Mile-High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode

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The Perfect Monster

The Comstock rush began as an outlet for the California gold fields, where too many prospectors were trying to strike it rich at the same time. In 1850, restless 49ers heard that gold had been discovered east of the Sierra Nevada, forty miles from Lake Tahoe, in a part of Utah Territory called Washoe after a local Native American tribe. On reconnoitering, they found deposits in Gold Canyon, a gulch in Sun Mountain (soon to be renamed Mt. Davidson), about five miles from the Carson River.

The setting was hardly the kind that halts pioneers in their tracks, eliciting cries of "Let’s build a town here." The mineralized area wasn’t much to look at: dry and drained of most colors other than blue (sky), brown (dirt), and gray (rock). Nor was the weather accommodating: aridity combined with the thin, high- altitude air to deliver hot, piercingly sunny days followed by deeply cold nights, with strong winds sharpening the extremes. Before the region could be mined profitably, its remoteness would have to be overcome and its safety assured from Native Americans, not, as it turned out, the namesake Washoes but the more formidable Paiutes. But such challenges lay in the future. For now, the prospects looked good enough to warrant a gamble: some miners began dividing their time, laboring in the Sierra Nevada foothills during the winter to finance summer forays to Gold Canyon.

Among the sojourners were two brothers, Hosea and Ethan Allen Grosh, who deserved far better than what life had in store for them. The sons of a Universalist minister in Pennsylvania, the Groshes were

. . . of medium height, slight in figure, good- looking, fairly well educated, very quick of observation, ready with expedients [i.e., resourceful], gifted (especially Allen) with exceptional powers of original thought, thoroughly honest and honourable, absolutely devoted to each other, industrious, persevering, chaste, sober, and, above all, "filled with that genuine religion of the heart which is the salt of the earth."

The exemplary young men had gone through a lot simply to reach the West, traveling to Mexico by ship and crossing that country on horse back only to get stranded eighty miles from the Pacific when the fellow handling their transportation ran out of funds. To secure passage to San Francisco, they sold their horses and gear. When they landed in California in August of 1849, Hosea, the younger brother, was suffering from dysentery, and Ethan had to nurse him back to health before they could set out for gold country. The brothers shook off these setbacks and joined other 49ers in California’s El Dorado County.

On a visit to Gold Canyon in 1853, the Groshes spotted a vein of silver. Setting themselves the goal of "get[ting] a couple of hundred dollars together for the purpose of making a careful examination," they based their plans on a fundamental difference between the mining of gold and silver. In the classic scenario, a 49er with a mule, a grubstake, and a few tools would work placer deposits: loose gold that he isolated by using a pan to scoop up sand from a streambed, then giving the pan a flipping motion to separate out lighter detritus from heavier "color," or specks of gold. With luck, he would be able to follow these specks upstream to the mother lode from which they had eroded. Having "located" (put boundaries to) a claim that embraced the lode, he would stake it, record it with the local registrar of claims next time he went to town, start excavating, and give the resulting mine a name. He might also go so far as to build himself a rocker (a wooden trough with ridges on the bottom to capture gold nuggets carried along with the sand and water sluicing through), but even with that extra, the pro cess was what we would now call low- tech.

Not so the mining of silver. The claiming pro cess was the same, but how you got to that point was quite different. Silver tends to occur in compounds called sulphurets and is often trapped in silicon dioxide, or quartz, which must be broken down before the precious metal can be extracted. Comstock silver generally took the form of silver chloride, appearing as blue- gray rock or blue- black sand, and streams were not in the habit of pointing the way to it. When other prospectors at Gold Canyon uncovered this foreign matter mixed in with the gold they were chipping out of lodes, they dismissed it as that "damned blue stuff," but the Groshes knew better and kept returning to Gold Canyon. On November 3, 1856, they wrote home to announce the discovery of two veins of silver, one of which they rated "a perfect monster."

What the Groshes didn’t realize was that they had stumbled upon only the monster’s tip, which lay above and at the edge of a subterranean zone where the foot of Sun Mountain came into contact with strata of uplifted rock. There volcanic forces had forced molten material containing gold and silver up into fissures, where it had slowly cooled and solidified, leaving a broad belt of ore that stretched for two miles, roughly north– south, although interspersed with sections of worthless rock called "horses." (The horses were to cause much trouble in Comstock country, by delaying recognition of a basic truth: the ore formed a more or less continuous vein or ledge rather than a cluster of discrete deposits.) But the Groshes were pleased enough with what little they could see. The following summer, counting on funds promised by a cattle- trader in the Carson Valley, they were trying to master the complexities of silver mining when they learned that their would- be benefactor had been murdered.

They pressed on anyway until, on August 19, 1857, Hosea swung a pick carelessly, puncturing his foot just below the ankle. Ethan applied poultices, but gangrene set in, and two weeks later Hosea was dead. Ethan wrote pitiably to his father:

In the first burst of my sorrow I complained bitterly. . . . I thought it most hard that he should be called away just as we had fair hopes of realizing what we had labored for so hard for so many years. But when I reflected . . . what a debt of gratitude I owed God in blessing me for so many years with so dear a companion, I became calm and bowed my head in resignation. "O Father, Thy will, not mine, be done."

Another letter, sent a few days later, shows that despite his strong faith, Ethan was inconsolable: "I feel very lonely, and miss Hosea very much— so much that at times I am strongly tempted to abandon everything and leave the country forever, cowardly as such a course would be. But I shall go on. . . . We have, so far, four veins. Three of them promise much."

In addition to his emotional loss, Ethan was in the hole for the expenses of Hosea’s funeral. By the time he’d worked enough to pay off the debt, it was late in the year to be trekking back to California. Accompanied by a friend, a young Canadian prospector named Richard M. Bucke (the author of the above tribute to the brothers’ "exceptional powers," etc.), Ethan set out on November 20. A snowstorm hit as the pair neared Lake Tahoe. Conditions became so dire that they killed and butchered their donkey for food and, when their wet matches fizzled out, lit a fire with the powder flash from their gun. A second storm followed, their gun wouldn’t fire anymore, and they sought warmth at night by burrowing into the snow. By day, they staggered along the middle fork of the American River. Bucke wanted to "lie down and die," but Ethan rallied him.

By December 6, the two men were so weak that they spent a good part of the day on their hands and knees. As Eliot Lord related in his Comstock Mining and Miners, "From daybreak till noon they had crawled less than a mile and their eyes were closing from overmastering faintness, when they heard the bark of a dog and saw a thin wreath of smoke in the air." They were taken in by miners at a camp fittingly called Last Chance. It came too late for Ethan, though: twelve days later, he died. Bucke survived, but at the cost of having one foot and part of the other amputated. He also lost his taste for prospecting. After recovering, he returned to Canada, where he became a distinguished physician, later the superintendent of a mad house, and the source for Lord’s account of the 1857 ordeal.

Despite failing to realize their dream, the Groshes occupy a pivotal spot in Comstock lore. It’s not quite right to credit them with discovering the Lode (when Hosea died, they were homing in on a tributary deposit that never amounted to much) but they were the first to recognize that this was primarily silver country, in which a new and more complex kind of mining would be required.

What happened next marks the difference between sentimental fiction and callous reality. In a novel written by Horatio Alger or Zane Grey, the energetic, loving brothers would have been the ones to put the great silver deposit— the Grosh Bonanza, as it might have been called— on the map. Instead, the founders were a couple of characters remembered as lowlifes. The first was Henry "Pancake" Comstock, a man so peculiar that he was reputed to be a half- wit (his nickname came from his habit of frying up pancakes because he was in too much of a hurry to bake bread). In fact, however, he seems to have been a scheming blowhard. In January of 1859, he happened upon two placer miners in another cleft in the side of Mt. Davidson, Six Mile Canyon, a mile or so north of Gold Hill, the settlement that had grown up above Gold Canyon. The miners were one party out of many working the area, but Comstock liked what he could see of their chosen terrain. In what was probably a bold- faced lie, he asserted that they were trespassing on property he’d already claimed as a "ranch." Unless you mean to raise reptiles, it’s hard to imagine a site less suitable for ranching than that barren slope. But the pair couldn’t prove him wrong, so they did what might be expected of men who live for luck and aren’t looking for trouble: they shrugged and let him in on the action.

The nascent mine was called the Ophir, after a bountiful gold mine in the Bible, but in an early American example of how the bold shall inherit the earth, the loquacious Comstock made it inseparable from himself. "When visitors came, it was always my mine and my everything," a local newspaperman wrote of Comstock’s egotism. By sheer persistence, the loquacious Comstock got his name attached to the whole mining district that sprang up around the claim.

The other alleged good- for- nothing to make a lasting impression was a prospector named James "Old Virginia" Finney, who named the new town that evolved out of the camp thrown together above Six Mile Canyon. Perched about halfway up the mountainside at 6,200 feet above sea level, the site at first went by the utilitarian handle "Ophir Diggings." According to a story told by Pancake himself, " ‘Old Virginia’ was out one night with a lot of the ‘boys’ on a drunk, when he fell down and broke his whisky bottle. On rising he said—‘I baptize this ground Virginia.’ " With the added "City," this is how the town sitting on top of some of the Comstock Lode’s richest ore has been known ever since. (The name "Virginia" also stuck to the mountain range of which Mt. Davidson is the highest peak.)

Traces of these founding worthies can still be found among the records of the Storey County Court house. (Virginia City became and remains the county seat whereas the more conveniently located Carson City won out as state capital.) Notice Book C consists of loose pages gathered into a binder and protected by plastic sleeves, but the handwritten entries were originally made in a blank book shelved behind a bar. An 1859 notice refers to "the supposed Quartz Vein discovered by Mr. Pancake Comstock & Co.," although in another entry, a deed of sale, the flapjack-lover styles himself "H. Comstock." On October 21, 1859, Finney signed a notice of sale with an X, described as "his mark"; the man was obviously illiterate. A barroom was a handy place to file records— too handy, as it turned out. Miners liked to take the book down and fiddle with the boundaries of their claims to reflect what they’d learned by following ore deeper underground. That second- guessing contributed to the chaos that provoked an infamous series of Comstock lawsuits.

With Comstock himself yakking on the sidelines, the gold miners worked their and his claim for several weeks, discarding pieces of gray- blue rock as they went along. (The Groshes had confided their opinion that this was silver- bearing ore to a few friends, but it wasn’t general knowledge.) Not until July did the truth come out. A visiting rancher walked off with a chunk of the dark rock, which he passed on as a curiosity to a judge in Placerville, California. The judge took the stone to a local assayer, who put a value of $876 per ton on its gold content, and $3,000 on its silver. Although His Honor meant to keep the find a secret, he couldn’t contain himself. Word flew up and down the Sierra foothills: the "damned blue stuff" commingled with the gold being chipped out of Six Mile Canyon wasn’t so accursed after all. It was late in the season to be striking out for high country, but a small mob of fortune- hunters reached Gold Hill in time to extract $275,000 worth of gold before winter set in.

Such a robust number whetted appetites back west, and the following spring the rush resumed in full spate, a lengthy queue of humanity wending its way from California gold country and beyond.

Writing for Harper’s Monthly Magazine, an indefatigable traveler named J. Ross Browne gave an eyewitness report of the tumult in progress:

An almost continuous string of Washoeites stretched "like a great snake dragging its slow length along" as far as the eye could reach. . . . Irishmen wheeling their blankets, provisions, and mining implements on wheel- barrows; American, French, and German foot passengers, leading their heavily- laden horses, or carrying their packs on their backs, and their picks and shovels slung across their shoulders; Mexicans, driving long trains of pack- mules, and swearing fearfully, as usual, to keep them in order; dapper- looking gentlemen, apparently from San Francisco, mounted on fancy horses; women, in men’s clothes, mounted on mules or "burros"; Pike County specimens, seated on piles of furniture and goods in great lumbering wagons; whiskey- peddlers, with their bar-fixtures and whiskey on mule- back, stopping now and then to quench the thirst of the toiling multitude; organ- grinders, carrying their organs; drovers, riding, raving, and tearing away frantically through the brush after droves of self- willed cattle designed for the shambles; in short, every imaginable class, and every possible species of industry, was represented in this moving pageant . . . all stark mad for silver.

Browne himself had made the trip mostly on foot, walking more than one hundred miles on soupy roads and potholed trails from Placerville to Carson City, where he caught a stagecoach that took him the last few miles to the Comstock. Traveling conditions were so daunting that suppliers could charge outlandishly high prices for their wares. A fellow named Moore got hold of some pack mules and loaded them up with what he thought miners would want. He guessed right: reaching Virginia City on March 31, 1860, he "sold two hundred dollars worth of drinks before nightfall. Forty men paid him a dollar apiece per night for the use of blankets and space enough in his tent to sleep in. Moore refused eight thousand dollars for his goods, which had cost him less than one fifth as much." The men (and some women) kept pouring in, day after day, month after month; two years later, a San Francisco newspaper estimated that nine hundred fifty wagon teams regularly brought in freight to serve the townspeople’s needs. A year after that, the number of teams had tripled.

Despite having got the jump on this human flood, neither of the region’s namesakes managed to parlay his early luck into durable wealth. Finney sold his Gold Canyon interests and moved to nearby Dayton, where in July of 1861 he got drunk and tried to ride a bucking mustang. The animal threw him, and he fractured his skull. Within hours he was dead, leaving a mere $3,000 behind. Comstock sold his Ophir claim for just under $10,000, took a wife but couldn’t keep her, ran a store that failed, and returned to prospecting. Unable to duplicate his Mt. Davidson success, he went slowly insane and committed suicide in Montana in 1870.

He and Finney weren’t the only pioneers left behind. A survey conducted seventeen years later showed that of the original Comstock claimants, "half of them were dead, most of the remainder were living in reduced circumstances, and none were rich." Some prominent mines were obviously named after human beings— the Gould & Curry, for example, and the Hale & Norcross— but few could remember who they were. Yet Finney, Comstock, and the others weren’t necessarily chumps for selling out. As Lord noted, they were placer miners who "knew nothing of underground mining or of the methods of reduction of silver ores, and were too poor or too impatient to undertake any systematic course of exploration. . . . Weighing the chances of gain and loss as they stood in 1859, the prospectors had no cause to reproach themselves for lack of foresight." Which is to say that silver mining is apt to be a complex and capital- intensive endeavor, and the Comstock was saving most of its bonanzas for an oligopoly of speculators and managers who could pool resources, share risks, trade inside information, and finance far-reaching technological innovations. It was a rush tailor-made for the big- time capitalism of The Gilded Age.

The influx of fortune-seekers and their suppliers gave Virginia City and environs a population of 3,000 in the 1860 census, but it was less a human settlement than a glorified prairie dog town wedged into the steep face of Mt. Davidson, where the streets were laid out parallel to the slope and named A,B,C, and so on. The immediate setting was desolate. Mark Twain, who was there from 1861 to 1864, said it looked "something like a singed cat, owing to the scarcity of shrubbery," and another journalist, Alf Doten, on hand starting in the summer of 1863, groused about the surrounding landscape: "[mining] is all this Territory is good for— not worth living in." As noted earlier, the very atmosphere was hostile. The town’s mile- plus elevation left it prey to penetrating sunlight by day and deep chills at night. Strong westerlies, called Washoe Zephyrs, cuffed residents even on clear summer days; in winter, the gales could be savage.

A no-nonsense observer described the zephyr’s effects as follows: "Such a wind rips boards, shingles, and sheets of tin from buildings, tumbles stovepipes and chimney pots down the gulches, and fills the air with flying gravel." To the irrepressible Twain, however, the zephyr was a gas. Here is his spoof of the blustery havoc it wreaked in Carson City (elevation a mere 4,730 feet): "hats, chickens, and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sagebrush, and shingles a shade lower; door- mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats, and little children on the next," all the way down to "a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots." One can only imagine the kind of debris with which he might have stocked the air layers above loftier Virginia City.

Excerpted from High Bloods by Dennis Drabelle.

Copyright 2009 by Dennis Drabelle.

Published in July 2009 by St. Martin’s Press.

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