THE GREAT BONANZA
"You certainly started young enough in the prospecting game," said
Owens, when Jim told of his birth in a mining camp, "and have you been
at it all your life?"
"Ever since I was big enough to twirl a pan or rock a cradle!"
"How do you mean rock a cradle?" queried Clem. "I thought you were in
the cradle!"
"Not that kind, boy," Jim answered, "what I'm meanin' is a miner's
cradle, or a rocker, as some calls it. I gradooated from one to
t'other."
"What's a miner's cradle, then?"
"It's a scheme to make pannin' easier. Pannin' is durn hard work,
Clem. You're squattin' on your hams beside a river all the day long,
you got to hold a pan full o' earth an' water at arm's length an' down
at an angle what nigh tears your arms out o' their sockets, an' then
keep revolvin' the mixture with a circular twist that wrenches the
muscles somethin' cruel. I've seen big men, tough uns, too, fair
cryin' from the pain, at first.
"Not only that, but you got to work the sodden lumps o' dirt soft wi'
your fingers, so's the grit gets right into the skin. Your hands are
wet nigh all the time. The grit an' the constant washin' o' the water,
in all weathers, cracks the skin all over, so's it's bleedin' most o'
the time. You got to have hands like a bit o' rawhide to stand it.
"The cradle does the work quicker'n' easier, but it takes three men to
work it right. It looks like a child's cradle from the outside, though
most o' them I've seen was made pretty rough. About six inches from
the top there's a drawer, or sometimes jest a tray, with a bottom o'
iron, punched wi' holes o' different sizes, accordin' to the kind o'
dirt you're workin' in. If your pannin' out don't show no big grains
o' gold-dust, why, you keep the holes o' the cradle small, otherwise,
you got to have 'em bigger. Below that drawer is another one, slopin'
like. It hasn't got no holes. It has cross-bars or cleats, what we
call 'riffles,' to keep the gold from washin' away.
"One man digs up the pay dirt an' chucks it in at the top o' the
cradle. Another dips up bucket after bucket o' water, continuous, an'
sloshes it in; it's his job, too, to break up the soft lumps an' keep
stirrin' the pasty mess, an' to keep the cradle full o' water. The
third man goes rock, rockin', without stoppin', hours at a time.
Mostly, the pardners spell each other off."
"But I should think a good deal of gold would be washed away by that
system," objected Clem, "surely the rocking must dash some of it over
the riffles."
"Some does go," Jim agreed, "but a gang can handle so much more pay
dirt in a day that it more'n makes up. Three men with a cradle can
handle twice as much dirt as the three men workin' separately would,
each with a pan. Team work pays, in minin'--if you can trust your
pardners.
"Just about the time I was born, Father made pardners with five other
prospectors, all pannin' on the Carson. Their claims were all in a
string, one after the other, so they figures on makin' a sluice.
That's jest a long trough. In richer an' more settled camps they're
made of iron, length after length, all ready to be fixed together like
a stove-pipe, but on the Carson, they was jest hollowed-out logs.
"Sluices was always a foot deep, a foot an' a half wide, an' as long
as could be made, slopin' slightly, so the water wouldn't run too fast
or too slow, an' wi' riffles every few inches all along. The six
claims I'm tellin' about give a chance for a sluice over a hundred
foot long. To save the trouble o' liftin' water up in a pail, or
pumpin' it, Father made a sort o' small flume, leadin' from the river
higher up right into the sluice, so's the water would run continuous.
"Bein' there was six o' them, the pardners worked three shifts, eight
hours each. One man dug the dirt, wheeled it in a barrow to the head
o' the sluice an' dumped it on a wooden platform. The other shoveled
it into the sluice, stirred it up, an' broke up the lumps when they
got pasty. Eight hours o' that was a day's work, I'm tellin'! Mother,
she cooked an' washed for all six men, aside lookin' after me. Wi'
meals to be got for all three shifts, she was kep' busy.
"The sluice didn't stop runnin', day nor night, for a month at a
stretch. Then the water in the flume was turned off, the sluice,
riffles an' platform were scraped clean wi' knives, an' all six
pardners panned the scrapin's. That was the clean-up. It was divided
by weight o' dust into seven equal parts, Mother gettin' a man's
share."
"Didn't they use any mercury at all on the Carson?" queried Owens.
"After a bit, our gang did. Not until each man had a bag o' dust set
aside, big enough to buy a few weeks' grub, though. They'd all got
badly bit in Californy, an' quicksilver cost a lot o' money in them
days."
"What's the quicksilver for?" queried Clem.
"To catch the gold. If you spread it on the riffles it seems to grab a
hold o' 'color' like glue, an', what's more, nothin' but gold'll stick
to it."
"Why is that?"
"I don't know," Jim answered, a bit irritably, "it does, that's all."
Owens interposed.
"You can't blame Jim for not knowing why, Clem," he said. "So far as
that goes, I don't believe any chemist in the world can tell you
exactly why quicksilver catches gold. It does, though, sure enough.
But I can show you how it does it, in a way.
"You know that if iron is exposed to damp air, it turns red with rust?
That is due to the chumminess or the affinity of iron with oxygen. You
know if silver is exposed to city air, where the burning of coal in
furnaces and fireplaces sends a sulphurous smoke into the air, it
turns black? That's due to the fact that silver is a natural chum of
sulphur. Chemically speaking, they make compounds easily.
"It's the same way with mercury, or, as it is generally called,
quicksilver. Gold and quicksilver are chums, and the minute they get
together they join to form a mixture which is called an amalgam.
That's one of the great discoveries of the age. Gold-mining has taken
a big jump forward since that was found out.
"You can see yourself how that would work. Whether with a pan, a
cradle, or a sluice, the only thing that enables a miner to separate
the gold from the worthless dirt is that the gold is smaller and
heavier. But suppose the gold dust is so fine as to be invisible, it
will be so light as to wash away easily; if it is in fine flakes, the
flakes will almost float. All that light gold would be lost in the
dirt that flows out of the bottom of the sluice, the tailings, as they
are called.
"In the days that Jim is describing, two-thirds of the gold was lost
that way. Every one, absolutely every single one of the forty-niners
would have made a fortune, if the chemistry of gold had been as far
advanced then as it is to-day. Even now, men are working over with
profit the tailings that the forty-niners threw away.
"Suppose, now, you make your sluice, cover the bottom of it and the
riffles with copper plates to hold the quicksilver better, and then
cover your copper with quicksilver. What happens when the dirt and
water come flowing down the sluice? The riffles will catch your heavy
gold, just as well as before, and the quicksilver will catch a lot of
the light gold that used to escape. You've got your gold in the
riffles, then, and you've got a mixture of gold and quicksilver which
has formed an amalgam.
"Now, the mixture has to be made to give back that gold. First of all
it is pressed through canvas or buckskin in order to get rid of the
liquid quicksilver, which will pass through the weave of the first and
the pores of the second, leaving inside only such of it as has firmly
allied itself with the gold to form the amalgam.
"The next thing to do is to put this amalgam into a retort, out of
which leads a long pipe, and to subject this retort to intense heat.
Quicksilver is vaporized at a comparatively low temperature--for a
metal. It is driven from the amalgam in the form of vapor, much as
water may be driven off in steam. The quicksilver vapor passes along
this long pipe, which leads to several coils placed in a tank of
running cold water. The cold chills the vapor, condensing it into the
liquid state again, and the quicksilver runs out of the end of the
pipe, ready for use once more. The pure gold is left.
"But, even with the use of quicksilver on the sluice there was still
40 per cent. of the gold that got away. For many years there was no
practical way of recovering this loss, and the chemists of the world
tore their hair in despair. What was needed was to find some other
chum of gold, even more affectionate than mercury. The chemists found
this new friend, at last, in cyanide, which is a salt of prussic acid.
Cyanide, Clem, is an arrant flirt, as I'll show you, in a minute.
"Nowadays, the tailings, after passing over the long sluice or flume,
and after having dropped the heavy gold in the riffles and given some
of the light gold to the quicksilver, are led to a huge churn. There
the earth and water are pounded together into a sort of slime. A wheel
lifts this slime into a movable chute from which it is poured into a
series of vats or tanks. These tanks contain cyanide, which has
already allied itself with a chum--potassium.
"But cyanide likes gold even better than it does potassium, and, as
soon as the slime strikes the vat, the cyanide lets go the potassium
and clings to the gold. Cyanide of gold is formed. So far, so good.
But what the miner wants is pure gold.
"The cyanide is pumped up out of those tanks into another chute, which
pours it into a second lot of tanks, fastened to the side of which are
large bundles of zinc shavings. The cyanide liked the gold better than
the potassium, but it has the bad taste to prefer zinc even to gold.
It releases the gold and flies to the embrace of the zinc. The gold,
suddenly deserted of the friendship of the cyanide, powders down to
the bottom of the tank, in absolutely pure form, ready to be melted
down into bars. By other processes, which I won't bother you by
describing now, the zinc is released from the cyanide, and the cyanide
is led to its old friend the potassium, ready to begin work anew. So,
you see, nothing is wasted.
"This process, and this only, has made the astounding wealth of South
Africa, for, as I told you, the reefs there are of very low-grade ore,
so low that Jim, here, would have turned up his nose at it. The
modern ability of chemists to get out the tiniest particle of gold
that lies in the most stubborn rock has made the Rand a richer region
than a prospector's wildest dream."
"If I'd known all that, forty years ago, I'd be a rich man now," said
Jim, regretfully.
"You'd have been a millionaire, ten times over," Owens agreed, "but,
since it hadn't been found out, you couldn't have known it. But did
you always stick to gold, Jim? That Carson River country has got more
silver in it than it has gold."
"Don't I know it? 'Ain't it been rubbed into me, good an' hard? Father
wasn't a cussin' man, noways, but he couldn't keep his tongue in order
like a man should, when he got to talkin' about silver. He threw away
any amount o' high-grade silver ore, while huntin' for gold. The
richest silver mine in the whole world, I reckon, was found less'n a
hundred yards from where he'd been pannin'.
"It was the same ol' story--he didn't know enough! Workin' hard may
bring a man some money, but havin' savvy will bring him a lot more.
"Right where Father was workin', he was havin' all sorts o' trouble
wi' a heavy black sand that kep' on fillin' up the riffles like it was
gold. He shoveled away cubic yards of it! An' do you know what that
was? That dirty black sand was nigh pure silver, an' Father was
pannin' less'n quarter of a mile away from the richest section in all
Nevada. He was campin' right on the Comstock Lode! I reckon you've
heard o' that, Mr. Owens!"
"Every mining man has heard of the Comstock," the mine-owner replied.
"Personally, I don't know a great deal about silver, although the
Broken Hill mine, New South Wales, which is nearly as rich as the
great Nevada deposit, is located not far from my home. I went straight
from gold to coal. So I never did hear the real story of the Comstock.
But you ought to know about it, Jim. Was it found by accident, too?"
"Rank good luck an' rotten bad luck mixed," Jim answered. "Do I know
that story! The first week's pay I ever drew was on the Comstock. An'
I was born, as I told you, near enough to throw a stone right on to
the Comstock outcrop. This was how it begun!
"There was two prospectors, Patrick McLaughlin an' Peter O'Riley,
Irishmen both, what had been pannin' gold on Gold Canyon, where, I
told you, Father had been. Luck was poor. Grub was hard to get. The
water o' the Carson had a strong taste, an' wasn't none too healthy.
So the two pardners started diggin' a water-hole down in the gulch,
near where they was workin'. What come up out o' the hole was a yellow
sand, all mixed up with bits o' quartz an' a crumblin' black rock,
much the same as the black sand Father'd been worried with.
[Illustration: THE MINER'S SLUICE.
Such a device as this was being worked by Jim's father when the
Comstock Lode was discovered.
_Courtesy of Netman & Co._]
[Illustration: PANNING GOLD ON THE KLONDYKE.
Typical summer scene on the junction of the Eldorado and Bonanza
Creeks; "color" showing in both pans.]
"Now a prospector'll wash any durn dirt he sees, an' O'Riley, while
waitin' for some bacon to fry, chucked some o' the yellow an' black
sand in a pan an' give it a twirl or two. You can reckon he jumped
some when the pan showed color. He yelled to McLaughlin an' the two o'
them got busy. Every pan showed color, not big, but enough. The
cleanin' up wasn't what you'd call rich but it was steady, an' there
was any amount o' pay dirt in sight. The two begin to fill their
buckskin bags wi' dust, right smartly.
"Then a low-down, dirty, ornery coyote of a man, Henry Comstock by
name, come amblin' along. A shifty critter was Comstock, trapper,
fur-trader, gambler, claim-jumper, mine-salter, sneak-thief, an'
everything else. He see O'Riley an' McLaughlin cleanin' up the cradle
an' guessed they'd struck it rich. Lyin' glibly, like the yaller dog
he was, he told the prospectors he was the owner o' the land, an' made
'em give up their claims. They went on workin', but on small shares.
The hole got deeper, but by-'n-by got hard to work because this seam
o' black rock got wider'n wider as it went down. Riley an' McLaughlin
dodged the rock, the best they knew how, findin' gold enough to pay
for workin' in the loose dirt on either side.
"One or two other prospectors drifted up that way, though the pickin's
was small. One o' them, wonderin' what the black rock might be, an'
havin' a hunch it might be lead it was so heavy, put a chunk in the
hands of an assayer in Placerville.
"The expert couldn't believe his eyes, at first, an' thought some one
was playin' a joke on him. His assay showed a value o' $3,000 per ton
in silver an' $800 per ton in gold. He assayed one or two other bits,
wi' the same result. Here was millions, jest beggin' to be picked up!
Folks got wind of it, right away. That was in November, 1859, too late
in the winter to cross the high Sierras into Nevada.
"The rush started a-hummin', early in 1860. 'Frisco was fair frothin'
at the mouth. It was a long trail, an' the silver-hungry crowd
couldn't wait. Some o' the craziest got away as early as January. They
caught it heavy!
"From Sacramento up the old emigrant trail to Placerville weren't no
gentle stroll in winter time! From Placerville to the bottom o'
Johnson Pass was a trail for timber wolves, not for humans. Snow lay
thick. Winds, fit to freeze a b'ar, come a-howlin' down the high
Sierras. A few men got through an' froze to death on Mount Davidson,
the silver actooally ticklin' the soles o' their feet. Some got caught
in slow-slides in the Johnson Pass an' their bodies didn't show up
till June. A lot more died o' starvation an' exposure on the way.
"That didn't keep the rest from comin'. They fair stormed the Pass. In
March there was a thaw, an' the flood o' men broke through.
"It was a bad crowd. Aside from decent prospectors and miners, there
was a pack o' gamblers, saloon-keepers, 'bad men,' fake speculators,
an' all the rest o' the human buzzards that follow on the heels of a
rush. They remembered the first days o' the forty-niners, an' every
bad egg in Californy wanted to be the first to murder an' to rob. In
three weeks, the silent an' deserted slopes o' Mount Davidson was
peppered wi' tents. Virginia City had been started an' had become a
roarin' town.
"That wasn't a minin' camp, it was a hell-hole. I've seen tough joints
in my day, but Virginia City beat all. It wasn't jest the miners lost
their heads, but experts, geologists, an' all, went plumb crazy.
'Twasn't much wonder. That black rock was jest one continooal bonanza.
A gold mine was a fool to it.
"The ore in one of the shafts--the Potosi Chimney, it was called--was
rangin' steadily over a hundred dollars a ton silver, an' that shaft
alone was bringin' up 650 tons a day. Three prospectors tapped the big
lode at another point, near Esmeralda, worked a week an' took six
thousand dollars apiece for their claims. The man who bought first
rights on Esmeralda, sold them before the end or that summer, for a
quarter of a million. An' yet McLaughlin an' O'Riley havin' given up
their claims to Comstock, got nothin' out of it. As for Comstock, he
filed a false claim of ownership which the courts wouldn' give him,
an' he went down an' out.
"The Gould & Curry mine, one o' the richest, was bought from its
finders for an old horse, a bottle o' lightnin'-rod whisky, three
blankets, an' two thousand dollars in cash. After four millions had
been taken out of it, an Eastern syndicate come along an' bought it
for seven millions o' dollars--an' they made money out of it, at that!
Six years after the openin' o' the Gould & Curry, there was 57 miles
o' tunnels, all in rich ore, an' the owners had to work it like a coal
mine, leavin' great pillars o' silver to prop up the roof!
"A telegraph line was run through an' that made Virginia City ten
times worse. It weren't a town o' miners, rightly, not like a gold
placer camp. Silver ore needs capital to work it, an' Virginia City
become a town o' loose fish, speculators, crooked brokers, an'
suckers. One man sold the Eureka mine to eight different people at the
same time, an' he'd never even seen the place an' didn't own a claim
in it. He pocketed eighty thousand dollars in eight days an' was
strung up to the limb of a pine-tree the ninth!
"There was some good work done, though. Durin' 1861 an' 1862
road-makers was busy, though laborers was gettin' fancy prices. But
the engineers kep' at it, an' afore the winter o' '62, there was a
wide road where two eight-mule coaches could cross each other at full
gallop without slacking the traces. Tolls were high, so high that the
road-makers got all their money back in the first year. Crack coaches
with relays made the trail from Sacramento to Virginia City in twelve
hours, instead of six weeks, like it was first. Hold-ups were frequent
an' plenty, but a 'road agent' didn't last long where every one
carried a gun.
"Then come the 'year o' nabobs,' that was '63. The Comstock Lode put
out over $26,000,000 in silver bullion alone, half-a-million dollars
o' silver every week in the year. By that time there was forty big
minin' plants operatin' wi' steam machinery. There weren't no place
for a small man any more, unless he wanted to do minin' on days'
wages, an' mighty few o' the early prospectors ever got any o' the
later wealth o' the Comstock. Father, he wouldn't touch silver, nohow,
but he made more'n the miners did by pannin' the dirt the mines were
throwin' away. They were makin' so much money out o' silver that they
wouldn't bother to take out the gold.
"Then come the first big smash. Half o' the mines sold to the suckers
weren't worth shucks. Wild-cat mines, they called 'em. There was one,
the Little Monte Cristo, which give the promoter half a million
dollars in shares which he sold to folk in New York an' Philadelphy.
An' they never made more'n an 8-foot pit in it an' didn't take out
enough bullion to melt down into a silver spoon!
"What was worse, the big mines got down to the rock water-level. At
first, they run little tunnels, what they called 'adits' from the side
o' the mountain an' drained that way. That wasn't no good, much. They
soon got below that. The lode got richer the farther down they went
an' some o' the big companies took to pumpin' out the water. Right
away, they started in to lose money. It cost more to pump than the
silver was worth. The boom dropped with a thud.
"Then Adolph Sutro come along. He was a big man was Sutro, one o'
these here engineers folks talk about. He offered to build a drainage
tunnel from the foot-hills o' the Carson Valley, just above the river
smack into the heart o' the lode, a distance o' four miles, tappin'
all the mines. He figured that, if it weren't done, all the mines'd
get flooded an' all the wealth o' Comstock'd go to smash.
"Seein' things were going' so bad, the mine-owners balked at first.
After a while, though, the water come in so free that they all agreed
to give him two dollars a ton for all the ore raised from the mines,
providin' his tunnel drained 'em all, an' providin' he fixed it so
that they could get men an' material through the tunnel, instead o'
having to pull it all up the shaft. It took Sutro six years to get the
capital, but he got it. He begun work in '71. Toward the end o' the
job the work was so hot an' tough that he doubled his rate o' wages,
an' in '77, bein' eighteen years old then, I started operatin' a drill
in the tunnel. I was thar on the day that we broke through."
Few engineering feats in the history of mining are more famous than
the making of the Sutro Tunnel. In one of the publications of the
U. S. Geological Survey, Eliot Lord has told its story of perseverance
and triumph.
"Sutro's untiring zeal," wrote Lord, "kindled a like spirit in his
co-workers. Changing shifts urged the drills on without ceasing;
skilled timberers followed up the attack on the breast and covered
the heads of the assailants like shield-bearers.
"The dump at the mouth of the tunnel grew rapidly to the proportions
of an artificial plateau raised above the surrounding valley slope;
yet the speed of the electric currents which exploded the blasts
scarcely kept pace with the impatient anxiety of the tunnel owners to
reach the lode, when the extent of the great Consolidated Virginia
Bonanza was reported; for every ton raised from the lode was a loss to
them of two dollars, as they thought.
"Urged on by zeal, pride, and natural covetousness, the miners cut
their way indomitably towards the goal, though, at every step gained
the work grew more painful and more dangerous.
"The temperature at the face of the heading, had risen from 72 deg
(Fahr.) at the close of the year 1873 to 83 deg during the two following
years; though in the summer of 1875 two powerful Root blowers were
constantly employed in forcing air into the tunnel. At the close of
the year 1876, the indicated temperature was 90 deg and, on the 1st of
January, 1878, the men were working in a temperature of 96 deg.
"In spite of the air currents from the blowers, the atmosphere before
the end of the year 1876 had become almost unbearably foul as well as
hot. The candles flickered with a dull light and men often staggered
back from their posts, faint and sickened.
"During the months preceding the junction with the Savage Mine, the
heading was cut with almost passionate eagerness. The miners were then
two miles from the nearest ventilating shaft, and the heat of their
working chamber was fast growing too intense for human endurance.
"The pipe which applied compressed air to the drills was opened at
several points and the blowers were worked to their utmost capacity.
Still the mercury rose from 98 deg on the 1st of March 1878 to 109 deg on
the 22nd of April, and the temperature of the rock face of the heading
increased from 110 deg to 114 deg. Four shifts a day were worked instead of
three, and the men could only work during a small portion of their
nominal hours of labor.
"Even the tough, wiry mules of the car train could hardly be driven up
to the end of the tunnel and sought for fresh air not less ardently
than the men. Curses, blows, and kicks could scarcely force them away
from the blower-tube openings, and, more than once, a rationally
obstinate mule thrust his head in the end of the canvas air-pipe. He
was literally torn away by main strength, as the miners, when other
means failed, tied his tail to the bodies of two other mules in his
train and forced them to haul back their companion, snorting
viciously, and slipping with stiff legs over the wet floor.
"Neither men nor animals could long endure work so distressing.
Fortunately, the compressed air drills knew neither weariness nor
pain, and churned their way to the mines without ceasing.
"A blast from the Savage Mine tore an opening through the wall, in the
evening of that day. The goal for which Sutro had striven so many
years was in sight. He was waiting at the breach, impatient of delay,
and crawled, half-naked, through the jagged opening, while the foul
air of the heading was still gushing into the mine."
Meanwhile, over the heads of the workers of the Sutro tunnel, a not
less marvelous change had come over the Comstock Lode. This was the
discovery of the Great Bonanza. After the slump of 1864 and the
terrible handicap of the water, mine-owners on the Comstock fell
deeper and deeper into despair. Gone were the wild days of riot and
extravagance. Only by extreme care, by the use of every modern
appliance, by the lowering of wages--some thirty pitched battles, with
six-shooters, marked this period--were they able to keep going at all.
Then, just as two Irishmen had first found the Comstock, two other
Irishmen forged to the front. These were John W. Mackay, who had begun
work as a day-laborer in the mine, and James G. Fair, a young fellow
who had come to Virginia City with only a few hundred dollars'
capital. They made a daring team. Seizing the opportunities of the
dull times, they bought property after property as it was abandoned by
the owners, who declared that the great lode had "pinched out." With a
third Irishman, Wm. O'Brien, and a 'Frisco miner, James C. Flood, they
bought the entire stretch between the two famous mines--the Ophir and
the Gould & Curry--thus forming what became known to history as the
Virginia Consolidated. The four men paid $50,000 for this huge
property; risking their all on the chance that deeper mining might
reach the supposedly "pinched out" vein.
They sank a shaft, down, down and down,--nothing! They ran a drift to
meet it from one of their purchased mines, and drilled for
weeks--nothing! Then a thin seam of ore appeared, but so small as to
seem insignificant. Fair pursued this vein. A quarter of a million
dollars were eaten up in chasing this elusive line of ore but the vein
would neither disappear nor get wider. Fair's partners tried to insist
on running galleries in various directions to explore--and did so for
one month while he was ill--but Fair returned insistently again to
that thin thread of silver. There was one place where it was only two
inches thick. And then, in October 1873, the miners cut suddenly into
the Big Bonanza.
"No discovery," wrote Lord, "to match this one had ever been made on
this earth from the time when the first miner struck a ledge with his
rude pick. The plain facts are as marvelous as a Persian tale, for the
young Aladdin did not see in the glittering cave of the genii such
fabulous riches as were lying in the dark womb of the rock.
"The wonder grew as the depths were searched out foot by foot. The
Bonanza was cut at a point 1167 feet below the surface, and, as the
shaft went down, it was pierced again at the 1200-foot level. One
hundred feet deeper and the prying pick and drill told the same story,
yet another hundred feet, and the mass appeared to be swelling. When,
finally, the 1500-foot level was reached and ore richer than any
before met with was disclosed, the fancy of the coolest brains ran
wild. How far this great Bonanza would extend, none could predict, but
its expansion seemed to keep pace with the most sanguine imaginings.
To explore it thoroughly was to cut it out bodily; systematic search
through it was a continual revelation."
The wealth revealed was beyond believing. This Bonanza, alone, yielded
$3,000,000 of silver every month for the first three years.
Yet it was hard to win. Mackay believed in high wages and paid more
than double the wages given to any miners in any place in the history
of the world. All were picked men, who had passed a severe medical
test. The hours were short. The men worked naked save for a loin-cloth
and shoes to protect them from the hot rocks. The heat reached 110 deg.
Three men, who stepped accidentally into a deep pool of water, were
scalded to death. The air was foul. The toil was severe.
Yet ever, the deeper they went, the richer grew the ore. When, at
last, Mackay, Fair, O'Brien, and Flood sold their holdings, the
Bonanza had yielded more than $150,000,000 worth of silver, one-third
of which had passed directly into the pockets of the four men.
But what of the first discoverers, McLaughlin and Riley? They had
found the silver, but the Bonanza was not for them. McLaughlin worked
for a while as a laborer and then was thrown out of the mine by a
foreman who said he was too old. He tried a dozen small ventures and
not only lost in everything he touched, but caused his partners to
lose, also. Bad fortune dogged him steadily. An old man, worn out and
hopelessly dispirited, died in a hospital and was buried in a pauper's
grave. Later, it was learned that this was McLaughlin.
O'Riley fared no better. He refused to work for others, believing that
luck would turn, and that he, who had once discovered so rich a prize,
would, some day or other, discover another. One night, in a dream, he
heard what he took to be the voices of the fairies of the mountain
bidding him dig at a certain barren spot on the hill-slopes of the
Sierras, many miles away from the Comstock Lode.
For days, for weeks, for years, he dug, ever hearing the fancied
voices leading him on, deeper and deeper still. Mackay offered him
money, but O'Riley refused to accept it, demanding that he be given an
equal share in the mine, or nothing. He starved and suffered,
sometimes finding pieces of pure silver and pure gold in his tunnel,
which he ascribed to his fairies (but which rumor says Mackay had
arranged to be placed there) and, in old age, his tunnel fell in and
crippled him. From the hospital he was taken to an insane asylum,
where he died.
Henry Comstock met the fate he deserved. For years he swaggered about
Virginia City claiming to be its founder and the discoverer of the
Comstock Lode, living on the charity of luckier men who threw him a
bar of silver as one throws a bone to a dog, or else selling wild-cat
shares to greenhorns. More than once he was justly accused of being in
league with the disorderly elements of the city and having taken part
in robberies. But a certain rough sense of pity kept him from being
strung up to a tree as he deserved a dozen times over--and he died, at
last, a suicide.