A visit to an old mining town in Nevada.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For pictures, see greatmirror.com
A visit to an old mining town in Nevada.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For pictures, see greatmirror.com
Eyes Wide Open (Virginia City, Nevada)
Ten weeks after returning home from Peru, I was dragging anchor. Moping a bit. The cure was obvious, but the stock market was down. I decided to take a five-night trip and pay for it with miles and points. I also decided to stay in the United States. I hadn’t gone anywhere for fun in the U.S. for years, maybe decades. There was nothing to see in the U.S.. That’s what I thought. I meant there was nothing to learn. I really meant there was nothing I wanted to learn. What’s that, you say? Yes, yes. Aquarius.
I decided to go to Virginia City, a town about an hour’s drive southeast of Reno. Virginia City sits atop the Comstock Lode, fabulously rich in silver until it was more or less cleaned out in the 1860s and 70s. Comstock miners made Virginia City in those years the metropolis of Nevada. That’s hard to believe when Reno today has a shocking quarter-million people and Virginia City has fewer than a thousand, but back in the day, as we say, it was Reno that had only a thousand people. Virginia City had 25,000. I suppose the residents today should be grateful that their town is hanging in there with its sturdy 800. When the mines close, most mining towns just blow away.
I had briefly visited Virginia City in 1963. I’m not sure why I went there, but in school I had read Mark Twain’s Roughing It, which centers on the two years he spent in Nevada, largely as a reporter for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise. That’s probably why I went. Twain was here exactly a hundred years before my 1963 visit–and no, I’m not interested in numerology any more than in astrology.
I believe that in 1963 I left Virginia City the same day I arrived. I remember a straight and almost level main street laid out on the east side of a straight-sided mountain with a long view east across a vista of desert mountains and valleys. I remember two- and three-story brick buildings lined up on about half a mile of that main street. With bold signs and names like The Bucket of Blood saloon, the target was tourists, who in 1963 almost certainly could tell you the names of the characters and even the names of the actors in “Bonanza,” a TV show set near Virginia City and then in the midst of a near-record run of over 400 episodes. I don’t remember much else except the heaps of waste rock dotting the slope below the main street. They were flat-topped and looked about right to serve as launch pads for interstellar rockets.
I might have stuck around for a few days, but I had left San Francisco because I was sick of the summer fog. I had thought that I would find sunshine in Nevada, but I didn’t. Depressed to the edge of disgust, I decided to keep driving. I had just graduated from the University of California with a bachelor’s degree in Geography. So, with that preparation, in what direction would I head? East? Sensible, but nope. South? Good guess, but wrong again. Don’t laugh, but to find sunshine I drove to Seattle. And it gets funnier, because in the week that followed and disgusted by Seattle’s clouds, I drove all the way to Chicago. I had never been there–never been east of Nevada–and I asked somebody where the city got its drinking water. He looked at me as if I was pulling his leg, then said, “the lake, of course.” I then asked him how the city removed the salt. I really did. I still see him tipping his head to one side and wondering about schools in California.
I know more geography now, but not enough to brag. For example, I know how to drive from my home in Oklahoma to Reno. I just have to drive north on Interstate 35 to Salina, Kansas, then switch to 70 and go west to Denver. Then I have to switch to 25 and go north to Cheyenne. I make one last turn there and let Interstate 80 take me the rest of the way. If you’re a trooper, which I used to be, the trip will take 25 hours. So, to repeat: north, left, right, left. That’s it.
I also know how to fly to Reno, usually with only one stop, probably Dallas or Denver or Salt Lake City. I have a so-called choice of airlines, though except for their color schemes and logos, I can’t tell them apart. It’s like Ford and Chevy. There’s a reason the tailgates of pickup trucks look like billboards.
I know: it’s not a very impressive demonstration of geographical knowledge, so suppose we ramp it up. Suppose we pretend I’m making the trip not in 2023 but in 1823.
I know: I’m the one who proposed this, but I’m already regretting it.
I know I have to start in spring, because I remember the Donner Party in the winter of 1847 starving in snow thirty-five miles west of what now is Reno.
I’m also thinking about Jedediah Smith, who survived two perilous trips across Nevada in the 1820s but who a few years later and out on the High Plains didn’t survive the Comanche. Neither would I, so let’s imagine that I meet no Indians. There’s a downside to doing this, because Jed Smith, like Lewis and Clark and lots of others, habitually relied on Indians for directions. Still, I am going to stick to my no-help plan because my purpose is to display my knowledge. I fear I will be displaying my ignorance.
I’ll carry Clint’s favorite gun. You know the one. It’s the most powerful handgun in the world, a gun that, as he says so politely, “will blow your head clean off, punk.” I wish I could say it the way he does. I’ll take as many cartridges as I can carry, along with a big knife, a blanket, a bunch of waterproof matches, a waterproof cape or groundsheet, and a change of heavy wool socks. I’m already betting that I’ll abandon some of those cartridges the way pioneers in covered wagons abandoned pianos.
Anyway, here I go, no guide, no map. Uh, I just remembered I should take a compass.
Maybe I should get a tin cup, too, but otherwise I’m off to a good start, heading west upstream on the Canadian River, which passes south of Oklahoma City. The river will get me all the way across what is now the Texas Panhandle. It ends, or maybe I should say starts, in the Southern Rockies in New Mexico.
But which way now? Good question. I don’t know what to do except bushwhack west across the mountains–I think they’re the Sangre de Christo–to the Rio Grande. That river flows north to south and I want to go west, so I guess I’ll go upstream and hope to get to the San Luis Valley, near the head of the Rio Grande.
Again I’m stuck and don’t know what to do except bushwhack west to the Colorado. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to follow that river downstream, not through the Grand Canyon, thank you. I could try hugging its north rim and then walking north from what is now Las Vegas. Not sure how to do that. Stupidly, perhaps, I’ll try instead to walk northwesterly from the San Luis Valley to Great Salt Lake. I say stupidly because I then have to cross 400 miles of Nevada desert with lots of more or less parallel mountain ranges driving me crazy, one after another. I will very likely die of thirst but maybe not of hunger if I can blow the heads clean off of some punk jackrabbits.
If I’m unbelievably lucky, I’ll eventually bump into the Sierra Nevada, the biggest and the last of the parallel mountains. I’ll know I’m there if I see Donner Lake, with its clear but damnably cold water. Hooray! I’ll walk east about 35 miles and spread out my blanket along the Truckee River. I’m sitting on the site of what will be Reno.
I have to tell you that I’m so tired that I’m going to wait until the world’s first transcontinental railroad shows up. It should be here in 45 years and will still be in place in 2023, but by then it will have changed names twice. It will be built as the Central Pacific, then swallowed by the Southern Pacific and then swallowed by the Union Pacific. The U.P. today is a busy freight line, but there are only two passenger trains daily, one eastbound and the other west. They’re run by Amtrak, the federal corporation that delighted the nation’s railroads in the early 1970s by taking over the money-losing business of moving people.
Sitting at the edge of the Truckee, maybe I’ll daydream about Jesse Reno, a general killed in the Civil War. Reno’s ancestors came from France, where the family name was Renault. I bet you didn’t know that, but it explains why Reno is famous for champagne and crepes. I’m sorry, but you’re on your own sorting out the truth from my chaff.
So there you are: I’m embarrassed that I can’t provide a more detailed route. Shall I console myself by saying that people in 1823 knew even less than I do? That’s not fair, you say, and you’re right, but I’m going to cling to this excuse and point to a famous map produced in 1816 by John Melish, a Scot settled in Philadelphia. This was the first map to show the area of what became the 48 states.
Melish is very, very good east of the Mississippi but very, very weak west of it, especially in Nevada. He does have a Texas—there’s always a Texas—but it just hugs the Gulf Coast, and it has no cities except San Antonio.
Melish has no Oklahoma–when he made the map there wasn’t even an Indian Territory–but he does see and label the Red River, the Arkansas River, and, in between them, the Canadian, which I just followed to the Rockies. Farther west, Melish has got the Rio Grande, which he calls the Rio Del Norte. He’s got it coming out of the Colorado Rockies, but for those complex mountains he shows only three parallel caterpillars. He calls the middle one the Snow Mountains, a sensible name even if it didn’t stick.
Melish relies heavily on Zebulon Pike, who did for the Southern Rockies something similar to what Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were doing farther north at out the same time. Melish’s map in fact shows the location of the building–he calls it a block house–that Pike built to winter in 1806 about 30 miles west of Pueblo, Colorado. That’s the same winter that Lewis and Clark spent near the mouth of the Columbia. Melish draws a funny little mountain which he labels Highest Peak. It’s now Pike’s Peak but has been demoted to Colorado’s 20th highest.
Melish is good with the Columbia. Thank Lewis and Clark. He plots the Colorado River, too, which he calls the Rio Colorado of the West and which he knows ends in the Gulf of California, which I bet money is more than most Americans today know, but I confess I don’t know how Melish knows this.
In the 400 miles between Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Nevada, Melish knows nothing. He knows the Bear River, which feeds the lake from the east, but he calls it the Buenaventura. West of the lake, he adds a long dotted line heading west. He adds these words: “Supposed course of a river between the Buenaventura and the Bay of Francisco which will probably be the communication from the Arkansas to the Pacific Ocean.” Well, dreamers dream. The only other feature Melish has between Great Salt Lake and San Francisco Bay is another caterpillar, this one labeled California Mountains. There is no Lake Tahoe, no Truckee River, and of course no Reno. No champagne or crepes.
Well, don’t scold him. Melish drew his map a decade before the first white man crossed Nevada. That was Jed Smith in 1826. Smith never published a map of his travels, so we have to wait another 20 years for Captain John C. Fremont to cross Nevada with the help of Kit Carson. Fremont did produce a map, and it shows both Great Salt Lake and Lake Tahoe. In between, again, there’s almost nothing.. Fremont was the first to call this region the Great Basin. He describes it concisely: “contents almost unknown, but believed to be filled with rivers and lakes which have no communications with the sea, deserts and oases which have never been explored, and savage tribes no traveller has seen or described.”
Fremont’s map was published in 1844, and two years later a young man named T. H. Jefferson—no relation to the president and full name unknown–crossed Nevada with a wagon train. Jefferson then published a map in four sheets covering what he called the Emigrant Road from Independence, Missouri, to San Francisco.
The map corresponds to the Oregon Trail from Independence to South Pass, which is about 50 miles north of what is now Rock Springs on Interstate 80 in western Wyoming. Jed Smith had established South Pass as the easiest crossing of the Continental Divide, and Jefferson’s Emigrant Road, like the Oregon Trail, runs over the pass but then heads southwesterly to the site of what will be Salt Lake City. The road continues around the southern shore of the lake and begins adding grim details: “no grass nor water,” “fearful long drive,” “battle with the Pauta Indians,” (I assume he means the Paiute), “grave,” “Salley’s grave,” (I have no idea who Salley was), and “bad water, no wood.”
It’s sobering, but on the far side of the desert, Jefferson does show the Truckee River. (By the way, Truckee was a Paiute chief, and the river is so beautiful that I almost cry when I think of it flowing through the high rise misery of downtown Reno.) Jefferson’s map has no Tahoe and no Reno, which means there’s still no champagne or crepes. I’m getting hungry just joking about them.
Two centuries later, there was no adventure for me. I flew to Reno via Austin. It was a weird routing, but it only cost 15,000 miles round-trip, and the flight times were good.
I can now report that whoever’s in charge of Reno’s airport really liked the 1960s, because the airport ceilings are so flat and low that you feel that you’re walking between two stacked waffles, brightened up in this case not by sliced strawberries but by slot machines, flashing colorfully when plugged in but otherwise suggestive of rows of coffins standing upright. I couldn’t believe all the people hoping for a jackpot. Most of them were old enough that they wouldn’t like it if I told them to just wait a bit. It occurs to me that if you want to be sure that our civilization is continuing on the path of progress, you only have to check to see if people are getting more and more bored.
I know: I shouldn’t say things like that. Who needs the truth? Who wants it?
Anyway, I rented a car, easy-peasy, went to Google maps on my phone, and let the lady who has no name direct me a few miles along Interstate 580 and then along some city streets to the Amtrak station.
The station is next to the old Central Pacific tracks, now the Union Pacific. The station is the third on the site and is a high-ceilinged affair built in 1926. Train travel isn’t what it was then, and there were only three people in station: me, a clerk, and somebody looking at his phone and waiting to be picked up. The station belongs to the City of Reno, I’m guessing to the railroad’s relief.
This is where I had sat waiting for 45 years, and it’s hard for me not to imagine now a Central Pacific locomotive coming through. It has a funnel-shaped smokestack because its boiler burns wood. Cinders from the firebox are dangerous because they can start forest fires, so the funnel shape–there were many patented versions–is not an ornament. It’s meant to spin the exhaust centrifugally to the edge of the funnel and to catch the cinders before they fly aloft and make trouble. When locomotives on the West Coast switched to coal or oil around 1900, funnel stacks disappeared, but if you remember that famous photograph of the Central Pacific meeting the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, you may recall that the Union Pacific engine, on the right side, has a straight or cannon stack. That’s because the UP, bless its heart, ran on coal.
A couple of men now come to mind. Not Leland Stanford or Charlie Crocker or Mark Hopkins, whose names linger as three of the railroad’s Big Four, but the fourth partner, the most important partner, the one who handled the money and dealt with the federal government. Collis Huntington once dictated a short autobiography–I remember seeing the text written longhand in pencil by a stenographer–in which he freely admitted bribing congressmen. Is that good or bad? I mean, we admire honesty, don’t we? He also said that in school he had done very poorly in every subject except geography. This pleases me, and I wonder if he found geography useful in planning the expansion of the railroad’s track network.
The other man who comes to mind is Theodore Dehone Judah, the engineer who, before the Big Four were Big, found the route that the Central Pacific would take from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada to Reno. When construction had hardly begun, Judah made what he thought would be a quick trip back east. Like most people at that time, he sailed to Panama and crossed the Isthmus. He found no Comanche but did find the kind of mosquitoes that transmit yellow fever. That was the end of Theodore Dehone Judah, dead at 37. Anyone inclined to romanticize the past, and I’m one of them, should remember details like that.
I found neither Comanche nor mosquitoes nor thirst nor hunger, but I did dare to park across the street from the Amtrak station and to scorn a parking meter. They wouldn’t dare, I said to myself. And they didn’t. Live dangerously, I say. Take risks. Do what you want. You’ll live longer.
There was a clerk on duty, and I asked him if he had ever heard of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad. This was the short line that from 1872 until 1938 connected Reno to Virginia City. Yes, he said. Great, I replied, because I had been wondering where the V&T’s Reno station had been. He apologized and said he didn’t know. Well, the V&T tracks in Reno are long gone, so his answer may seem reasonable, but two minutes later and not twenty feet from where he sat, I saw an old map on the wall. It was part of an historical display, and the map showed that the Amtrak station had once served both the big railroad and the small one. You got off one train, crossed through the station, and got on the other. It’s not as though the clerk was crazy-busy Why hadn’t he ever looked around? Of course we know the answer, but there’s no point in lamenting our enslavement to phones and social media. No point in suggesting that we should actually look at the real world.
Trains in Reno now run in a 30-foot-deep trench, which means that if you’re getting on or off an Amtrak train, you have to deal with a lot of stairs or an elevator. The trench was put in about 15 years ago, and most motorists are happy not to have to wait for trains to clear the grade crossing in front of them. They may not even notice that they’re crossing a track. That’s assuming there’s no train rolling through town. If there is, motorists new in town will glance anxiously to see if the deep rumbling signifies an earthquake about to bury them.
Reno does have some very pleasant, older neighborhoods, but the area around the Amtrak station is a jumble of seedy casinos and tedious office towers, high-rise condos, and that joy-without-end, multi-level parking structures. They’re nearly all concrete and the same shade of gray. The once-famous casinos from the 1950s–Harold’s, Harrah’s, and the Mapes–are either closed or demolished. Some smaller ones survive, but the big new casinos are mostly two or three miles south, where there’s room for parking lots the size of Manhattan. Unlike the downtown towers, the casinos dress like showgirls. After all, Job One for a casino is the projection of decadence. It’s all in the name of fun, though in Virginia City I would meet a retired blackjack dealer who said the casinos were a dark business she was glad to be done with. She had seen houses lost and marriages destroyed in those places.
Every now and then in the next few days, Reno would come up in conversation. I’d sum up my reaction by mentioning the meters at the entrances to Interstate 80: one car per green. Just like Los Angeles, I’d say. On a gravel road in the mountains outside Virginia City I stopped a UPS van to ask about road conditions. We chatted a bit and then I said he had a great route and was lucky compared to drivers in Los Angeles. He nodded and said, “or even in Reno.”
I don’t anticipate a cure for the modern city, but there is an easy escape from Reno. Maybe three hours after landing, I got back on Interstate 580, went south less than 10 miles beyond the airport, then turned onto State Highway 341, a two-lane road that straightaway climbs about 3000 feet to a 7,000-foot summit on the Virginia Range. Virginia City’s on the other side.
Long before I got to the top, I was driving through a sparse pinr forest. Ponderosas and Jeffreys, I suppose. I was remembering their scent on hot summer days in the Sierra. It’s a smell I love so much that even on this chilly November day, with–may God forgive me–my window probably rolled up–the forest reminded me that I was alive. That may sound ridiculous, but three hours earlier I had been breathing air from Boeing. Nobody breathing that stuff suddenly thinks they’re alive. I’m pretty happy living in Oklahoma, but those pine forests in the mountains do make me reconsider.
END PART ONE
A few miles over the top of the Virginia Range, I cruised into Virginia City.
Sure enough, here was the old main street, still straight and nearly level not only since I had last seen it in 1963 but since 1863 or a bit earlier. The street lies almost exactly atop the Comstock Lode, a vein with scattered blobs of silver discovered in 1859 almost by accident, when gold miners decided to test some blue stuff, as they called it. They had been treating it as waste but a sample sent for assay to California came back at $3,000 a ton in silver, never mind the $750 in gold. The blue stuff turned out to contain silver sulfide. The Ophir Mine was born. That’s Ophir, same as in the Bible. It was the first Comstock bonanza. That word, by the way, came into English from Spanish courtesy of Joseph Gregg writing in the 1840s about gold in New Mexico.
In 1875, when the Comstock reached its peak, you could have driven along the street I was on and in the space of a mile rattled off the names, north to south, of half a dozen bonanzas: the Mexican, the Ophir, the California, the Consolidated Virginia (which was the richest of them all), the Best and Belcher, the Gould and Curry, the Savage, the Hale and Norcross, the Chollar, and the Potosi.
If you were keen to invest, there were lots of other mines with shares for sale. Brokers–there were dozens of them in Virginia City and even more in San Francisco–probably wouldn’t tell you that most investors lost money in these mines. Prices were volatile, to put mildly, and many investors bought when shares were high and sold when they were not. Others lost money on shares whose prices may have stayed steady but where each year the shareholder paid mandatory assessment fees to develop a mine that never paid a dividend. Of course there was no law against losing money both ways.
I am learning to detest numbers, but a tabulation from the 1880s shows that across the Comstock Lode and between 1860 and 1880, shareholders were assessed $62 million in return for $116 million in dividends. Not bad, you say. I’ll take a piece of that. But wait: $84 million of that $116 million in dividends came from just two mines, the Consolidated Virginia and the adjacent California, both of which charged almost nothing in assessments. As I say, I am learning to detest numbers, but I think that leaves about $30 million in dividends to be divided among shareholders who paid just about $60 million in assessments. Not so good, though it was still possible to get rich by buying and selling at the right times.
A quiz question comes to mind. During the Great Depression one state in the United States decided to bolster its revenues by legalizing gambling and taking a cut of the profits. Which state was it? I know: it’s a giveaway, but the answer makes sense, because the state was one with gambling in its bones.
Mt. Davidson, the highest peak of the Virginia Range, was on my right. It’s barren but topographically dramatic. It’s named for the otherwise forgotten San Francisco representative of the London Rothschilds. He was among the first to learn of the amazing assay results, and he became an incorporator of the Ophir Mine. Until then, the mountain was called Sun Mountain, but rich people like to be appreciated.
Downhill from the main street and on my left, Six Mile Canyon has a creek supporting cottonwoods, fluttering and golden when I saw them. Much of the creek’s water this time of year comes from treated sewage originating as the town’s domestic water. The water comes from a reservoir 15 miles to the southwest in the Carson Range, which flanks Lake Tahoe on the East. That sounds mundane, but the system is on the list of National Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks. It’s there because the water system was built in the 1860s and consisted of 27 miles of wooden flumes, plus a world-class siphon, an iron pipe that ran between the Carson Range and the Virginia Range and got the water 1,700 above the intervening valley without having to pump it. Nobody at the time thought it could be done, except for the engineer in charge of San Francisco’s water supply. Several siphons were eventually built, and one, a 10-incher from the 1870s, is still Virginia City’s water source. It needs to be replaced, people say.
I saw signs along the creek cautioning that the water was contaminated. The problem wasn’t the treated sewage so much as mercury, regularly used and always partially lost in the many mills that treated the Comstock’s ore. Except for their foundations, those mills have vanished. The mercury hasn’t. Sorry to say, it’s a national priority superfund site.
About half of the length of the main street was still solidly built up with two or three story brick buildings, mostly built after a disastrous fire in 1875. Alas, nobody knew that this would prove to be the peak year for silver production, and so property owners rebuilt furiously, including the town’s International Hotel, a brick building with six floors, 160 guest rooms, and a hydraulic elevator. There were banks on the main street and offices for doctors and lawyers, which is surprising only because they’re all gone now, every last one. There’s no supermarket or pharmacy in town, either. The International Hotel burned in 1914 and the site has been vacant ever since. It’s now a parking lot.
Virginia City does have an elementary school and a high school, and there are some county offices, including a new jail occupied mostly by drug offenders, but main street lives or dies off tourists. Residents get used to driving off the mountain when they want something–northwest to Reno, southwest to Carson City, or east to Dayton at the foot of Six Mile Canyon. Dayton has mushroomed from under a thousand people in 1970 to over 15,000. I call it spillover from Carson City, population about 60,000. For the people on the mountain who are reluctant to drive, FedEx and UPS make life easier.
I was surprised how many people working in town lived somewhere else. Virginia City was too expensive, they said. I heard this so often that I began asking almost right away, “Do you live here?” The answer came with an edge of bitterness and an explanation that many buildings had been bought by outsiders (that’s code for Californians) who don’t like Virginia City enough to live in it but who like it enough to buy a building, jack up the rent, and watch the oldtimers move out. I never figured out who could afford to move in, but business turnover is high, so maybe the answer is small-business owners who move in, give the city a whirl, then quit. Some people stick around because they get stuck. One woman, happy to talk, said she had been here 17 years and been trying to get away for 15. For me, susceptible to romance, it was a reality check. What reality, you say? Well, what does the song say: “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Maybe that should be the anthem for real-estate investors.
The street I was on, main street, is called C street. That may seem odd, but rich people must live above everyone else, so uphill from C Street and parallel to it there is A Street and B Street, still with some very nice old houses. They’re all wood, like the Victorians in San Francisco, though not so extravagantly painted. Even if you want to build something new here, which some people do, it has to look old-fashioned. It’s a joke. I mean at least half the people in Virginia City are expats from California. They’ve come here for freedom, and they slam into zoning regs. That is a joke, isn’t it? You could say they’ve managed to escape metered freeway entrances.
Downhill from C, you can walk along more modest residential D and E Streets and fragments of other streets all the way down to R, where the high school is located, a thousand feet east of C Street and almost 300 feet below it. It’s a real hill, and from several blocks away you can hear school buses in low gear struggling up. As for getting from one to another of the alphabetical streets, the best bets are the perpendicular Union, Taylor, and Washington.
The old Virginia and Truckee Railroad came in from the south along E Street and stopped at a station on the site of what is today the city’s visitor center. It was closed when I saw it: some structural problem that wasn’t going to be fixed soon. Anyway, people who lived on B street in the old days got off the train and had to walk uphill three blocks. Not a Himalayan trek, but a gain of maybe 70 feet, tricky in snow and, at an elevation of 6,000 feet, maybe a bit tiring. But you’re right, people on B street probably had carriages.
You can see it’s hard to get lost in Virginia City, but if you were transported to the mines below, you’d be terrified. OK, OK: I’d be terrified. Fortunately, this will never happen. The rock here is soft enough that the roofs of underground passages were held up by massive wooden beams. The beams would still be holding them up today if groundwater wasn’t pervasive. But it is. Usually hot groundwater.
Gargantuan pumps used to remove that water. One pump had a flywheel that weighed 110 tons and was 40 feet in diameter. It ran off a steam engine and was connected to a wooden walking beam that you couldn’t look at–OK, I couldn’t look at–without thinking of how the forests around Lake Tahoe had been pillaged. The timber, by the way, like the city’s water, came down off the east side of the Carson Range by flume and then up to Virginia City either by mule cart or, after 1872, by the trusty V&T.
Nobody was going to tell the people of Virginia City to spare the forest around Lake Tahoe, and the mine pumps, their boilers driven by more wood, kept working until the ore ran out. The pumps were then turned off, the mines flooded, the mine timbers rotted, and the roofs collapsed. See: you’re safe. If you’re a defender of the logging industry, of course, you’ll say that the trees have grown back. If you’re not a defender, you’ll say that after 150 years the new forest trees are still not as big as the trees they replaced. We can argue all day.
The man who owned the logging company, by the way, built Carson City’s biggest house. It’s wood. I don’t know who owns it now, but from the outside it seems in good shape. I spent many summers as a boy in a state park on the western side of Lake Tahoe, and the park is named for that lumberman, Duane Leroy Bliss. At the time I never thought about it. Place names are like that: either you ignore them or you get seduced. I got seduced when a teacher a million years ago told me that the name of the Spanish city of Zaragoza comes from Caesar Augustus. I’m still hooked. Another reason to donate to Wikipedia.
Along with the underground passageways, even the entrances to many Comstock mines have been lost. It’s odd, because many buildings on C street have plaques put up by a local historical organization. Not so the mines. Old USGS topographic maps show the shaft of the Consolidated Virginia next door to and on the downhill side of the V&T station, but there’s no marker on the ground. The once-extensive buildings around the shaft are gone, and the site of the shaft has been bulldozed so thoroughly that I couldn’t find a trace of it.
Maybe that’s a good thing, because much as I respect the courage and inventiveness and energy of the men who worked in these mines, I wouldn’t want to join them. I learned this in the course of a pitiful half hour in the one mine that welcomes visitors. It’s the Chollar Mine. Don’t misunderstand. There’s no mining going on, and the tour never gets near a shaft. It enters a tunnel and goes a couple of hundred feet into the side of the mountain.
It’s like taking a tour of the White House and stopping at the foyer, but I should be careful what I wish for. The tour operator provided hardhats. Good thing, because I kept bumping my head on overhead beams. The floor was mucky, and we ended in an awkward space the size of a bedroom, maybe. Passages led off from here in at least three directions, but they were all permanently blocked. Heavy timbers rimmed the space, and some stood in the middle of it.
I could feel words taking shape in the back of my mind: “I think I want to get out of here,” but the most interesting thing about the tour, apart from my uneasiness, was that a few of the supporting timbers formed a cube maybe five feet on a side. Bingo, I thought, a square set. These empty boxes, framed but without sides, were invented in Virginia City by a German engineer named Philip Deidesheimer. By the 1890s they had been exported to other parts of the world where the rock above a mined-out void is too weak to support itself. A good example is Broken Hill, Australia, where the company known today as BHP hired the superintendent of the Consolidated Virginia to show them how it was done. The tour showed me only one square set, not the stacks that once rose a dozen high to fill mined-out areas. Pity.
In 1882, the USGS published a geological atlas of the Comstock, and the atlas included a map showing what the tour I was on skipped. The ore at the Chollar Mine had been rich to a depth of 600 feet and had been removed not though a tunnel but through a shaft just like an elevator shaft. Five drifts or horizontal arms reached out from the shaft for two or three hundred feet until the ore quit. The shaft continued down through barren rock to a depth of 1100 feet, and the miners dug another eight drifts in this zone, none of which found anything worth mining. The shaft then turned into an incline, a not-quite vertical shaft. It descended to 1900 feet with three drifts that, again, found nothing. At the bottom of the incline it reached over in a drift to the so-called Combination Shaft, shared with neighboring mines sharing the cost of drilling to 2600 feet.
The Combination Shaft required incessant pumping to remove a flood of nearly boiling water. The air temperature in the mine exceeded 120 degrees, and though surface air was pumped in, the miners are said to have drunk three gallons of ice-chilled water on every shift. They were paid $6 a day, a 50 percent premium over the Comstock’s standard $4. All in vain. Work at the Combination Shaft stopped in 1886 for lack of ore. It flooded, collapsed and was abandoned.
Abandoned mining shafts are dangerous, so it’s good that Virginia City’s shafts are not just sitting there, tempting idiots and children. The Combination Shaft is an exception. Looking east from the Chollar mine, I could see a huge heap of yellowish waste rock a few hundred yards away. Above it, eight mighty timbers remained from a hoist that once lifted rock to the surface. When I say mighty, I mean timbers maybe 10 inches by 20 inches square, timbers that you can hardly buy today and which, if you could, would draw protests from the same people who deplore tiger hunts. I’m one of them, but at the same time I can’t help comparing the men who did this work with me and my brave little keyboard.
I walked over to the Combination Shaft. It was deserted, which I liked a lot, and I saw that somebody had thoughtfully covered the hole with a steel grate perhaps 10 feet by 20 feet. When I say “thoughtfully” I am not being sarcastic. You can walk on top of the grate–I did, very gingerly–and look down. The shaft is neatly rectangular, unlined but firm enough to be intact 130 years after the mine closed. The center of the shaft is of course a hole pitch black and scary, though visitors have dropped cameras on strings down through seams in the grate and found a blockage of some sort after about 300 feet. It may be solid or merely a plug that wouldn’t support a dog. I suppose it partly depends on the height of the water table.
I climbed up to the wooden beams–maybe “baulk” is better–that once supported heavy, cast-iron wheels for the cables hanging down into the shaft. Behind the beams there was a building with walls of corrugated sheet metal. The building held a cable-spooling machine that must have weighed a ton. Rusty cables were still wound around the drum, and there was a braking mechanism, but the engine was gone. Foundations for other buildngs surrounded this one building. The foundations were mostly concrete, but the foundation for the hoist was faced with stones like the blocks of the Egyptian pyramids. I expect they’ll survive us all.
To get a picture of what was happening not just with the Chollar mine but over the entire Comstock, go back to the 1882 atlas.
It’s a large volume, about 18 by 20 inches, and was prepared by George Becker, a New Yorker by birth but educated at Harvard and with advanced degrees from Heidelberg and Berlin’s Royal School of Mines. The atlas is full of bogglingly complicated drawings of the mountain in cross-section from various angles. You can see the blobs of ore that have been discovered, and you can see the many passages created by miners extracting ore or hunting for it. You can see the areas that were reamed out and once presumably filled with square sets.
Practical people might argue that the atlas was a waste of taxpayer money, because by the time it was published Virginia City was in terminal decline. Still, that’s hindsight. I’m thinking of Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, an uncle of Manfred, World War I’s Red Baron. Ferdinand would later be famous on his own account for travels in China–among other things, he coined the term Silk Road–but first he came to Virginia City because he had been hired to appraise the Comstock’s potential. Another German, Adolph Sutro, was hoping to solve the problem of water in the mines by building a drainage tunnel from a point about four miles east and about 1700 feet below C Street. He wanted European investors to pay for the thing, so he commissioned the baron to write a report. Von Richthofen concluded that the Comstock was a deep vein, where silver might yet be found at depth.
Sutro built his tunnel, in ruins today and on a site maddeningly fenced and posted. By 1880 it was draining 3.5 million gallons of water daily, but the mines were closing, the mine owners wouldn’t pay for a service they no longer needed, and no more great blobs were being found. Sutro cashed out while the cashing was good and retired wealthy to San Francisco, where he became a popular mayor and philanthropist.
Some of the atlas plates are hard for me to understand, and so I was delighted to find a 3-D physical model of the Comstock at a private museum at the north end of C street. I’m suspicious of private museums, especially when, as in this case, they’ve polluted miles of highway with billboard after billboard, but I’ll make an exception for The Way It Was. That’s the name of the museum. The 3-D model was set inside a glass case measuring perhaps eight feet long by three feet high and deep. Behind the glass, there were hundreds of wooden rods about the width of a pencil but of various lengths, some vertical, some horizontal, some sloping, but all glued together in a chaotic network full of dead ends. No tidy grid here, no perceptible pattern at all except that every rod was connected to at least one other rod so miners at the end of the day could get the hell out. The sky must have been welcome for miners working by candlelight.
Sometimes the mines, like those participating in the Combination Shaft, were interconnected to work cooperatively, but most mine owners had also gone to court to fend off neighbors. This was far trickier than two surface owners quarrelling about the location of a property line between them, because mining practice and, after 1866, federal mining law, allowed miners to stake a claim to 200 or 300 feet of a vein they had discovered. The law gave them, in the words of the 1866 federal statute, “the right to follow such vein to any depth, with all its dips, variations, and angles.” Miners could follow a vein until they were digging deep below someone else’s land. That sounds tricky, but what made the law treacherous was that veins aren’t like plywood. If the vein was like a tree, the top of each branch could be discovered and located by a different prospector, and each prospector could then happily dig down until bumping into other miners who were working down their branches.
The Ophir was said to have fought off 37 lawsuits, which explains why lawyers were to Virginia City what houseflies are to spilled beer. Besides, getting to the Comstock became a lot easier in 1861 when a toll road opened to Placerville, 101 miles to the west. Stage lines offered 18-hour trips all the way to Sacramento. One outfit promised 5pm departures from Virginia City and breakfast in Sacramento. And so a directory published for Virginia City in 1864 listed seven breweries, 10 blacksmiths, and 23 doctors. That’s not bad for a town four years old, but would you believe the directory also listed 50 lawyers. They were outnumbered only by the town’s 53 saloons.
Nevada joined the Union that year, 1864. It elected two senators. One of them was William Stewart, the best-known of those attorneys and the man credited as the force behind the federal laws passed in 1866 and 1872. (Those laws by the way mostly codified the rules developed during California’s Gold Rush. The miners in Virginia City lived with those rules until the federal law replaced them.)
You probably won’t be surprised if I tell you that of Nevada’s first five senators, one had been the Territory of Nevada’s one and only governor, two were Comstock mine owners, one was the leading banker for the miners, and the fifth was attorney Stewart. The five of them carried Nevada right through to the next century, with Stewart serving on and off from 1865 to 1905. The nicest thing I can say about him is that he had a perfect house in Carson City, the state capital. It’s still there: one floor with a rectangular footprint and a simple gable roof. Rich Americans today don’t live like that.
Mine owners couldn’t live that modestly without offending a community where everyone hoped to strike it rich and buy a mansion. Ironically, the man who made the greatest fortune in Virginia City was very modest. He was John Mackay, an Irishman who arrived in 1858 and said that all he wanted was to make $30,000. Sounds sensible. Later, he said that a man who has $200,000 and tries to make more does not know what he is doing. Sensible again, but by 1875 Mackey was making $300,000 a month from his share of the Consolidated Virginia. You might say he couldn’t help it.
He worked with three slightly junior partners in a group informally known as the Comstock’s Big Four, one matching the railroad’s Big Four. This second Big Four, alias the silver kings, had bought the Consolidated Virginia, which until then had been a failure. They also controlled a mine to the south and from that mine ran a drift into the edge of the Consolidated Virginia. There, at a depth of 1,200 feet–BANG!--they nicked the edge of what became known as the Big Bonanza. The 3-D model in the museum has a white ribbon tracing the irregular blob, a thousand feet across in some directions. Philipe Deidesheimer, the inventor of the square sets holding up the mine roofs, wrote that “nothing like these mines has ever been seen or heard or dreamed of before.” Shares in the Consolidated Virginia rose from 1 dollar in July, 1870, to $700 a share six months later. Deidesheimer invested everything he owned in the mine but held on too long and declared bankruptcy as the shares collapsed in 1879 to $3. Mackay didn’t make that mistake. He sold his shares prudently while receiving about $25 million in dividends.
Mackey’s wife, Louise, had worked as a seamstress in Virginia City. Now the richest woman in town, she was still disdained by the women she had worked for. She wasn’t having any of that, and she left Virginia City, never to return. Not to worry: Mackaye left with her and bought her a mansion in Paris that stands today as the Belgian Embassy. It’s about a hundred meters north of the Arc de Triomphe. Louise Mackey enjoyed her new position as a society hostess, but she did pay for the construction in Virginia City of a hospital for miners, and for years her husband paid to keep it running. The building’s still there, close to the high school and now operating as an art center. There’s no hospital or clinic in town today, but there is a peripatetic Catholic priest who comes on Sunday.
Mackaye stayed busy with a new business, laying transatlantic cables. Jay Gould tried competing with him but gave up with the explanation that nobody could compete with somebody who, if they needed money, simply dug it up. Mackaye’s cables across both the Atlantic and Pacific became part of the Western Union system in 1943.
Wikipedia, which I generally trust, says that Mackey’s fortune was worth the equivalent of $50 billion dollars today. Color me skeptical. Mark Twain’s mentor on the Territorial Enterprise, made his own estimate. In The Big Bonanza, published in 1876 under the pen name Dan De Quille, William Wright estimates that Mackey was worth $50 or $60 million. That converts to something under $2 billion today. I say we just agree that John and Louise were comfortable.
END PART 2
The Comstock Lode made a grand total of just under 30 millionaires. That was the calculation in 1943 of Grant Smith, a mining attorney who had grown up in Virginia City. Eight of the thirty, Smith wrote, made their fortunes with the Consolidated Virginia. Five more got rich from the Crown Point, a mile to the south. (I haven’t mentioned the Crown Point yet but will shortly.) Another eight weren’t miners at all. They were brokers in San Francisco selling dreams to dreamers.
Thirty seems in this case like a small number, but just as there’s a long way in an automobile from 80 miles an hour to 100, so many people did well on the Comstock, even if they did fall short of that seventh digit. A correspondent from The New York Tribune came to town in 1875, looked around, and was dazzled. Virginia City, he wrote, had “restaurants as fine as any in the world… I have never seen finer shops than are here, and the number of diamonds displayed in the windows quite overwhelms one’s senses. I have never been in a place where money is so plentiful nor where it is spent with so much extravagance and recklessness.”
Well, maybe he was offering an early example of the disguised advertising that we see in print every day, but check the waybills of the V&T. Yes you can, thanks to the first director of the USGS. Clarence King had already sponsored George Becker’s geological atlas of the Comstock, but King was more than a geologist and he wanted a Comstock history, and so he hired a young Harvard graduate to do the job. Eliot Lord had graduated in 1873 and spent three years on the faculty at the U.S. Naval Academy. He earned a master’s from Harvard and spent two years writing for newspapers in New York. Lord wasn’t a geologist–his Harvard dissertation was on Alexander Pope and his Masters was in modern history, but as I say Clarence King was more than a geologist and had worked enough with Lord to know that he’d do a thorough job. Lord’s meticulous Comstock Mining and Miners was published in 1882.
Lord was a metaphorical miner himself. Digging into V&T waybills, he found that the railroad in 1879 brought 179,000 pounds of fresh oysters to Virginia City. I find this shocking. I expect thousands of cases of canned beans and lots of beer, but Lord tells me that the V&T that same year also brought 700,000 pounds of apples and 58,000 pounds of pianos, which I’m guessing means about a hundred of them. Lord writes, “Strawberries, apricots, pears, peaches, grapes, apples, figs, and all other products of the luxuriant gardens and vineyards… of the pacific seaboard cover the counters of the open stalls in luscious heaps.” What’s going on? This doesn’t sound like the Wild West at all. It sounds like a travel show on television singing the praises of Italy.
It gets even more unsettling, because Lord reports that Virginia City bookshops and news vendors in 1867 sold 325 copies of Harpers’ Monthly, 112 copies of the Atlantic Monthly, 194 volumes of Dickens and 44 volumes of Shakespeare. Virginia City had a public library. Lord doesn’t discuss its holdings or report its circulation statistics, but I have a sinking feeling that I probably could have walked in and asked for a copy of Chapman’s Homer.
Well, surely Virginia City was awash in violence. Why else would C Street have that Bucket of Blood Saloon? But along comes killjoy Eliot Lord. In June, 1863, Virginia City had about 7,000 people. Lord reports that there were 66 arrests that month for drunk and disorderly behavior. Well, that’s good. Boys will be boys. There were also 36 arrests for disturbing the peace, 13 for fighting, 11 for sleeping on the sidewalk, 10 for drawing a deadly weapon, 6 for grand larceny and 3 for assault and battery. So far, so good, but you do see what’s missing. Don’t you? Nobody’s been shot dead in the whole town. I’m looking for Clint blowing the heads clean off those punks, but I can’t find him. Fast forward 17 years. It’s 1880, mining is past its peak. but Virginia City still has 11,000 people. Lord reports two arrests in June that year for assault with intent to kill–now we’re talking–but, again, not a single murder.
It seems that Hollywood has deceived us. You can make a case that Virginia City is unusual because more than half the miners were English or Irish. I’m assuming that their literacy rates were simply higher han the rates of homegrown Americans, but any picture I create of Virginia City as a bastion of civility and prosperity needs correcting in a hurry.
Consider Sandy and Eilley Bowers, who owned 20 feet of a claim that contained a blob of silver that was extraordinarily rich and easy to get at. Grant Smith, the attorney who counted the Comstock’s millionaires, says that Sandy Bowers, probably had half a million and “spent it as fast as it came.” He and his wife Eilley built the first mansion paid for by the Comstock. It’s a few miles north of Carson City and is now a county park. The happy couple went to Europe to furnish it, and though it was closed when I came by, I read that it contains four fireplaces framed with Carrara marble. Nothing but the best, but then the blob was finished. Sandy tried mining some more, but at age 38 he died of silicosis, probably courtesy of his shovel. Eilley made the mansion into a resort, but that failed. She lost everything and after years as a fortune teller, died destitute at 87 in San Francisco. She and Sandy are buried with their daughter, who died at about age 10, in a cemetery with only three graves on the hill behind the mansion. Old photos show the hill barren, cleared of almost every tree, but it’s green now, as if to suggest that Nature forgives or forgets.
Virginia City has several cemeteries. The main one, north of town, is not only big but once was an irrigated garden in the desert. You can still see the irrigation pipes. There’s a much smaller cemetery a mile south at Gold Hill, a Virginia City suburb where gold was discovered before silver. I was wandering around and saw a tall headstone for William Henry Bennetts, “a Native of England, Died in attempting to rescue the lives of his fellow miners in the Alta drift, June 2, 1881, aged 29 years and 3 months.” I don’t know what happened to the men he was trying to save. Another stone, broken in two, reads “Richard Brey, who lost his life by the bursting of the fly wheel.” (That’s all it says, but spin these multi-ton wheels fast enough, and the bolts holding them together can fail.)
Then I spotted a lineup of three near-identical tombstones, simple slabs, semicircular at the top for Richard, George, and James Bickle, aged 33, 30, and 29, all of whom died April 9, 1869. They could have died in many ways, like the unlucky five men who were standing at the base of a Comstock shaft when a mining cart full of heavy equipment came crashing down on them. Eliot Lord tabulates that between 1863 and 1880, 295 men died accidentally. Call it one every three weeks or so. The commonest accident was falling down a shaft. That happened to ninety-five men, roughly a third of all the fatalities, but the single worst accident occurred–you guessed it–on April 9, 1869, when 34 men suffocated in an underground fire. Several connected mines at Gold Hill were involved, but the great majority of the victims, including the Bickle brothers, died in one of them, the Crown Point. Lord offers some gruesome details, but I’ll let them be..
The Crown Point, you may remember, was the mine that created five of the Comstock’s thirty millionaires. The mine superintendent and part owner was one of them. He was John P. Jones (the P stands for Percival, not Paul). The Crown Point paid $11 million in dividends and charged only $2 million in assessments. When the mine petered out, Jones decided to use his wealth to become a United States senator. He spent money to get there, and he remained in the senate for 30 years before retiring to Miramar, his Queen Anne mansion on the coast at Santa Monica. It was demolished in 1938, but there’s a monument to Jones in a nearby park, close to what is now the Fairmont Miramar. There’s no monument to the three Bickle brothers, and I understand that it’s unreasonable to expect one, but I would like to believe that Senator Jones every year on April 9 remembered the men who died making him rich.
A half mile farther south, tiny Silver City has its own cemetery, and it contains the grave of Hosea Grosch. He and his brother Allen wrote home in 1856 that they had found a vein of silver. This was probably the first discovery of silver on the Comstock, and the brothers wrote that it was “A perfect monster.” Then Hosea hit his ankle with a pickax. The wound got infected, and he died. The brothers had planned to go to California for money to develop the mine, and Allen decided to stick to that plan, but Hosea’s accident delayed his departure. Allen finally set out with a mule and a companion, but it was late in the year, They hit storms and deep snow. They stayed alive by eating the mule, and they made it to Last Chance, a tiny place about 20 miles west of Lake Tahoe. They were both badly frostbitten, and Allen died after refusing to have his foot amputated. His companion chose the alternative, survived, and limped to San Francisco. He returned home to Canada, became a psychiatrist, and served for over 20 years in London, Ontario, as the superintendent of the insane asylum there. It sounds like a terrible joke, but I can’t help linking that career to his earlier one.
I should have mentioned that the name Comstock comes from Henry Comstock, another Canadian. This one became caretaker of the Grosch brothers’ claim after Allen had left for California.. He also became the owner of a sixth of the then-new Ophir mine. He could have done nothing and grown rich–the Ophir, I might mention, was the germ of George Hearst’s fortune–but Henry Comstock was happy to sell his share of the mine for $11,000. “A bird in hand,” he may have thought. He opened two mining-supply stores but Lord writes that “his customers usually paid him in promises.” Comstock went bankrupt and, as Lord writes “in a fit of despair and distraction blew out his brains… and was buried without a headstone in Bozeman, a little mining camp in Montana.” That was 1870. Virginia City, lest I forget, is named for another early miner, James Fenimore, “ol virginny,” who in fact did come from Virginia and had been prospecting here since as early as 1851. William Wright, Mark Twain’s mentor and writing under the pen name Dan de Quille, said that ol’ Virginny was “thrown from a bucking mustang that he was trying to ride while a good deal under the influence of liquor. He was pitched head-first upon the ground, suffered a fracture of the skull, and died in a few hours.” That was 1861.
What then shall we make of this Terrestrial Titanic, with its equivalent of the first-class saloon and the boiler-room downstairs?
What’s that? Yes, I hear it too. Someone is saying that if it’s OK they’d rather have oysters and a mansion in Paris than get frostbitten in the mountains or asphyxiated in a mine fire.
Who wouldn’t? Mark Twain diligently worked his way up from Virginia City to arrive at Oxford University and become the very official Dr. Samuel L. Clemens. I’m thinking also of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who writes in his prodigiously protracted autobiography, that as a young man he came close to hanging himself in desperation over his poverty and floundering career. At much greater length he writes of his decades as a bon vivant. It’s the usual trio of wine, women, and song, but Rubinstein with a wink insists that women came first.
Well, it’s a good thing that most people want to live the high life. Otherwise we’d still be living in caves. Besides, if everybody was content with a menial job then the people in First Class wouldn’t be nearly as happy as they are. Tell me that someone in a Lexus isn’t satisfied when glimpsing that the person in the next lane is driving a Toyota. Tell me that somebody driving a BMW 5 Series doesn’t shrink a bit in the driver’s seat if the car in the next lane is a 7 Series.
And so, here’s Eliot Lord one last time, reporting that in 1860, at the very beginning of the Comstock boom, Virginia city had 10 laundries, 10 livery stables, 9 restaurants, 9 bakers, 7 blacksmiths, 7 boarding houses, 7 shoemakers, 6 doctors, 5 lumber yards, 4 butchers, 4 tobacco stores, 3 drugstores, 3 watchmakers, 2 stationer’s stores, 2 fruit stores, 1 sadler, 1 hotel, and a gunsmith. Few of these people, if any, would have declined changing places with a silver king. George Orwell, writing from his experience in Paris, says that people sometimes wonder if waiters despise the people they are serving. Orwell insists that they don’t and that the waiters want only to be served themselves.
It’s a no brainer, but let’s go back to The Way It Was, that museum on C Street. I’m looking at a Burleigh air drill, with an inch-thick percussive needle maybe six feet long sitting on a four-legged base. It looks like a giant mosquito and is powered by compressed air delivered through a hose. The machine was patented in 1866, proved its value on the Hoosac railroad tunnel in western Massachusetts, and six years later arrived at the Comstock.
The Burleigh drill would create a hole that was then packed with black powder or, after 1868, with dynamite. The miners would come back after the blast and load the broken rock into small but heavy iron carts running on narrow-gauge tracks along which the carts were pushed back to a shaft where the rock could be hoisted to the surface. Hot water was meanwhile being pumped out, while cooler air, cold water, and ice were being sent down to the miners. There were toilets down there, too. They were just the standard iron carts fitted with an iron lid with two holes cut into it. Think of it as companionable defecation.
I mentioned a while back that the mine pumps were driven by enormous steam engines, one with a flywheel that weighed 110 tons. The museum has a walking beam that was once attached to such an engine. The beam is about 12 feet long and has a box of weights on one end to counterbalance the pump rod that reached down from to the other end of the beam to the bottom of the shaft. I find it next to incredible that the pump rod was constructed of beams 16 inches square strapped together and reaching 2,500 feet into the Earth. Is the tensile strength of pine great enough to withstand 660,000 pounds of stretching? That’s what the pump rod weighed. I find it even more inconceivable that the walking beam could withstand so much twisting or torsional force, even though the beam was built of two sixteen-by-sixteen inch baulks yoked together. .
The mines were noisy, but the surface wasn’t much quieter, because the ore had to be smashed into dust before it could be milled. The smashing was done in a stamp mill, where a line of iron hammers each often weighing one hundred pounds was raised and dropped by a steam-powered camshaft. I stopped and scrutinized the museum’s specimen of a rusted camshaft and the half a dozen stamps it controlled.. How noisy would it have been? In 1866, the Comstock mines kept 1271 stamps pounding day and night. Dan de Quille wrote, “the roar of Niagara is a faint murmur compared with the deafening noise of these stamps.” Perhaps the noise didn’t bother miners, exhausted by work and numbed by a bit of alcohol. Perhaps the families on B Street told themselves to enjoy the sound of making money.
Residents also either suffered or got used to the sound iron foundries. They’re not peaceful places, and Virginia City had at least three of them. They didn’t just make stuff for the mines, either, so it is that you can walk along C street, pass the now-abandoned, empty building that housed Mark Twain’s old employer, The Territorial Enterprise, and see that the front of this two-story brick building has five iron columns supporting an arcade over the sidewalk. The column capitals are Corinthian, and the foot of each column is stamped with the words “Fulton Foundry, Virginia” as though this upstart in the desert dared to compete with San Francisco.
I bring up all this machinery because I want to say something in defense of the downstairs. The boiler room. The same voice that a few minutes ago said that it preferred oysters to asphyxiation is now telling me that if I’m crazy enough to defend this obsolete technology then there’s a job waiting for me to run a Burleigh air drill in some mine in Zambia or Mongolia And, yes, you see me now clutching my brave little keyboard to my bosom.
But still I want to say something in defense of that technology. Dedicated listeners may remember that in an earlier episode (posted April 9, 2022) I was talking about Sydney, Australia, and saying that what I wanted there but could not find, was attachment. Instead, I felt detached or, as every humanities graduate learns to say, “alienated.” In that episode I said that attachment came naturally when you were in a place where you belonged, by which I meant a place for which your genetic inheritance or animal self prepared you. In a steel tank under 10,000 feet of water? No. In a balloon fifty thousand feet above sea level? No. Places where you are surrounded by machines you do not understand? No.
A few episodes later I was talking about places where you do feel at home. The first couple I mentioned were Australia’s Uluru, or Ayers Rock, and our own wonderful Yosemite, which somehow keeps its magic despite the crowds. And in later episodes I was talking about being at home at Great Zimbabwe and in Romania’s Saxon villages, and even–gasp!--in Old Hebron. These were cultural landscapes, created by people using tools with which people are intuitively comfortable.
Yes, this runs counter to the prevailing belief–was it John Kenneth Galbraith who used to talk about “conventional wisdom”--that life becomes better as technology grows more powerful. If that’s true, then life gets better as technology develops and separates us more and more from the world in which we evolved. Someone might well argue that they are as attached to their smartphone as they are to a favorite national park, but in episodes coming from India’s Cauvery Delta and the Ajanta Caves I’ve argued that Buddhism and Hinduism disagree and say that happiness comes from finding a place in the world, not in a piece of clever plastic. Of course, those religions could be wrong. And so I look at the equipment in the C Street museum and at the Chollar Mine and the Combination Shaft and think that I’m looking at the apogee of the technology with which human beings are comfortable. See a walking beam and you understand what it does. See a stamp mill and you see what the camshaft is doing. See a square set and you understand square sets. I understand these things because I have eyes and hands and a brain that’s part of genetic chain that extends back to amoebas and god knows what else.
Once again, please. The museum has a wood-splitter designed to split timbers a foot square. I’ve never seen a splitter that big, but it’s fully comprehensible. On the other hand, I don’t understand the mechanism in a parking meter. I know nothing about the electronics of the plane that brought me here or that support the ATM I visited because I figured that the people at the museum and the Chollar Mine might just be old-fogeyish enough to take only that green stuff we used to use. The 1860s and 70s were a pivot point, or what people like to call an inflection point. I don’t want to go back there, for the hundredth time, but I think we’ve lost something. Knowing this should make us work harder to find it.
Isn’t that why gazillions of people tramp over to Venice or Toledo. In case you’re wondering, I mean Venice, Italy and Toledo, Spain. But of course you knew that. I recently saw an 18th century painting of an Italian town I’d barely heard of: Arezzo, an hour or so south of Florence. The scene was the town square, the Piazza Grande, and it showed perhaps 50 people scattered over an acre of open crowd surrounded by four- or five-story buildings. I didn’t find it beautiful, but it did remind me how different the world felt then.
Rubinstein, the pianist, was a museum maven himself and wrote repeatedly of “moments of eternity.” He didn’t explain the phrase, but I think he had in mind several things, including sexual ecstasy, the occasional concerts where his playing rose from virtuoso whiz-bang to music, or, as in this case, visiting a museum and seeing something that he would never forget. A landscape, perhaps, that was now part of his brain matter.
You’re going to tell me that the world isn’t going back, and I’ll agree with you. Pry it out of me, and I’ll admit that I don’t want to go back there either. Still, I know what I’ve lost, and what I want more of, and I know that the important transition isn’t the Industrial Revolution of the textbooks. I’m as much at home with the world of the Comstock as I am with the Middle Ages. The important transition came later–let’s say around 1900–and it has plunked us down and left us on the curb of a one-way street where traffic moves fast and isn’t friendly.