Virginia City, Nevada (Part 2 of 3)

For photos, see greatmirror.com
For a transcript, see Buzzsprout.com/1970784

Transcript

 I drove into Virginia City.  Here was the old main street, just as straight and level as I remembered it from my visit 41 years before.  The street lies almost exactly atop the Comstock Lode, which despite its name was not one mass but a line of many separate masses or blobs of silver.  The first blob was discovered in 1859 almost by accident, when gold miners exploring the neighborhood 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, along with $750 in gold.  The Ophir Mine was born.  That’s Ophir, same as in the Bible.  It was the first Comstock bonanza.  That word came into English from Spanish, courtesy of Josiah Gregg who a decade earlier had used it while writing about gold in New Mexico.

In 1875, when the Comstock reached its peak, you could have driven along the main street 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.  Some lost  because they bought when shares were high and sold when they were low.  Others lost money on shares whose prices 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 showed 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 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 time.  This is the right moment for me to mention that during the Great Depression, one state in the United States decided that the way to boost its tax revenue was to legalize gambling.  You have one guess.       

Mt. Davidson, the highest peak of the Virginia Range, rose 1,500 feet 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 blue stuff’s amazing assay results, and he became an incorporator of the Ophir Mine.  Until then, Mt. Davidson had been called Sun Mountain, but rich people want recognition almost as much as they want more money.

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 came 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 like information you don’t need, but the system is on the list of National Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks.  It’s there because the water system, built in the 1860s, consisted originally 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 which got the water 1,700 above the intervening valley without having to pump it.   Several siphons were eventually built, and one, a 10-incher from the 1870s, survives as Virginia City’s water source.  It needs to be replaced, people say.

Signs in Six Mile Canyon cautioned that the water was contaminated.  The problem wasn’t the sewage.  It was 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.  Six Mile Canyon is 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.  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 six-story brick building with a hydraulic elevator.  There were banks on the main street and offices for doctors and lawyers, which is surprising only because Virginia City today has no lawyers or doctors.   The International Hotel burned down 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.  There’s Reno about 15 miles to the northwest, Carson City about a dozen miles to the southwest, and Dayton, about five to the southeast, at the bottom of Six Mile Canyon.  Dayton has mushroomed from under a thousand people in 1970 to over 15,000.  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 Virginia City lived down at the bottom of the hill.  Virginia City was too expensive, they said.  I heard this so often that I began to start conversations by asking, “Do you live here?”  The answer came with an edge of bitterness and a story about buildings bought by outsiders (that’s code for Californians) who don’t like Virginia City enough to live in it but who like it well enough to buy a building, jack up the rent, and watch the old timers 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 do stick around but not necessarily because they want to.  One woman told me she had been here 17 years and been trying to get away for 15.  

The town’s main street is C street.  Rich people love to live above everyone else, so up above C Street and parallel to it A Street and B Street have some very nice old houses.  They’re all wood, like the Victorians in San Francisco, but these Victorians haven’t been flamboyantly decorated.   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 escapees from California.  They’ve come here for freedom, and they slam into zoning rules. 

Downhill from C, there’s a scattering of more modest houses 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.  Union Street, which goes all the way up from R to A, is steep enough that from several blocks away I could hear school buses in low gear.  

The old Virginia and Truckee Railroad, the V&T, came into town from the south along E Street and stopped at a station on the site of what is today the city’s visitor center.  Some structural problem meant that the visitor center was closed and wasn’t going to open anytime 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 icy weather and, at an elevation of 6,000 feet, maybe a bit tiring.  But you’re right, people on B street probably had carriages.

It’s hard to get lost in Virginia City, but it’s a different story underground, where there used to be a maze of shafts and tunnels.  I say “used to be” because the rock under Virginia City is soft enough that the roofs of underground passages had to be held up by wooden beams.  The beams would still be holding them up today if groundwater wasn’t pervasive.  It is pervasive, and it’s usually very hot.  

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 connected to the pump by a wooden walking beam that reminds me that the forests around Lake Tahoe were pillaged for the Comstock.  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 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 immediately flooded, the mine timbers rotted, and the roofs collapsed.  

If you’re a defender of the logging industry, you’ll say that the trees have grown back.  If you’re not, you’ll say that after 150 years the trees in the new forest are still not as big as the trees they replaced.  The man who owned the logging company, by the way, built Carson City’s biggest  house.  It’s wood, and it’s still there.  I don’t know who owns it now, but from the outside it seems in good shape.  There’s a California state park on the western side of Lake Tahoe named for that lumberman, Duane Leroy Bliss.  Odd that you can butcher a forest and get a park named for you.

The entrances to the Comstock mines have disappeared, too.  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, for example, show the shaft of the Consolidated Virginia adjacent to 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 good, 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.

Good thing it stops, 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.  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 mined-out voids was 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. 

In 1882, the U.S. Geological Survey published an atlas of the Comstock showing that the ore at the Chollar Mine had been rich to a depth of 600 feet and had been removed not through a tunnel but through a 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.  The miners dug another eight drifts in this zone, but found nothing 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.  The mine flooded, collapsed and was abandoned. 

Abandoned mining shafts are dangerous, so it’s good that the Comstock shafts are not sitting there, tempting children and idiots.  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 which, if you bought them today, would draw protests from the people who deplore tiger hunts.  I’m one of them, but 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 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 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 climbed up to the timbers 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.  Rusty cables were still wound around the drum, and there was a braking mechanism, but the engine was gone.  Foundations for other buildings surrounded this one survivor.  The foundations were mostly concrete, but the foundation for the hoist was faced with stones like the blocks of the Egyptian pyramids.

The atlas published by the Geological Survey is big, perhaps 18 by 20 inches.  The maps were prepared by George Becker, a New Yorker by birth, educated at Harvard and with advanced degrees from Heidelberg and from Berlin’s Royal School of Mines.  The atlas is full of bogglingly complex drawings of the Comstock Lode 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  hunting for more. You can see the areas that were reamed out and 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.   Experts at the time thought otherwise.  Think of Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, an uncle of Manfred, World War I’s Red Baron.  Ferdinand would later be famous for travels in China–among other things, he coined the term Silk Road–but years earlier he went to Virginia City 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 greater depths.  He was right, in the same sense that I might live for 150 years.   

Sutro built his tunnel, in ruins today and on a site maddeningly fenced and posted.  By 1880 the Sutro Tunnel 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 of silver 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 too complicated 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 except that every rod was connected either to the surface or to other rods so miners could get the hell out.  

Sometimes the mines, like those participating in the Combination Shaft, were interconnected to work cooperatively, but most mine owners went to court to fend off neighbors.  This was far trickier than surface owners quarreling about the location of a property line, because mining custom 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 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 sheets of plywood.  Instead, they’re like branching trees, so two miners could each find the top of a branch, start digging, and then bump into each other.  

The Ophir was said to have fought off 37 lawsuits, which explains why a directory published for Virginia City in 1864 listed seven breweries, 10 blacksmiths, 23 doctors, and 50 lawyers.  They were outnumbered only by the town’s 53 saloons.

Nevada joined the Union that year and elected two senators.  One of them was William Stewart, the best-known of the lawyers and the man credited as the force behind the federal laws.  (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 laws replaced them.) 

Nevada’s first five senators included the Territory of Nevada’s one and only governor, two Comstock mine owners, the leading banker for the miners, and lawyer 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 lawyers today would be embarrassed to live so simply.

Even then, the leading mine owners of the Comstock felt obligated to put on a show, even if they didn’t much want to. I’m thinking of the man who made the greatest fortune  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 Big Four, alias the silver kings, had bought the Consolidated Virginia, a mine which until they bought it had been a failure.  The four men 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.  Philip 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 one dollar in July, 1870, to $700 six months later.  Deidesheimer invested everything he owned in the mine but held on too long and  declared bankruptcy when the shares in 1879 sank to $3.  Mackay didn’t make that mistake.  He sold his shares after receiving about $25 million in dividends.  

Mackey’s wife, Louise, had been 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 putting up with that, and so she left Virginia City and never returned.  Not to worry: Mackaye 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 also paid 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. 

Mackaye began investing in transatlantic cables.  Jay Gould tried competing with him but gave up with the explanation that he couldn’t beat somebody who, in need of money, simply dug it up.  Mackaye’s cables, across both the Atlantic and Pacific, became part of the Western Union system in 1943.

Wikipedia says that Mackaye’s fortune was worth the equivalent of 50 billion dollars today.  Color me skeptical.  William Wright, who wrote under the pen name Dan De Quille, was Mark Twain’s mentor on The Territorial Enterprise.  In The Big Bonanza, Wright’s Comstock history published in 1876, Wright estimated that Mackaye was worth 50 or 60 million dollars.   Is that equivalent to $50 billion today?  I don’t know, but you don’t have to follow my lead.  After all, I hate numbers.  I say we just agree that John and Louise were comfortable.