with each other by cross-drifts. Every 
 new cross-cut attracts the attention of all who are in 
 terested in the mine. If one cross-cut is in pay ore 
 there is much greater excitement when the next one, 
 a hundred feet farther on, is to be opened. In this 
 way, with drifts, cross-cuts, and cross-drifts, the skele 
 ton of the underground plan begins to be apparent. 
 Imagine a general plan something like this on each 
 level, and we only have to describe the winzes to com 
 plete the framework of the passageways. A winze is 
 a small shaft sunk wherever it is needed, from one 
 level to another, for ventilation, to explore new ground, 
 or often, when sloping, to serve as a chute for ore and 
 timbers. An " upraise " is the beginning of a winze 
 Btarted on a level and carried upward toward the next 
 higher level. If it is finished its name is changed to 
 winze. The only connection between one level and an 
 other besides the main shaft is by means of these winzes. 
 Vertical winzes are in reality shafts; sloping winzes 
 are inclines; drifts, cross-cuts, and cross-drifts are 
 really tunnels. 
 
 Th main shaft which connects all these under 
 ground workings is not always vertical, neither does 
 it always remain the same for its entire length; it may 
 be an " incline/ as the Crown Point shaft, which is 
 vertical to the eleven-hundred-foot level and then 
 follows the lode, which dips thirty-five degrees at that 
 
THE ClT? tfNDEHGROtJND. 225 
 
 point. The car used for hoisting through an incline 
 is a "giraffe," absurdly called so "because the hind 
 wheels are very large and the front ones low, so as to 
 keep the car level/ One would suppose that the name 
 kangaroo would be more appropriate. It carries eight 
 tons of ore at a trip. Sometimes another or " back- 
 action " car is fastened behind. A ride on a giraffe 
 is very exciting. The track is well lighted and the cars 
 climb it with the speed of a lightning express. The 
 giraffes, like the elevator cages, have safety grips. At 
 the bottom of the shaft or incline is the " sump," a pit 
 or well sunk there to collect the water from the mine. 
 Here are the suction ends of the pumps. 
 
 To have a main^shaft presupposes that there are 
 some air shafts for ventilation; but there are few on 
 the Comstock, ventilation being secured as far as pos 
 sible by connection with the main shafts of other mines. 
 The miners agree that the direction of a draught in a 
 mine remains permanent for years, but if a fire in a 
 mine changes the draught, it never changes back. A 
 " down-cast " has thus been changed in an hour to 
 an " up-cast." The general tendency of air currents 
 in the Comstock is in the same direction as the slope 
 of the ore chimneys that is, southward. Each new 
 connection makes changes in the air currents in all 
 the mines. 
 
 There is machinery in the mines, and often a great 
 deal of it. Steam makes too much heat, but com 
 pressed air, hydraulic power, and electricity are now 
 used with entire success. Small engines run the 
 " blowers " to .force fresh air through pipes to every 
 part of the mine, but particularly to the heads of the 
 news cuts, drifts, and upraises; others hoist and lower 
 rock and other materials in the various winzes, and still 
 others drive the drills. All this makes a network of 
 
226 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 pipes, mostly for compressed air, extending through 
 out the mine. 
 
 The admirable system which prevails is nowhere 
 more manifest than in the way men are handled. They 
 form in line in the hoisting works and march into the 
 cages. They leave the mines in the same way. Three 
 shifts of eight hours each make the day of twenty- 
 four hours. " Morning shift " is from 7 A. M. to 3 P. M.; 
 " afternoon shift " from 3 to 11 P. M., and " night 
 shift " till 7 again. Each level of the mine has there 
 fore its three shift bosses. The clerk who acts as time 
 keeper has an office in the hoisting works and registers 
 every man s ingoing and outcoming with the regularity 
 of a machine. The shift bosseslreport men missing 
 or sick, also accidents, or anything else of importance. 
 They tally loads of ore and waste rock, filling up a 
 printed blank. The superintendent thus knows how 
 much work each shift has accomplished. Each level 
 has a foreman. The mine has also a general under 
 ground foreman, and an assistant to take his place at 
 night. As regards the workmen, there is complete 
 classification. The timber men attend to the supports 
 of the various workings; the miners, drill men, and 
 drifters hew and cut passages and extract the ore; the 
 pump men and engineers see to their respective duties. 
 Watchmen make regular rounds, messengers carry 
 orders, take the men water or tools, and gather up the 
 dulled picks and crowbars to send them to the forges. 
 
 Lamps, candles, and electric lights gleam along the 
 rocky aisles of the mines, except in long unused por 
 tions. Since one mine is connected with another on 
 the various levels, the boundary lines being accurately 
 marked on the walls of the main drifts, the longer 
 streets of the underground city extend for three and 
 four miles, and in active times men are met at almost 
 
THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 227 
 
 every corner and turn, singly or in groups. It is a busy, 
 populous city, and its inhabitants are a superb race of 
 men, white-skinned twilight dwellers, naked except 
 for shoes, overalls, and small felt caps. They go about 
 quietly with hardly a word to each other. It is a land 
 of silence as well as of candlelight. One begins to 
 understand why miners have always made such uncon 
 querable soldiers at times of national need; these men 
 are soldiers already in their power to yield prompt 
 obedience and in their capacity to move together in 
 solid phalanxes. 
 
 On the Comstock the arch enemy is heat. " View 
 their work! " says Mr. Lord in his history of the lode. 
 " They enter narrow galleries where the air is scarce 
 respirable. By the dim light of their lanterns a dingy 
 rock surface braced by rotting props is visible. The 
 stenches of decaying vegetable matter, hot, foul water, 
 and human excretions intensify the effects of the heat." 
 The men can not wear woollen garments, they perspire 
 so freely. In the most heated parts of the mine they 
 work ten or fifteen minutes, then run to thrust their 
 heads under cooler water from the pipes, and to breathe 
 deeply the fresh air forced out of the blowing tubes. 
 They soon become so exhausted that the shift boss 
 orders them back to lighter work in less torrid drifts. 
 Miles of passageways have been cut in air so unendura 
 ble that candles burned blue and went out, and men 
 falling down were dragged back by their comrades. 
 
 About 1868 it began to be noticed that the points 
 of greatest heat in the lode moved considerably from 
 year to year, as if the hot-water streams sometimes 
 filled one part of the lode and sometimes another. 
 Crown Point, on the f ourteen-hundred-f oot level, struck 
 a stream so hot that eggs were readily cooked in it, but 
 a year later the heat at this place was much lessened. 
 16 
 
228 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 Bullion on the seventeen-hundred-foot level registered 
 140 Fahr. About this time an enormous vein of hot 
 water was tapped at various points along the lode. It 
 has been estimated that the water pumped out of the 
 Comstock at this period and the air in circulation 
 through the mines were together removing annually 
 an amount of caloric that was the full equivalent of 
 that produced by fifty-six thousand tons of the best 
 anthracite coal, burned in the most economical man 
 ner. Notwithstanding this constant extraction of heat 
 from the lode, the temperature continued to increase, 
 though with many fluctuations, as greater depths were 
 attained in the various mines. 
 
 Specialists have had a pretty quarrel over the cause 
 of the heat in the lode. Prof. Church says: " Chemical 
 combinations between the water and the lode rocks " 
 technically, kaolinization of the lode feldspar. 
 Others say that the water in the lode rises from " where 
 the eruptive rocks retain much of their primal heat/ 
 The highest recorded water temperature here is 175 
 Fahr., and large areas of rock remain at from 130 
 to 150. When the miners were working on the lowest 
 levels of the deepest shafts, three thousand feet and 
 more from the surface, there was every sign of enter 
 ing a new hot belt probably far greater than any heat 
 previously known in the entire history of mining. By 
 the compressed-air pipes the five or six men at a head 
 ing receive fully seven hundred cubic inches of air 
 per minute. It reaches the place at a temperature 
 of about 90, seldom less. On some levels each miner 
 drinks three or four gallons of ice water in his eight- 
 hour shift. The hotter parts of Consolidated Virginia 
 have required ninety-five pounds of ice daily to every 
 miner at work. " Even with this help," said the Terri 
 torial Enterprise, "four picked men in some stopes 
 
THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 229 
 
 have found themselves unable to do the work of one 
 man in a cool drift." An incline in Savage became 
 so tropical as it advanced that the men who were ar 
 ranging the pump rod at a new station staggered out 
 half dead with cholera-like cramps caused by the blind 
 ing heat and foul air. Men lost their wits, raved, sang, 
 talked like lunatics, and had to be taken to a less heated 
 part of the level, where they were rubbed and kneaded 
 from head to foot, especially on the stomach. Some 
 times it was necessary to carry them to the surface 
 and obtain prompt medical attendance. Under these 
 searching strains, which tried the best constitutions 
 until the weakest place gave way, men often perished 
 in the drifts. Besides those who yielded to heart fail 
 ure, apoplexy, and suffocation, some were tortured to 
 death by falling into pools of boiling water. 
 
 Besides this intense heat of the lower levels, the 
 hot water met with in running drifts and crosscuts 
 is sometimes so poisonous with the minerals it contains 
 in solution that when a vein is tapped it blinds every 
 miner in that part of the workings. Their faces swell 
 and their eyes remain closed until they have been some 
 time in the open air and under medical treatment. 
 Then, too, the old shafts in the upper levels, long ago 
 abandoned and marked " dangerous " on the mine 
 maps, have been left to darkness and decay. Acres of 
 underground passages and ore chambers here are 
 ghastly, crumbling ruins, trembling under the step of 
 every explorer. Timbers are twisted and crushed to 
 half their original length or pressed together by the 
 weight of the mountains overhead until they seem 
 like flattened, broken, entangled straws in the " lake " 
 of a cider press. Occasionally some one creeps along 
 the remaining crevices into the shapeless and fast-clos 
 ing chambers of ancient bonanzas. The foul and 
 
230 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 musty odours of a charnel house fill the hot, dripping, 
 desolate darkness; moist and slimy fungi of gigantic 
 size and strange shapes grow out of the walls and tim 
 bers; fire damp fills many of the drifts, and dangerous 
 explosions occur; phosphorescent lights glow at times 
 in these tangled tropical forests overthrown and crushed 
 together, and in winter nights abandoned shafts are 
 sometimes illuminated with dazzling blue flames that 
 might serve for the witch scene of an opera. 
 
 The ordinary accidents which are everywhere in 
 separable from mining life occur on the Comstock in 
 every possible form, only on a larger scale than usual. 
 The character of the vein matter would be termed 
 " extra hazardous " by every mining man. Three hun 
 dred fatal accidents and six hundred " severe injuries " 
 were reported in the files of the Virginia City news 
 papers between 1863 and 1880. It is safe to estimate 
 that from the time the mines were opened in 1859 to 
 the summer of 1893 thirty-four years there have 
 been six hundred fatal and twelve hundred severe acci 
 dents on the Comstock. The years for which the sta 
 tistics are most complete show inexplicable variation. 
 Accidents seem to go by groups and seasons, and there 
 are many superstitions respecting the subject among 
 miners themselves. 
 
 Although not the greatest source of mining disas 
 ter, according to statistics, a fire is by far the most 
 dreaded of all accidents. In some mines there is but 
 a single shaft up which to escape, and smoke and ex 
 plosive gases add to the dangers. There may be eight 
 or nine hundred men compelled to take their turns 
 to ascend the shaft in the cages; the gas explosions 
 put out most of the lights, and men rushing to escape 
 fall headlong into winzes and chutes. Other accidents 
 only endanger a few men nearest the scene, but when 
 
THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 231 
 
 the timbers take fire every person in the mine is in 
 imminent danger. The slightest smell of anything 
 burning is instantly noticed and examined into. A 
 man could cause an excitement throughout half a dozen 
 levels of a mine by lighting a newspaper in a candle, 
 for the smoke would soon penetrate the drifts, and 
 anxious miners would begin to tumble out of every 
 nook and cranny. 
 
 The amount of lumber packed into a mine is so 
 great and the draught in case of fire is so violent that 
 hurricanes of flames and smoke leap through the nar 
 row channels of rock ?nd beat in resistless waves to 
 the remotest opening. It can hardly be possible to 
 overestimate the inflammability of a well-timbered 
 Comstock mine. Where bonanzas once existed are 
 oval chambers, one or two thousand feet high, packed 
 full of cribs of timbers, with hundreds of floors of two- 
 and three-inch planks on which the miners stood to 
 work away at the roof as they rose on frame after frame 
 from the bottom to the top of the bonanza. There 
 are stairs, timber-lined chutes, winzes, drifts, and cross 
 cuts, and everywhere, besides the heavy timbers, there 
 are miles of " lagging" behind the frames. Things 
 could not be better arranged for a conflagration. 
 
 Some glimpses of the famous fire in Yellow Jacket 
 will serve to illustrate the subject. Here the fire began 
 about seven o clock one April morning in 1869 on the 
 eight-hundred-foot level, two hundred feet from the 
 main shaft. The morning shift was in the mine when 
 the alarm was given, and Gold Hill and Virginia City 
 were aroused. At the shafts of Kentuck and Crown 
 Point, the adjacent mines, as well as in the Yellow 
 Jacket shaft, blind ing volumes of smoke prevented 
 descent. As when a ship is in the breakers grinding 
 to pieces against sharp rocks, those on board are some- 
 
232 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 times as completely beyond mortal help as if they were 
 upon another planet, so in this case the firemen and 
 miners found it impossible to descend, not only on 
 account of the black, thick smoke, but because of the 
 highly mineralized and deadly gases which made men 
 faint and dizzy yards from the mouths of the shafts. 
 
 A safety lantern was put on a cage and sent down 
 with a message of cheer written in large letters on a 
 piece of pasteboard: "We shall get you out soon. It 
 is death to attempt to come up from where you are. 
 Write a word to us." The cage descended slowly, stop 
 ping long at level after level to the lowest point at 
 which any of the men were; it came back without any 
 reply. A draught suddenly drew the smoke out of 
 the Kentuck shaft, and men were able to descend in the 
 cages; they found the bodies of two miners; the gather 
 ing of Death s harvest had begun. Crown Point could 
 not be entered, but the smoke and gas drew away from 
 Yellow Jacket after an hour or two, and men began 
 to bring up the dead in that shaft, carrying them 
 through a circle of rope extended about the hoisting 
 works and laying them on the ground. 
 
 Firemen took hose, and carried it down the shaft to 
 the eight-hundred-foot level; miners and timber men 
 went with them, putting out flames, propping up fall 
 ing walls and sides of drifts half filled in places with 
 debris from the roofs. Such a battle in the recesses 
 of a mine equals, and indeed surpasses, in elements 
 of danger and heroism the fiercest fire battle that men 
 ever waged on the surface of the earth. They played 
 streams of water all day upon red-hot rock and into 
 boiling lakes, and the water ran at scalding heat from 
 the giant pumps. Sudden caves drove poisonous gases 
 upon them; they were paralyzed by fumes of sulphur, 
 antimony, and other minerals, and were sent up the 
 
THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 233 
 
 still smoking shaft, whose heavy timbers fortunately 
 had not been destroyed. 
 
 After thirty hours of continuous labour the firemen 
 and miners recovered twenty-three bodies. The fire 
 broke out again and again, with new jets of deadly 
 gas; it became evident that no life remained in the 
 ruins, and at last, after several days and nights of un 
 availing struggle in the three mines, the mouths of the 
 shafts were hermetically sealed and steam was forced 
 into them with all the force of the giant engines. Two 
 days later the shafts were opened and more bodies 
 found, but the fire broke out, and the mines were again 
 sealed. This alternation continued several times, for 
 the whole mining community was determined to recover 
 every body; but the firemen were brought up insensible, 
 even seventy-five days after the first outbreak of the 
 fire. The miners at last walled up the smouldering 
 fire on the eight-hundred-foot levels of Kentuck and 
 Crown Point, where it continued to burn for a year or 
 more. It is a well-authenticated fact that three years 
 afterward there was still red-hot rock in some of these 
 drifts. 
 
 The scenes that occurred in the mine when the fire 
 broke out were graphically told in the Territorial En 
 terprise and other newspapers, whose reporters inter 
 viewed every man who escaped in the first cage load 
 before smoke and gas had filled the shaft. The story 
 reads like a leaf from the destruction of Pompeii- 
 darkness, smoke, ashes, rains of fire, fatal vapours 
 asphyxiating the panic-stricken people of the submon- 
 tanic city. The Crown Point miners crowded in the 
 cage, where they hung to every bar in such wild con 
 fusion that the station keeper thought many of them 
 would be torn to pieces, and so held the cage until it 
 had only time to escape, remaining behind himself 
 
234 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 and losing his life. One miner, hastening toward the 
 shaft in the total darkness, all lights having been put 
 out by gas explosions, dropped on his knees and began 
 to crawl forward till he was at the edge of the shaft. 
 Several other miners ran up from behind, and he heard 
 them fall headlong into the deeps. 
 
 Outside, the scenes that occurred as bodies were 
 brought out of the volcano mouth, and, most of all, 
 when the order to seal the shafts was given, were such 
 as abide in one s memory for a lifetime. Wives, chil 
 dren, fathers, mothers, friends of the doomed men 
 were all there, adding their separate passions to the 
 awful grief and despair. Some wept, some wrung 
 their hands and cried aloud, some appeared as if sud 
 denly insane or stupefied and overwhelmed by the 
 calamity. Now and then a woman fainted and was 
 carried home by her friends, and ever the crowd grew 
 as the more remote cottages of the miners poured forth 
 wild women hurrying from washtubs and housework 
 to where the black smoke rolled forth, a sign to the 
 cities of the lode that precious human lives were being 
 lost in that vast dasdalian labyrinth a thousand feet 
 below. As each body was carried out, a wailing cry 
 rang through the crowd like the winter wind in Sierra 
 pines: " Who is it? " " Who is it this time? " Then 
 the wives of the missing miners came forward to look, 
 and some one shrieked recognition, and those that car 
 ried the dead sobbed as they turned back for another. 
 
 Later there were other fires. Explosions shook the 
 solid earth and hurled sheets of flame two thousand 
 feet along the drifts from mine to mine. Scorched 
 bodies were found beside the fire track, but miners in 
 the cross-cuts escaped. Again, some months after 
 ward, the Belcher air shaft caught fire. The men were 
 got out of the mine, but gas explosions that were heard 
 

 * - X 
 
 il 
 
 
 The Bottom of a Shaft. 
 
THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 235 
 
 a mile off and spurts of flame five hundred feet high 
 warned the superintendent that the drifts must be 
 closed or the whole mine would soon be a mass of 
 flames. He called for eighteen unmarried volunteers 
 for a desperate undertaking, and had great difficulty 
 in choosing among those that came forward. They 
 were hastily bulkheading the main drift near the burn 
 ing shaft when a large cave in the latter changed the 
 direction of the draught, and instantly a breaker of 
 white flame rolled forward through the drift. Nine 
 of the eighteen men " were hoisted out scarred and 
 crisp, their clothes burned from their bodies." A sec 
 ond gang of volunteers took the place of the first and 
 completed the bulkhead. 
 
 A remarkable struggle for life occurred in the Suc 
 cor mine, a little off the Comstock, on the Silver City 
 grade. Some miners who wished to " thaw out " their 
 frozen giant powder put a dozen cartridges on the en 
 gine boilers and went away. Pretty soon the cartridges 
 began to burn, throwing out jets of flame that rose to 
 the woodwork, and so the hoisting works blazed up 
 in a moment. The mine was a small one, and little 
 work was being done at the time; two men were down 
 in the shaft, five hundred feet below, and the hoisting 
 tub was there also. The car man and engineer shouted 
 to the men and shook the cable, but failed to make 
 them understand that they were in great peril. Then 
 the fire drove everybody out of the building. It was 
 soon in flames and fell in, and the timbers of the shaft 
 itself began to ignite. Of course every one knew that 
 there was no hope after that for the men below, who 
 could not escape suffocation. But two days later, when 
 the fire was put out and a gang of miners went down, 
 they found the bodies of the two men " at the pump 
 station," a recess in the side of the shaft. They had 
 
236 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 actually climbed two hundred and sixty-five feet by 
 clinging like snails to the corner timbers and slight 
 crevices. Foot by foot their marvellous journey was 
 traced, and it still remains an unequalled feat in the 
 annals of mining. They were in perfect safety in the 
 sheltered alcove until the poisonous gas from the burn 
 ing pine rose to that point and destroyed them. A 
 polite coroners jury a few days later said: " We must 
 strongly deprecate the custom prevalent in many mines 
 of warming giant powder on the boilers about the 
 works." 
 
 The spirit in which the miners meet peril and death 
 is almost uniformly the cool, careless fatalism of many 
 a war veteran. Some of their grim jests still ring like 
 the sayings of old Norse sea kings. A premature blast 
 in one of the mines once drove a foot-long splinter 
 through the hand of a timber man, through the lag 
 ging he was working on, and into the soft rock. " We 
 shan t need a spragg at this end, Bill! " was his cool 
 remark. A " spragg," be it understood, is a square 
 stick of wood six or eight inches long. One end is 
 put against the posts of the timbering; the other end, 
 slightly sharpened, is against the heavy planks, called 
 lagging. The pressure of the walls upon the planks 
 gradually forces them out, and the spraggs go steadily 
 through into the rock behind. When the planks reach 
 the post the men in charge take picks, relieve the pres 
 sure, and put in new spraggs. This system keeps the 
 main timbers from being broken. 
 
 A still more famous case of nerve was furnished 
 by a brawny young Cornishman who fell into a main 
 shaft. Twenty feet down he came to the pump station 
 out of which the old-style pump " bob-nose " pro 
 jected a little, and by agility, strength, and good for 
 tune he was enabled to seize it with both hands, and so 
 
THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 237 
 
 hung over the shaft, swinging from the slippery iron. 
 He made no outcry, knowing that he had been seen to 
 fall and that men would look down the shaft. When 
 a bucket was lowered and he was brought up he cast 
 a careless glance over his shoulder as he walked off and 
 said: " If ee ha nt caught hold of the bob ee d ha been 
 scattered all abroad by now! " 
 
 We have thus studied the toils and adventures of 
 the citizens of the real Comstock, the men of shafts, 
 drifts, winzes, and ore chambers. This strange hidden 
 realm begins to take shape in one s mind. It is truly 
 a city, but it is not like the cities of the surface, nor 
 can it be even measurably described by the terms and 
 phrases that apply to such cities. If the California 
 and Consolidated Virginia mines could be taken out 
 of the great lode and set on a plain, they would cover a 
 parallelogram thirteen hundred and ten feet one way 
 and about three thousand feet the other. The height 
 to which they would rise would be over three thousand 
 feet. Through the mass around and within it one 
 would see so many galleries and pathways that to re 
 move the whole body of material piecemeal would seem 
 easier than to construct a tithe of them. Everywhere 
 there are angles, curves, and irregularities, as veins 
 of ore have been followed. Everywhere the mass of 
 soft, mineralized matter mingled with hardest rock is 
 bored, patched together, upheld by braces, and kept 
 from instant collapse. These mines, moreover, are 
 only two out of many. The whole lode, if plucked 
 forth by the roots, would present similar characteris 
 tics, and, more than this, it would lean like the Pisan 
 tower, and the sides would run in and out like a top 
 pling, wave-worn cliff full of coves and promontories. 
 
 But the Comstock seems to me a more impressive 
 fact just as it stands, walled in by mountains and rooted 
 
238 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 
 
 BO deep that men may toil there through centuries 
 to come without reaching the bottom of its " fissure 
 vein." After meditating upon the paths, lanes, alleys, 
 roads, crossroads, and highways of the great group of 
 mines, rising by stairs on stairs, from level to level, 
 one is ready to grasp the completed conception of the 
 labyrinthian wilderness, where, in the midst of aban 
 doned acres of caves, pitfalls, and jungles of fungi- 
 overgrown timbers, lie masses of ore and yet-undiscov 
 ered bonanzas. 
 
 Imagine, then, a city built by fallen angels or by 
 the jinn and genii of Arabian legend. They have riven 
 the Himalayas, the roof -ridge of the world, and in the 
 vast cleft they have builded with stones and metals, 
 cell by cell, as the honeybee builds. Millions of years 
 the dwellers have toiled until the cleft, from palm- 
 land levels to where deodars grow in the edges of snow 
 drifts, is full and running over. At last the kingdom 
 of the genii is overthrown by some superhuman hero. 
 Wrath fully, then, the defeated ones rain fire and molten 
 rock down the Himalayan cleft, pile mountains over 
 head, and pass, black- winged, out of sight forever! 
 Still, traditions of the wondrous city live on in singers 
 tales, mingled with stories of heroes and the gods in 
 their high places; still, men s imaginations cling to 
 the legend. Then, in the fulness of time, treasure- 
 seekers come, tracking up a barren canon the faint 
 spatter of molten drops blown from towers of gold 
 in the wondrous city s conflagration. They tunnel 
 into the cleft, they sink shafts into measureless depths, 
 still molten with rains of fire, until they find and empty 
 the palace rooms of the princes and monarchs of a race 
 that existed before the generations of men. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE MINING COMMUNITY. 
 
 GKEATER than the city are the dwellers therein; 
 finer than all incidents and illustrations of the magni 
 tude and material wealth of the Comstock, are lessons 
 of human faith, courage, and ability to conquer every 
 obstacle, that are taught by the story of the mines. 
 For a period of time as long as an average life the 
 famous group has been training men to be miners; has 
 been creating specialized types of character in the 
 midst of a peculiarly courageous and intelligent com 
 munity. 
 
 Along the Comstock, year after year, the bonds of 
 common interest and sectional pride drew men closer 
 together in spite of strenuous rivalries. Periods of 
 bonanza replaced pioneer cabins with edifices of brick 
 and stone, terraced upon the hillsides. Periods of 
 borrasca welded social ties among those whose fortunes 
 were inseparable from that of the Comstock, even as a 
 trip hammer unites steel blooms into armour-plates for 
 girding iron leviathans of war. Men, women, and chil 
 dren learned to love the keen excitements, the splendid 
 physical activities, the perpetual outpourings of energy, 
 the virile, superb, passionate life of the mining camp. 
 
 Everywhere, almost unheeded, in the bustling, rest 
 less community, were the hidden elements of literature, 
 but, strangely enough, no world-famous tale of the 
 Comstock has yet sprung from the fertile soil. Here 
 
 239 
 
240 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 and there a few Californians have attempted to picture 
 the changing life of early Nevada before it passed away, 
 and brilliant local writers have photographed episodes 
 and single characters. But no great novelist seems 
 to have recognised the preciousness of the fast-passing 
 opportunity. Some day the story-teller will come who 
 can add another masterpiece to literature, as one long 
 dead but not forgotten once went to a crumbling adobe 
 house and a poor, despised race, and there wrote 
 Eamona. 
 
 Said a man who knew and loved the Comstocker: 
 " The person who only judges from the exterior has 
 no business in the camp. He will be picked up a little 
 too often for pleasure if not set down a little too heavily 
 for comfort. A man can have any game he wants, 
 whether played with a pack of cards or with pistols, 
 whether straight from the shoulder, or in kindness 
 from the heart." Dr. Gaily can also be called as wit 
 ness to the characteristics of the men of these and other 
 mountain camps: "They are not good people in the 
 Sunday-school view, but there is a spirit of charity and 
 a Saxon sense of fair play about them which is a sub 
 stitute. A deliberate insult to a woman or a child is 
 a bid for instant death, and the general verdict is, 
 6 Served him right! But no man here is any other 
 able-bodied person s guardian. Whoever wishes to go 
 to the dogs, goes to the dogs. There is no restraint, 
 or, as they express it, There is nobody holding you. : 
 
 Mining camps, large and small, openly wear their 
 worst side out. Whatever vice exists is open to the sun. 
 With much that is evil, there is also much that is noble, 
 and even heroic. Meanness is very scarce, and shams 
 of any sort are instantly punctured. " What do you 
 know? " is a common morning salutation, and " What 
 can you do?" expresses the habitual attitude of the 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 
 
 camp toward every stranger. Everywhere among this 
 great and peculiar race of men one finds a graphic, 
 broadly humorous, or quaintly burlesque use of words; 
 never in any part of the world has language been more 
 perfectly fitted to daily needs. Here are grotesque 
 idioms and ancient yet living dialects; here, also, is 
 Shakespeare s English, new-minted by the men of the 
 camp into homely phrases that have become American. 
 The frontiersman is here, but the backwoodsman has 
 been eliminated. One notices with surprise that these 
 men, and in fact all others in the camp, seem endowed 
 with an undismayed spirit of humorous buoyancy, 
 curiously common here to all temperaments, climatic, 
 consonant with the clearness, dryness, and purity of 
 the atmosphere, and yet so individualized as to be full 
 of a rare and inexpressible charm. 
 
 As for the workers in and about the mines, the 
 minutely classified body of men that form the real 
 nucleus of the camp and give it these distinctive fea 
 tures, no other group of men in America are more com 
 pactly organized, none show a keener intelligence, and 
 none are deeper-chested, stronger-limbed mountain 
 eers. Their abounding vitality and cool, steady cour 
 age (in the mining-camp term, " sand ") have received 
 abundant illustration in the preceding pages, but noth 
 ing has been said of their love and tenderness for each 
 other in times of need. Men become " pards," and 
 each one lives for the other, willing to die for him if 
 there is a chance, and that may come at any moment. 
 They take care of the sick with the gentleness and pa 
 tience of trained hospital nurses. It is a heroic fellow 
 ship at its best the social order of this masterful, 
 masculine community. 
 
 The underground miner as he goes about the 
 street is a well-dressed, clean person, who takes a 
 
242 TSE STOEY OF THE MINE. 
 
 daily bath and changes his clothing twice a day 
 once when his shift goes on, and once when it 
 comes off. He is calmly proud of his occupation, 
 in the purely professional spirit, but personally he is 
 as modest a man as one could wish to see; it is not at 
 all his fault that he is in his way an aristocrat among 
 working men. His life has made him a sane, thought 
 ful, responsible person as far as mining goes, no matter 
 how lawless of social conventions he may choose to be 
 in other directions. He knows himself responsible for 
 the lives of his fellow-workmen; his own life hangs 
 upon the honesty of another s work, and that other s 
 life hangs upon the honesty of his own work. A single 
 careless prop, a defective bolt or timber, any neglect 
 or lack of thoroughness, any laziness or ignorance, is 
 sure to bring calamity, and may bring death. There 
 fore this responsible professional personage is as stern 
 as Rhadamanthus in his judgments upon all that per 
 tains to his business. 
 
 No incompetent foreman can govern such men. 
 In a great fire at Crown Point, Senator John P. Jones, 
 then superintendent, found it necessary to cut a pipe 
 on the seven-hundred-foot level. It was midnight, and 
 almost continuously for five days and nights he had 
 been foremost in leading the dripping firemen and half- 
 naked miners through smoking, flaming, steaming 
 drifts. Jones and a young man went alone into the 
 level to drive a plate of steel through the pipe. They 
 worked for fifteen minutes in an atmosphere so deadly 
 that the lights almost failed them, and the miner could 
 hardly hold the plate. The lights went out as the last 
 stroke fell, and Jones carried his fainting, half-delirious 
 assistant to the main shaft and held him during the 
 ascent. When the hoisting room was reached he 
 dropped his burden on the floor and staggered blindly 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 243 
 
 to a bunk. Such were the leaders of the Comstock 
 miners. 
 
 One can hardly understand the curious ebb and 
 flow of mining life in its mingling of admirable reserve 
 with dangerous turbulence without long meditation 
 upon that troglodytic existence often so singularly 
 barren of colour and variety, and yet so inexorable in 
 its demands upon heart, hand, and brain. Men might 
 toil with dull persistency for months in a dark, dripping 
 vault, picking down a wall and wheeling out rock; one 
 twist of the pick might fill the drift with a foaming, 
 resistless river of water. The divine elements of mys 
 tery and passion were forever hovering near them. 
 Thus miners become, in the course of years of toil, 
 magnificent examples of the power of such environ 
 ment to stimulate the emotions and intellects of labour 
 ers, and to produce a people with vast capacities for 
 love and hate, for sarcasm and laughter, for terrible 
 wrath and for sublime self-sacrifice. 
 
 From the most ancient times, says Gamboa, the 
 toils of the mine have been a punishment for slaves, 
 a torment for martyrs, a means of revenge for tyrants. 
 The Belgians purposely called the mining shaft " la 
 fosse" the grave, and the Cornish pits were named 
 " coffins." This dreary and exhausting employment 
 makes men long for amusement; they become reckless 
 and yield to the strong and coarse temptations of min 
 ing towns. The staples of leisure-hour existence mean 
 to thousands deep drinking and high gaming. The 
 vast fortunes made and lost in mining stocks, and the 
 fluctuations in real values of the mines themselves, 
 insensibly warp the judgment and make the whole 
 community restless, eager, ever anxious for sudden 
 gains. A leading Comstock mine owner once said 
 that he " did not mind what wages he paid his men," 
 17 
 
THE STOBY OF THE MINE. 
 
 for " all the surplus " came back to him in his stock 
 deals. 
 
 The simple, childlike men of the mining camps 
 were quickly stirred for good or evil. During the war 
 the " sanitary flour sack " of Nevada became historic. 
 It began its career in an outside camp where an elec 
 tion bet was made that the loser should carry a fifty- 
 pound sack of flour through the town and donate it 
 to the Sanitary Commission. Gridley, to whom this 
 fate befel, put the sack up at auction, and $4,539 in 
 gold was realized. He then took it and started, in May, 
 1864, on a tour of the Pacific coast. When the famous 
 sack reached the Comstock, Mark Twain and Tom 
 Fitch made speeches, and the towns on the lode took 
 a holiday. Gridley, covered with flags, the sack of flour 
 on his shoulder, walked through the streets, escorted 
 by brass bands, military companies, carriages, horse 
 men, and the multitude. Silver City invested $1,800. 
 Gold Hill poured out $6,587, and when Gridley reached 
 Virginia City and mounted the platform with his won 
 drous sack the miners were determined to " play the 
 game for all it was worth." The Chollar miners, 
 through their spokesman, offered $500; Potosi miners 
 raised them, and so it rose by hundred-dollar leaps, 
 as group after group entered the contest, till the Gould 
 and Curry miners, to use their own phrase, " lifted the 
 rest of the boys out of their boots " by paying $3,500 
 in cash. Coin rattled like hail on the platform until 
 nearly $14,000 was raised. Men climbed over chairs 
 and emptied their pockets before Gridley. Accord 
 ing to the Territorial Enterprise, a " small brown bug " 
 crawling on a man s arm was caught, put up at auc 
 tion, and sold for ten dollars for the Sanitary Fund, 
 as a sort of side-show, while Gridley was still auction 
 ing off his flour. A person who jeered irreverently 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 
 
 at the bug, and also suggested that the money " had 
 better be given straight," was immediately thrashed 
 by an irate miner. 
 
 Nothing in the long story of the Comstock sur 
 passed the outburst of delight that took place upon 
 the surrender of Lee. The people " went wild in a 
 frenzy of emotion." Said one of the newspapers: " No 
 such drinking was ever before seen anywhere. In three 
 hours the majority of the men of the city were crazy 
 drunk, including many who were never before under 
 the influence of liquor, and were to be seen lying in 
 heaps. Business was entirely suspended, and the 
 printers, editors, and reporters being all drunk, no 
 papers were issued." Mark Twain himself could not 
 invent a more unique, plausible, and all-sufficient edi 
 torial excuse for not coming out on time. Eabelais 
 in all his madcap revels never depicted such " high 
 old times" as Virginia City saw that day. Men left 
 the saloons and walked the streets, drinking the healths 
 of the war heroes and of the war President until the 
 last reveller sank into maudlin sleep. A few days later 
 came the news of the assassination of Lincoln. Then 
 the men of the Comstock wept like children and draped 
 their houses and stores in black. Seizing a man who 
 muttered approval of the deed, they gave him thirty 
 lashes on the bare back, and were with great difficulty 
 restrained from hanging him. 
 
 Newspapers were very numerous in the Nevada 
 mining camps. Scores of brilliant and audacious 
 writers entered the new fields with able publications 
 whose scattered files will always remain the best con 
 temporary record, and often the only one, of many a 
 forgotten district long since abandoned to primeval 
 silence. The support that these journals received was 
 surprisingly liberal, and while the camps were pros- 
 
246 THE STORY OF THE MINE!. 
 
 perous they were bonanzas to their fortunate owners. 
 Before the Big Bonanza was exhausted more than a 
 hundred different newspapers had been started in the 
 scattered towns of Nevada, whose population was only 
 sixty thousand people. " Along the shore where these 
 dismantled journals were driven by adverse winds/ 
 writes one of the pioneer editors, " are buried many 
 absurd, strange, wonderful, and often tragic experi 
 ences." A few, a very few, of the old-time editors 
 survive, in a world as remote from their thoughts and 
 training as the thickly settled, railroad-gridironed 
 Sacramento Valley is remote from one of the white- 
 haired trappers of Siskiyou. Some of them, winning 
 a wider fame, left the Comstock, or Reese River, or 
 White Pine, decades ago; others, tired of the " festive 
 pistol s popping " and " a man for breakfast every 
 morning," have learned to plant orchards and vine 
 yards in the California valleys, and so lengthened their 
 days after the long service of pioneer journalism. 
 
 Hard and ceaseless that service was. Into every 
 new camp some wandering editor-printer went with 
 his press, types, and outfit, was noisily welcomed by 
 the miners, turned his mule loose on the hillside, and 
 began to pencil his announcement for the first issue 
 of the Prospect, Miner, Argent, Silver State, True Fis 
 sure, Reveille, Messenger, or whatever he chose to call 
 the new venture. The Silver Bend Reporter, started 
 in such a manner, in 1867, at a frontier mining village 
 in a rocky canon of Nye County, announced its advent 
 in language that was there considered a model of the 
 dignified style of salutatory: " Here, in this bright off 
 shoot of civilization, surrounded by a vast ocean of 
 wilderness, shall be a newspaper! In young, vigorous, 
 and beautiful Belmont we have settled." The Terri 
 torial Enterprise, the pioneer newspaper of the region, 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 247 
 
 had five men on the editorial staff and twenty-two 
 compositors. Five hundred dollars a month was the 
 salary of the managing editor. Mark Twain and Dan 
 De Quille were reporters. About this time Tom Fitch, 
 of the Union, challenged Joe Goodman, of the Enter 
 prise, to a duel in Six-Mile Canon. Mark Twain re 
 corded his disappointment in the next issue: " Young 
 Wilson and ourselves at once mounted a couple of fast 
 horses and followed in their wake at the rate of a mile 
 a minute, since when, being neither iron-clad nor half- 
 soled, we enjoy more real comfort in standing up than 
 in sitting down. But we lost our bloody item, for 
 Marshall Perry arrived early with a detachment of 
 constables, and Deputy-Sheriff Blodgett came with a 
 lot of blarsted sub-sheriffs, and these miserable, med 
 dling whelps arrested the whole party and marched 
 them back to town." 
 
 Columns of this sort of thing could be culled from 
 the pioneer newspapers of the Comstock in the days 
 of their glory, when their laughing and fighting 
 writers were the most virile, rollicking, merciless, ten 
 der-hearted quill-drivers in America. E. M. Daggett, 
 Henry Mighels, of Carson, Myron Angel, J. T. Good 
 man, and D. E. McCarthy were among the most famous 
 Nevada editors of the period, and nearly all of them 
 belong to the Comstock group of newspapers, where 
 they first exhibited their high literary abilities. A 
 little later, while these veterans were still in harness 
 and a younger group of writers such as Sam Davis 
 and Arthur McEwen were becoming known, the 
 press of Nevada contained more real Pacific-coast lit 
 erature and gave its writers more freedom of expres 
 sion than did the newspapers of California and Oregon 
 put together. 
 
 A pioneer newspaper office early in the ? 60 s is de- 
 
248 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 scribed as a rickety one-story frame building about 
 twenty feet wide. It contained an old-style Washing 
 ton press, cases, desks, and editor s table. A small 
 lean-to addition was the kitchen and dining room, and 
 sleeping-bunks like those in a ship s forecastle occu 
 pied one side. On cold winter nights the stove was made 
 red-hot, and the printers moved as close to it as possible 
 and " lashed old sacks around their feet with bale rope " 
 to keep themselves warm. When it rained the roof 
 leaked, and the dripping water was led over the cases 
 by strings, so many of which filled the upper part of the 
 roof that it looked as if hung with " webs of Brobding- 
 nagian spiders." Every one, down to the printer s 
 devil, had shares in some favourite mine, and boxes 
 full of specimens lay around in the corners. When a 
 prospector from the desert entered the office, editors 
 and printers dropped their work and gathered around 
 him to listen and ask questions. Many of these pioneer 
 newspaper men had done more or less prospecting them 
 selves. 
 
 Stories about Mark Twain, whose brother was Ter 
 ritorial Secretary, are countless in Nevada. He came 
 to Virginia City from another camp, where he had 
 been writing letters signed " Josh." When the first 
 steam press in Nevada started in the Enterprise office, 
 the " general mix-up of new press, newspaper, and bot 
 tles of wine " caused Twain to take among other things 
 what he averred was " a severe cold on his mind." He 
 staid at home and one of his chums took his place at 
 the local desk. The next morning the paper contained 
 an article purporting to come from Mark Twain, in 
 which he was made to make an abject and circumstan 
 tial apology to a large number of Virginia City news 
 paper men and other citizens whom he had at vari 
 ous times criticised. This document instantly cured 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 249 
 
 the "cold on the mind/ and Twain, resuming his 
 editorial chair, described its late incumbent as " a rep 
 tile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultiva 
 tion, no more Christian principle than animates and 
 adorns the sportive Jackass rabbit of the Sierras! " 
 
 But it was as legislative reporter that Clemens be 
 came a shining light of the times. Besides his sober, 
 everyday Senate and Assembly items, he concocted a 
 Third House report which pelted the Legislature with 
 incessant sarcasm. Member after member was made to 
 air his views in a grandiose burlesque of his favourite 
 expressions. After an excellent parody upon Senator 
 Stewart s famous speech against taxing the mines, the 
 president of this mythical Third House responded: 
 
 " Take your seat, Bill Stewart! I am not going to 
 sit here and listen to that same old song over and over 
 again. I have been reporting and reporting that in 
 fernal speech for the last thirty days, and I want you 
 to understand that you can t play it off any longer. 
 When I want it I will repeat it myself I know it by 
 heart, anyhow. You and your bed-rock tunnels and 
 your blighted miners blasted hopes have got to be 
 a sort of nightmare to me, and I won t put up with it 
 any longer." 
 
 Thus the humorist dealt undismayed with each 
 individual idiosyncrasy of the legislators, and made 
 them ridiculous throughout the length and breadth of 
 Nevada. When poor Larrowe, of Reese River, returned 
 to his constituency he was everywhere greeted with ad 
 miring quotations from the Proceedings of the Third 
 House, such as " Nine sceptred and anointed quartz 
 mills, sir, in Lander County already! " and the terse 
 presidential comment: "Plant yourself, sir! plant 
 yourself! I don t want any more yowling." 
 
 Leaving the newspapers, let us again turn to the 
 
250 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 mining class. The statistics for 1880 are typical of the 
 working force at a time when it was larger and better 
 organized than at present. At that time there were 
 2,770 miners employed, of which 770 were Americans, 
 816 were Irish, 640 were English, 191 were Canadians, 
 83 were Scotch, and the rest were " from everywhere." 
 Welsh, Swiss, Swedes, Slavonians, Danes, Belgians, 
 French, Australians, Manxmen, Norwegians, Portu 
 guese, and Bussians were represented. There was one 
 Finlander and one Laplander. Six more men were 
 married than unmarried. The average age was a frac 
 tion over thirty-six; the average height was five feet 
 nine and one fifth inches; the average weight was very 
 close to one hundred and sixty-six pounds. Classified, 
 lastly, according to employment, in thirty-nine distinct 
 occupations in and around the mines, the Americans 
 furnished a majority of the foremen, bosses, engineers, 
 firemen, carpenters, blacksmiths, and machinists. Both 
 the Irish and the English furnished more miners in the 
 technical sense than the Americans did. About eight 
 hundred men in all were needed in the small but im 
 portant occupations, such as masons, melters, pump 
 men, brakemen, lamp men, and a dozen others; nearly 
 two thousand were miners in the full meaning of the 
 term. 
 
 The organizations by which the Comstock miners 
 have maintained wages, have ruled in this respect under 
 all administrations, and still continue to rule, are sim 
 ply " Unions." At Virginia City, Gold Hill, and Sil 
 ver City their word long ago became law. On one 
 occasion a superintendent who had attempted to cut 
 wages was concealed in the home of a priest, or he 
 would have been torn limb from limb by the indignant 
 miners. No Chinaman was allowed in the mines under 
 any pretext. As time passed these remarkable Unions, 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 251 
 
 which had dictated to Stewart and his allies in the 
 days of the earlier bonanzas, reached out to greater 
 victories. When Sharon and the Bank of California 
 syndicate began to build a railroad to Virginia City 
 it was decided to use Chinese labour in grading. 
 
 Sharon controlled nearly everything, from the news 
 papers to the Legislature; but no sooner were his Chi 
 nese graders established in a camp near the Overman 
 mine than a committee of three hundred and fifty-nine 
 miners from the Union went out, four abreast, like 
 a military company, in two battalions, and descended 
 on the Chinese. The sheriff of the county ordered 
 them to disperse and return home. One man replied 
 that they would do so as soon as they were through, 
 and advised the official to sit down and watch proceed 
 ings. He halted them and read the Eiot Act, to which 
 they listened with grave attention until he had finished 
 that impressive document. Then they roared sealike 
 applause, gave three cheers for the " United States 
 of America," and marched on with loud Homeric 
 laughter. As they went along the course of the rail 
 road construction the Chinese deserted pick and shovel 
 and fled into the gulches. Not a shot was fired. The 
 " Committee " returned to report progress, and for 
 eight days not a Chinaman dared to do a stroke of work, 
 while the lordly Sharon was supplicating the Unions 
 to permit the resumption of railroad grading. Finally 
 he signed an agreement by which he removed the Chi 
 nese from the districts of Virginia City and Gold Hill. 
 
 The wage standard that the Unions insisted upon 
 was not less than four dollars a day for eight hours 
 labour. All workers in the mines, skilled and un 
 skilled, were put on the same arbitrary level. Their 
 one reply to every argument that if cheaper labourers 
 were employed in handling low-grade ores 5 more men 
 
252 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 could be given employment at the higher rates, has 
 been the curt statement, " Pay four dollars a day or 
 shut down the mines." 
 
 Four dollars a day was not unusual in the mines of 
 the Pacific coast at the time of the discovery of the 
 Comstock. When the cost of obtaining supplies is taken 
 into consideration, four dollars left the labourer less 
 surplus than two dollars in field work in the accessible 
 valleys of California, As the Comstock lode was de 
 veloped, only the best miners were employed, and others 
 went to newer districts, thus keeping down the supply. 
 The bonanzas were discovered at such intervals as to 
 give the best mines a large margin of profit, even when 
 paying such wages, and the stockholders, always anx 
 ious for immediate returns, were never willing to shut 
 down the mines long enough to secure a new body of 
 working men, even if they could thus break up the 
 Unions and greatly reduce the running expenses of 
 the mines. Indeed, there never was any united effort 
 to reduce wages, so violent and immediate was the re 
 volt against the slightest move in that direction, so 
 strongly were the Unions supported by the whole com 
 munity. Besides, in many if not all cases the tem 
 porary closing of a mine meant the flooding of it with 
 water, and perhaps years of costly efforts to pump it 
 dry again. The Unions held an impregnable fortress. 
 
 If there had been no stock market, and if careful 
 business men had been owners of the mines and had 
 held their shares as an investment first, last, and al 
 ways, no miners Union or mining community could 
 have prevented readjustment of the amount and the 
 distribution of the wage fund. The Comstock plan, 
 which paid the poorest and the best miners by the same 
 scale of compensation, would have given place to a 
 sliding scale fixed by the employers according to their 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 253 
 
 ideas of the labour market. The artificial standards 
 of the Union were only made possible by the unique 
 financial history of the great lode; by the millions of 
 dollars in unproductive assessments collected from 
 eager men and women of every rank in life through 
 out the Pacific-coast States and Territories; by the 
 splendid succession of bonanzas which created in turn 
 the fictitious paper bonanzas of the stock markets; 
 and, lastly, by the great money kings, Stewart, Jones, 
 Sharon, Ralston, Hayward, and the Bonanza Four. 
 
 Every observer of the Comstock in its palmy days 
 noted the universally high standards of living. Not 
 only the necessaries, but the luxuries of life formed 
 the daily fare of the miners. California and the ad 
 jacent valleys sent the choicest fruits, berries, vege 
 tables, milk, fresh butter, and stall-fed beef. Trout, 
 venison, bear, squirrels, quail, and grouse from the 
 Sierras, salmon from the Sacramento, ducks, geese, 
 snipe, and other wild fowl from the sloughs and bays, 
 and oysters from the Chesapeake, were everyday affairs 
 in the Virginia City markets. In 1876 the railroad 
 carried to the two towns in round numbers 400,000 
 pounds of fish, 350,000 pounds of poultry, 120,000 
 pounds of oysters, 1,020,000 pounds of eggs, 1,000,000 
 pounds of vegetables, and over 2,700,000 pounds of 
 fresh fruit. Hams of the best grade to be obtained 
 were a favourite article of food, and nearly 600,000 
 pounds were used. It is hardly necessary to continue 
 the list. No labourers ever lived on better fare. 
 
 The clothing worn by the miners at home and in 
 the streets was substantial and often elegant. Their 
 underwear, white shirts, and shoes were of the grade 
 preferred by the average storekeeper or landowner. 
 The unmarried miners lived in large, well-kept lodging 
 houses, the rooms of which were carpeted, heated, 
 
254: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 and comfortable. Bathrooms were universal, not only 
 in the lodging houses but at the hoisting buildings. 
 Board and lodging which cost forty or forty-five dollars 
 per month in bonanza times has been reduced by 1880 
 to thirty dollars, and even less. 
 
 Pay day on the Comstock comes weekly in some 
 classes of work, and the habit of squaring accounts on 
 Monday has grown up among merchants, so that Mon 
 day is still called " steamer day," a phrase borrowed 
 from pioneer San Francisco. The regular pay day of 
 the working miners is usually from the first to the 
 third of every month. The men, as they come up out 
 of the mine, go to the timekeeper s office and get their 
 accounts. Then they go to another office, where the 
 cashier or head clerk pays them. In the best Comstock 
 times Consolidated Virginia s monthly pay roll was 
 ninety thousand dollars, and three quarters of a million 
 dollars was paid along the Comstock every month to 
 the employees of the mines. Four dollars a day for 
 workmen counts up fast, and, besides, the engineers, 
 machinists, and a few others received five, six, and even 
 seven dollars a day. The railroad men, the mill men 
 along the Carson Eiver, and the lumberers in the moun 
 tains all receive their wages in much the same way as 
 the miners do, and the cities on the lode receive the 
 most of it back again. In many cases every man in a 
 mine leaves a dollar or two with the cashier, when he 
 draws his pay, for the family of some dead comrade; 
 in this way as much as two thousand dollars is some 
 times raised in five or six months. This is the miners 
 life-insurance system. 
 
 Chosen as the miners are the very pick of the 
 mining population of the Pacific slope they are young 
 and vigorous, but, as vital statistics show, they suffer 
 from pulmonary troubles. This is due to the sudden 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 255 
 
 change from the tropic lower levels of the mine to the 
 snow-covered, windy ridge of the town in winter. 
 " Many a man," says Mr. Lord, " reached his house 
 half-choked with pneumonia, and spitting blood." 
 The introduction of warm dressing- and waiting-rooms 
 at the hoisting works lessened disease, though the vitali 
 ty of the miners continued to be sapped by their exces 
 sive use of stimulants. Long after the big bonanza days 
 the average annual consumption of beer on the Corn- 
 stock was fifteen gallons apiece for every resident of 
 the county, and that of spirituous liquors was five gal 
 lons. The twenty thousand people spent annually 
 about nine hundred thousand dollars for beer, wine, 
 and ardent drinks. This was called by the saloon men 
 " a dry season," however, for they had seen the average 
 annual consumption of all classes of liquors nearly 
 three times as much. 
 
 The remarkable efficiency of the well-fed, well- 
 clothed, and contented miners of the Comstock has 
 been noted in previous chapters. There are no better 
 miners known to the craft, nor can any nationality 
 be said to excel. Working groups are usually made 
 up of men of several nations, for they accomplish more 
 in this manner. In 1877, in the California mine, 217,- 
 432 tons of ore were extracted and milled. This, it 
 has been estimated, was a daily average of 1.13 ton 
 for each man employed. The report of the company 
 gave the expenses of that year as follows: Hoisting 
 ore, $186,461; supplies, $357,101; salaries and wages, 
 $788,012 giving a total of $1,331,574. The 217,432 
 tons of ore brought up was lifted 1,600 feet and cost 
 at the surface $6.12 per ton. Mining authorities say 
 that this entire record is without parallel for cheapness 
 and efficiency under the given conditions. 
 
 Never were the self-reliance and sheer fighting 
 
256 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 capacity of the men of the Comstock "better shown 
 than during and just after the great fire of October, 
 1875. It began at six o clock in the morning in a low 
 lodging house kept by a woman called " Crazy Kate." 
 Scores of cheap frame buildings surrounded it, every 
 thing was like tinder, and a fierce gale was blowing. 
 People roused from sleep had barely time to escape 
 with their lives. The hoisting works lifted men out 
 of the depths as fast as possible, and miners and fire 
 men fought the flames. Vain task! The wind hurled 
 fiery missiles across the city, kindling fresh centres 
 of destruction, while the main torrent rolled on like a 
 lava river from Kilauea, hemming in the defeated 
 toilers. Great brick buildings tumbled, as in the Bos 
 ton and Chicago fires. The populace, yielding to 
 despair, fled to the mountains and there looked down 
 from barren rocks upon the destruction of Virginia 
 City. Out of the ocean of fire came the roar of ex 
 plosives as whole masses of buildings were blown to 
 pieces by gunpowder and dynamite stored within, or 
 were blasted out of the way by the heroic men, still 
 fighting as they retreated. Pillars of flame and the 
 mass of dark smoke were seen fifteen miles away. The 
 business houses, public buildings, hotels, banks, 
 churches, freight and passenger depots, and many pri 
 vate residences were in flames when the whole fighting 
 force was centred on the costly mine works. The 
 mountains shook with blasts of dynamite, clearing 
 open spaces about mills and hoisting works, but the fire 
 leaped over in a hundred places at once, caught lumber 
 yards and shaft houses, and swept nearly all the sur 
 face works of the mines out of existence in a few 
 moments. Millions of feet of lumber, thousands of 
 cords of wood, trestles, offices, roofs, machinery, in 
 flammable supplies of every description, threw out such 
 
THE MINING COMMUNITY. 257 
 
 heat that a pile of railroad car-wheels in the open air 
 in the Ophir yards were smelted together. The fire 
 began to creep down the great shafts, and here the 
 miners and firemen struggled in the midst of blazing 
 ruins until the mines themselves and the joint shaft 
 buildings of California and Consolidated Virginia were 
 saved. 
 
 About two thousand buildings were destroyed on 
 the lode, and ten million dollars would hardly have 
 replaced the loss. Car loads of cooked provisions, 
 blankets, and other supplies were started toward the 
 Comstock while the fire was still burning. Money was 
 telegraphed. Eelief committees were organized in 
 other towns and cities. Lumber was placed on the 
 smoking earth, still being wet by firemen. Electric 
 lights enabled the work of rebuilding to go on by night 
 as well as by day. In sixty days the people of Vir 
 ginia City were again settled comfortably. An extract 
 from the official report made by the superintendent 
 of Ophir will serve to show the stuff that men were 
 made of in old Comstock days: " On the day after the 
 fire men were sent to Carson and Dutch Flat, Cali 
 fornia, to procure and ship timbers; machinery was 
 telegraphed for. The new double-reel hoisting en 
 gine just completed for the combination shaft of the 
 Chollar-Potosi, Hale and Norcross, and Savage was 
 secured; the old engine foundations were torn out 
 and new ones constructed; work was prosecuted with 
 out cessation; supplies hauled a considerable distance 
 on account of the destruction of the railroad tunnel 
 and bridges; the works rebuilt and hoisting through 
 the shaft resumed November 25th, being inside of 
 thirty days from the time of destruction." The new 
 buildings cost nearly $318,000. Consolidated Virginia 
 and California, which had lost $1,461,000 by the fire, 
 
258 ME STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 replaced everything that was destroyed within fifty 
 days, and yet declared without delay their regular divi 
 dends. Consolidated Virginia paid out over two mil 
 lion dollars while rebuilding its works, for it was in 
 bonanza. These were extraordinary and indeed unpre 
 cedented feats of labour and capital. The city of mines 
 had come out gloriously under the fire test. 
 
 Such were the workmen, such the communities, that 
 once clustered in the rocky waste on the mountains 
 of Nevada. They are still the same, though since the 
 Big Bonanza was worked out the mines have paid 
 their owners poorly, and the towns have suffered much 
 more than in any former period of borrasca. Small 
 stockholders no longer carry the burden of assessments 
 as formerly, but a few large owners have been forced 
 to prop up the fallen market and sustain by their own 
 wealth the daring and still alluring speculation. None 
 except themselves can say how many more millions 
 of dollars these men will or can spend in the search. 
 What new problems are to be solved in deeps below 
 deeps, what magnificent metalliferous deposits may 
 rest undiscovered in the great fissure, no human 
 prophecy can foretell. 
 
CHAPTEK XXI. 
 
 THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 
 
 THUS far, the story has been a straightforward 
 narrative of events, from the days of the trappers to 
 the exhaustion of the Big Bonanza. Those Titans 
 whose plots and counterplots shook half a continent 
 are dead, or have forever left the Comstock. We have 
 fallen upon dark and narrow times, and yet, like a ship 
 long beating up some iron coast against unfriendly 
 winds, each headland we round may prove to be the 
 last cape that shuts us out from another prosperous 
 voyage. The spirit of the true mining men was never 
 so clearly present as it has been through the lesser epi 
 sodes of these sixteen weary years of the Silence of 
 the Comstock. 
 
 " She has another word to say. She is asleep, but 
 not dead." Thus spoke incarnate poetry to me from 
 the lips of one of the ancients as I stood on a gray 
 waste pile, looking out over the barren land. The 
 story ends with a question " What next ? " Is it to 
 become a land without a habitation, a mountain of 
 ruins like the ancient city forts of those unrecorded 
 miners of Mashonaland and the Golden Chersonese? 
 
 If thus it was now ended, how very far from a new 
 story it is when all is told. Nothing among the deeds 
 of gold-hungry men and wandering races of conquerors 
 could be less strange than this, and yet it covers so 
 large a space as to become almost an epic. Over and 
 18 259 
 
260 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 
 
 over again, great busy camps, becoming strangely 
 silent, have perished as frosted leaves. The cities the 
 miner has built who shall name or number them? 
 They are hidden in trackless deserts, luring genera 
 tions of prospectors to their deaths; they lie among 
 Andes and Himalayas, under glaciers, in tangled Cam 
 bodian forests, or, deeper still, where lost continents 
 are sunk in ocean s dreamless ooze. Not yet has that 
 hour of doom and oblivion arrived for the proud Corn- 
 stock, but the sceptre has already passed to younger 
 camps. 
 
 Visit with me the Comstock, then, in this year of 
 grace 1896 and let us briefly note the condition of af 
 fairs. We climb with the railroad from well-watered 
 Carson s sea-green circle, through wild gorges and 
 along the crest of ridges that look down upon thou 
 sands of prospect holes. Every moment the view 
 broadens and brightens. We climb through a barren, 
 lonely, forsaken land of strange, shining grays and 
 browns, clear cut ir a marvellously invigorating moun 
 tain atmosphere. The desert slopes endlessly away 
 from the eternal mountains, and a soft, golden glow, 
 like that which pervades one of Gerome s Egyptian 
 paintings lingers in the far east, across the yellow sands, 
 the silver sage brush. High peaks, treeless even to 
 their deepest canons, cold, severe, and yet so wonder 
 fully chiselled and rounded that the heart leaps to be 
 hold them, are ranged about the amphitheatre wherein 
 the cities of the Comstock were founded thirty-seven 
 years ago. All is revealed in successive landscapes, 
 as the railroad carries one upward from the valley 
 floor of the Carson itself a high plateau toward 
 these cities in the clouds, still strong and patient, still 
 able to endure until the end. 
 
 A little space farther and higher, and the train 
 
THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 261 
 
 swings along the side of that old-time Slippery Gulch, 
 down which the pioneers slid on rainy mornings, as 
 they climbed painfully, with more or less reprehensible 
 language, to their new-found placers on Gold Hill. 
 There, in the hollow and canon-crossed head of the 
 gulch, and on its precipitous sides, so steep that as one 
 explores the outlying streets his hand almost touches 
 the rise of the hill, the city of Gold Hill abides, and 
 all the world-famous South End mines of the Comstock 
 honeycomb the vein beneath it. 
 
 Although Gold Hill played a minor part in the 
 great trilogy of the Comstock, it shows, even more than 
 Virginia City, that most striking feature of the true 
 Western mining camp, the adoption of the natural sur 
 face of the earth, no matter how steep, rocky, or diffi 
 cult of access, as good enough to build upon. A little 
 levelling may have been necessary to keep streets and 
 buildings from rolling to the bottom of the gulches, 
 but as soon as the stern requirements of the law of 
 gravity were to some extent satisfied the pioneers 
 ceased the struggle. Every inch of ground that a house 
 can be made to cling to is occupied, and the roof of 
 one line of dwellings is often on a level with the base 
 ments of the next higher row. So strenuously have 
 men seized upon and utilized every point of vantage 
 that the houses seem piled on top of one another in 
 the centre of the town, while outside scattered dwell 
 ings climb the ridges like human beings, leaning for 
 ward against the slope and resting in groups. One 
 sees in such an old mining camp so much that seems 
 to subvert the ordinary laws of architectural stability, 
 so many leaning towers and walls, that he is fain to 
 believe that the whole mass of the town is in reality 
 bolted and iron-plated together and fastened to the 
 mountain slopes. In the deep horseshoe-shaped 
 
262 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 quarry pit a mile across that by some curious mis 
 nomer was called Gold Hill, neighbour can talk to neigh 
 bour almost as in a theatre, so wonderfully do whole 
 streets and blocks of buildings overhang those beneath 
 them. 
 
 This Gold Hill, this irregular and immense mass of 
 overcrowded structures, some of rough-hewn black 
 timbers, some costly and pretentious, but all mingling 
 with and actually jostling the shanties; these sheds, 
 barns, and rude cheap cottages; these bits of fence 
 and sidewalk; these crumbling steps leading from 
 street to street and from house to house, fitter for goats 
 than for human beings; these black chimneys, piles of 
 rusting machinery, high-roofed mills, and acres of 
 white and brown dump heaps encroaching on the town 
 or sloping away into gulches all give one a vivid 
 impression of what life was in the days when 
 the place was crowded to the brim. In those days 
 it was not a city in fact, nor yet a town; it was simply 
 one great communal dwelling or primitive apartment 
 house. It still has a communal aspect, for the lessen 
 ing population retires year by year from the outskirts, 
 leaving shanty after shanty to rot there, and occupies 
 the better buildings. 
 
 The railroad carries us through the Divide a few 
 hundred yards, and the last and greatest panorama of 
 the Comstock chain instantly sweeps into view. Sugar 
 Loaf and the Flowery Eange are fully revealed, the 
 North End mines and the historic metropolis of the 
 silver miners lie spread out on an irregular sloping 
 mound broken by ravines and hollows, rising to the 
 mountains of granite on the west, and sinking into 
 vast canons east. It is larger than Gold Hill, and slow 
 ly becomes more impressive, though not so immedi 
 ately picturesque. It lies marvellously open to all the 
 
THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 263 
 
 winds that blow, and they seem to gather here from the 
 western half of the continent. The city is a forest of 
 chimney pots of all shapes and sizes and every con 
 ceivable manner of patent, aimed at circumventing 
 winds of every sort, even perpendicular ones. Here 
 ends, almost in the heart of the town, this mountain 
 railroad flung out into a wilderness of rocks for the sake 
 of the silver mines, just as in California a broad, superb 
 stage road is flung twenty-six miles out into the Coast 
 Eange to carry passengers to the Lick Observatory, on 
 the top of Mount Hamilton. 
 
 What is the visitor s first impression, supposing that 
 he knows the past of the Comstock? Not disappoint 
 ment, but a poignant regret, almost strong enough to 
 be called a personal sorrow. Wreck, decay, abandon 
 ment, make the dominant note of the scene. Many of 
 the great mills stand idle over their vast gray waste 
 heaps, rotting slowly down to death and chaos. In 
 side, the stamps hang rusting in long rows, " hung 
 up," as the miners say. No clang and clatter is heard 
 no strong, deep roar of the massive machinery 
 that filled the canons and the crowded streets in 
 bonanza times with constant undercurrents of thrill 
 ing, pulsing sound night and day alike while mil 
 lions of dollars worth of bullion poured out of the 
 smelters. 
 
 The catastrophe for it is nothing less does not 
 seem to attract any one s serious attention, hardly be 
 comes formulated into a casual phrase. One is told 
 elsewhere that " times are dull on the Comstock," that 
 Virginia City " is not what it used to be." One hears 
 on the Comstock itself that " after a little things will 
 pick up " ; that there is plenty of good rock down in 
 the mines; that the trouble is with " the ring " the 
 speculators who are trying to control something or 
 
264: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 other; that pretty soon the lower levels will be pumped 
 out, and work resumed in that most torrid mining belt 
 known to modern science; that matters are nearly 
 ready for a great simultaneous revival of enthusiasm. 
 Nor is this merely the despairing cry of unacknowl 
 edged defeat; it is something almost too sacred to be 
 put into words. It is neither more nor less, in its higher 
 manifestations, than the sublime spirit of patriotism, 
 defending to the last the lonely mountain fortress of 
 the miner State of the Comstock. These men and 
 women who built Gold Hill and Virginia are uncon 
 sciously loyal to something that never took visible form 
 in the chain of American institutional development. 
 The township, county, and political state have not be 
 come as living realities to them as the laws, customs, 
 and social order of the Comstock. The cheerfulness 
 and even buoyancy, therefore, with which the com 
 munity as a whole maintains itself is something that 
 passes human understanding. 
 
 I stood and watched a man at the ore heap in a 
 mill. He was a very strong, tall man, blond-bearded, 
 with flakes of gray in his hair; a kindly, sweet-tem 
 pered mountaineer, and he knew the mill and mines 
 as a child knows the rooms of the house in which he 
 lives. " Our mine is doing a little better," he said with 
 a smile of pleasure. " They think up at Ophir that 
 they ll strike it rich before any one else, but maybe 
 they re mistaken about that." 
 
 Everywhere the same esprit du corps exists; it goes 
 far to explain the victories of the Comstock. Every 
 where, in spite of the real decay and wasting plant of 
 many enterprises, things are kept in some degree pre 
 pared for the expected revival of mining interests. In 
 outward appearances, the community has fallen upon 
 hopelessly hard times; but the potential capacity of 
 
THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 265 
 
 mines and mills is still enormous, and if large bodies 
 of pay ore were uncovered the really important proper 
 ties would almost instantly resume work at full speed. 
 After twenty years of borrasca, an air of constant readi 
 ness still pervades every department. The boys that 
 sharpen drills, the bosses and surveyors and superin 
 tendents, all dwell in this hopeful atmosphere and knit 
 themselves closer and closer to the thoughts of the 
 unknown mine depths. 
 
 Even while this chapter was being written these 
 unconquerable Comstockers made a discovery that may 
 prove a new bonanza. In previous chapters the forma 
 tion of the chain of mines has been described. In the 
 chapter on Sutro Tunnel it was explained that many 
 ledges were cut by that great adit, and that some of 
 these ledges might prove valuable. As it happens, 
 there is a wide ledge of rock, rich in a few places on 
 the surface, that lies east of and parallel to the Corn- 
 stock, the centre ridges of both lodes being perhaps 
 a mile apart, and the lodes possibly uniting somewhere 
 in the depths. The long-neglected ledge, the Bruns 
 wick, will now be thoroughly explored from end to 
 end a work of many months. Ore now taken out of a 
 three-foot vein in the extension of Chollar and in Hale 
 and Norcross territory is very rich, and much resembles 
 Comstock ore. Being drained at a depth of 1,600 feet 
 by the Sutro Tunnel, water can be handled cheaply 
 should bonanzas exist in the Brunswick, and it is pos 
 sible that in a few years a fourth line of deep-mine 
 works will be built far east, beyond the long-neglected 
 third line of shafts. 
 
 The future is a " sealed seed plot/ and no one 
 knows what has been sown therein for these great 
 hearted Comstock miners. But how dramatic a pos 
 sibility it is, that while all the world is being stirred by 
 
266 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 the extraordinary mining events of recent months, not 
 only in America, but in nearly every other country 
 under the sun, the ancient strength of the Comstock 
 is perhaps about to return! 
 
CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 THE AMERICAN MINER OF TO-DAT. 
 
 THE American miner of to-day is toiling steadily 
 on, in his countless camps, making history more rapidly 
 than ever before. The yield of our mines fluctuates 
 to some extent, but every decade shows enormous gains. 
 According to official statistics, the total value of the 
 mineral products of the United States in the two years 
 1893 and 1894, the last period for which we have au 
 thoritative data, was, in round numbers, $1,169,000,000. 
 This includes the metals, iron leading in value, with 
 silver, gold, copper, lead, and zinc following in the 
 order named; it also includes fuels, structural ma 
 terials, abrasive materials, minerals used for chemical 
 purposes, mineral pigments, and many miscellaneous 
 products of our mines. 
 
 The vast growth of all departments of American 
 mining industry can be plainly illustrated by a few 
 statistics. In 1845 the entire United States produced 
 but 100 tons of copper; in 1890 a single mine, the 
 Calumet and Hecla of Michigan, produced 26,727 
 tons; in 1894 the total product of the United States 
 was 158,120 tons. The world-famous Calumet and 
 Hecla has produced over 500,000 tons of copper since 
 its discovery and has paid nearly $45,000,000 in divi 
 dends. In 1825 the lead product of the United States 
 was but 1,500 tons; the notable Illinois and Missouri 
 deposits brought this up to 30,000 tons in 1845, but 
 the annual yield sank to 20,000 tons, and far below, 
 
 267 
 
268 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 until Eureka, Leadville, Coeur d Alene, and other 
 great groups of mines carried it to the maximum of 
 1893 some 230,000 tons. Similar illustrations might 
 be given in every other department of mining. As 
 far as civilization is concerned, the iron industry is 
 the most suggestive of all. According to Mr. Birken- 
 bine s monograph on Production of Iron Ores (United 
 States Keports), the approximate total iron product 
 of the world is 57,000,000 tons, of which the United 
 States, ranking by far the first, produces 16,300,000 
 tons. 
 
 Such impressive sum totals may serve to illustrate 
 the greatness of these rapidly developing underground 
 industries. Better, however, are glimpses of a few of 
 the newer American mine groups which are making 
 fortunes for men, especially from the precious metals. 
 The Cripple Creek district is situated upon some 
 rounded hills from seven to twelve miles southwest 
 of Pike s Peak, Colorado, at an elevation of from 9,000 
 to 10,800 feet. Some early prospectors organized 
 Mount Pisgah district here in 1874, but failed to 
 handle the ores at a profit. An excitement occurred 
 in 1884, when 5,000 people camped here on " salted " 
 claims. Some of these claims afterward proved to be 
 valuable, though sold on false pretenses. Along in 1890 
 numbers of tenderf eet, or " alfalfa miners," as the pros 
 pectors called them, began to take up claims in the 
 twice-abandoned camps. After a while, by a little 
 stream in the aspen thickets, a lame burro, a dog with 
 a broken leg, and a man with a broken arm are said to 
 have given the chief camp its name. Notable discov 
 eries were soon made, changing penniless men into 
 millionaires, and by 1894 the Cripple Creek excitement 
 was something wonderful to see. 
 
 Cripple Creek mining towns have continued to 
 
THE AMERICAN MINER OF TO-DAY. 269 
 
 grow since then; ten or twelve camps, with a total 
 population of some 25,000, lie within an area of six 
 teen square miles. Something like a hundred mines 
 are shipping ore to the cyanide-process mills at Flor 
 ence, on the Arkansas. The mines in 1892 yielded 
 $600,000; in 1893, $2,100,000; in 1894, $3,000,000; 
 and in 1895, nearly $8,000,000. This one district has 
 made Colorado the leading gold-producing State in 
 the Union, the total output of gold in 1895 being $17,- 
 340,495. 
 
 Another district attracting attention is the Mercur 
 of Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains, where a Govern 
 ment mule, kicking a piece of rock, revealed the gleam 
 of gold to a lucky teamster named Allen. Here, and in 
 the adjacent Tintic range, are rapidly growing camps, 
 producing half the precious metals of Utah. 
 
 But perhaps no portion of the great mineral belts of 
 America is being more rapidly developed at present 
 than California, long to some extent neglected, and 
 yet possessing many very famous mines and enormous 
 undeveloped resources. The noted Idaho and Eureka 
 ore body yielded over $11,000,000 in seventeen years, 
 and paid over $5,000,000 in dividends. The Hayward, 
 the Keystone, and the Oneida of Amador; the Massa 
 chusetts and the Gold Hill of Nevada; the Sierra 
 Buttes; the Plumas Eureka and the Standard Consoli 
 dated, are equally familiar names to California gold 
 miners. About eighteen thousand miners are regularly 
 employed in twenty-four hundred well-established 
 mines, in different parts of the State. The Pacific coast 
 north of Mexico, and including Nevada and Arizona, 
 has fully a thousand stamp mills, carrying about fifteen 
 thousand stamps and costing, with other machinery, 
 fully $20,000,000. Half of this investment is in the 
 State of California. 
 
270 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 The American prospector, cheerful and energetic 
 as ever, is at work in hundreds and thousands of once- 
 abandoned camps, whose ledges could not be profit 
 ably worked by old methods. He is busy revealing new 
 treasures in the islands of Unga and Unalaska, in camps 
 along the Yukon, in the south-coast Alaskan gold 
 fields, and in British Columbian districts, such as Cas- 
 siar, Caribou, and Eossland. Prospectors are searching 
 mile by mile the mountains of Washington, Oregon, 
 and California, all the way down to the Mexican line. 
 The entire length of the great Rocky Mountain min 
 eral belt is being prospected more vigorously than ever 
 before. Only the other day, out in the Mojave desert, 
 a large district was found, where placer gold and rich 
 quartz veins abound and new camps are there being 
 established. One of these is called the Randsburg. 
 As usual, stories of the rediscovery of the long-lost 
 " Gunsight " and " Pegleg " mines come from various 
 parts of the desert. Every issue of the mining journals 
 contains hundreds of items from new camps, illustrat 
 ing the toils and triumphs of the prospector as he tests 
 surface gravel claims, or tunnels for ancient river chan 
 nels under lava beds, as in Idaho, or finds in all sorts 
 of unheard-of places the gleam of minerals, useful or 
 precious. 
 
 Much has been said in this book about the pros 
 pector, and more might justly be added, for he still re 
 mains the pioneer, differing in essential details from 
 the miner, the speculator, and the capitalist. He 
 lives a free, careless, outdoor life, and he has blazed 
 the trail for others all the way from Missouri and Texas 
 to Alaska and California. Though better fitted for his 
 work than he was fifty years ago, and better supported 
 by those who make fortunes from his discoveries, the 
 American prospector of to-day has not essentially 
 
THE AMERICAN MINER OF TO-DAY. 271 
 
 changed; he is still a wide traveller, an heroic adven 
 turer, a man of infinite resource and homely, well-tried 
 virtues. Sometimes, like Dick Gird, he reaches a dis 
 trict " with a pair of blankets and six dollars in money," 
 and finds a million-dollar mine; sometimes, like Major 
 Beading, he " loads a train of mules " with gold nug 
 gets from new placers, but far more often than other 
 wise the wilderness, which takes him to its heart, 
 sweetens his many hardships with such devotion to 
 his chosen work that all his life he searches for hidden 
 treasure, and rarely makes more than his grub stake. 
 
 The whole American mining field broadens year by 
 year, not only on the frontier, but in many of the staid 
 and long-settled communities. Perhaps, with improved 
 methods, even the gold deposits of the Appalachians, 
 from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas and Georgia, can be 
 profitably worked on a large scale. The best authorities 
 declare that the cost of roasting and chlorinating ores 
 in a hundred-ton plant is now less than three dollars per 
 ton. By the cyanide process it is even less, in ores 
 adapted to this useful method. A few years ago these 
 processes cost ten dollars and even twenty dollars per 
 ton, but large bodies of low-grade ores, long necessarily 
 neglected, can now be handled with profit. 
 
 So promising are recent developments that it would 
 not surprise mining authorities if the annual gold yield 
 of the United States, British Columbia, and Alaska 
 reached the hundred-million-dollar mark by the close 
 of the century; nor does it seem unlikely that the total 
 yield of different countries will add to the world s gold 
 stock within the next ten years more than $2,500,000,- 
 000. A period of higher property values and of larger 
 business prosperity is clearly indicated by this astonish 
 ing revival of mining interests. Evidently the story 
 of the miner and his mines will go on for ages to come. 
 
272 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 
 
 I may say, in closing, that there has never been a 
 time when so many attractive and important books 
 upon mining were being published by specialists. Be 
 sides the United States Government Annual and Census 
 Reports and the invaluable volumes of the leading 
 mining and engineering periodicals of America and 
 Europe, I note among recent publications RothwelPs 
 Mineral Industry, Statistical, etc., a masterpiece of 
 work; Eissler s Metallurgy of Gold, largely devoted to 
 new processes; Hatch and Chalmers s Gold Mines of 
 the Rand; and Kemp s Ore Deposits of the United 
 States. Really monumental works upon the history, 
 mechanics, and metallurgy of mining are each year 
 appearing in greater numbers. The noble industry 
 of which I have given only a glimpse is in the hands 
 of highly trained specialists, and everywhere, from 
 the arctic circle to the auriferous conglomerates of 
 South Africa, these specialists are shaping its magnifi 
 cent future. 
 
 (7) 
 
 THE END. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 EAR I 5 12CG T 6 
 
 
 JBJ2 66 RCO 
 
 
 , ,. - , : 
 
 :., ^ 
 
 p 
 yc :.;-- * 
 
 rrniDKiFrY TO 
 
 
 
 
 JUL ( >2 1972 
 
 
 IOAN AHC 
 
 
 
 . . 3 1973 2 
 
 4 
 
 
 
 
 VT^H^- 
 
 REffDTS MAK 
 
 
 
 
 
 LD 21A-60i-10, 65 
 (F7763slO)476B 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley