Virginia City, Nevada (Part 3 of 3)

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

Transcript

The Comstock created a grand total of just under 30 millionaires.  Slim pickings, but that’s the estimate made by Grant Smith, a mining attorney who grew up in Virginia City.  Eight of the thirty, Smith wrote, made their fortunes from the Consolidated Virginia.  Five got rich from the Crown Point Mine, a mile to the south.  Another eight were brokers selling dreams to dreamers.

Slim pickings, as I say, but many other people did pretty well from the Comstock, even if they did fall short of that magical seventh digit.  A correspondent from The New York Tribune came to Virginia City in 1875, looked around, and wrote that the town 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.”

Yes, I’m skeptical, but check the waybills of the V&T.  Yes you can, thanks to the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey,  He was Clarence King, and he had already sponsored George Becker’s geological atlas of the Comstock. King also wanted a history of the phired an 1873 Harvard graduate to write it.  Eliot Lord’s senior thesis had been on Alexander Pope, but Clarence King thought that Lord would do a good job, and King was right.  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 astonishing.  I expect thousands of cases of canned beans but Lord says that the V&T that year also brought 700,000 pounds of apples and 58,000 pounds of pianos, which I’m guessing means about a hundred of them.   He 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.  It sounds like a TV show promoting Italy.

Well, surely Virginia City was awash in violence.  Why else would C Street have that Bucket of Blood Saloon?  But along comes Eliot Lord.  He reports that in June, 1863, Virginia City had about 7,000 people.  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.  But do you see what’s missing?  Nobody’s been shot dead.  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.  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.  Hollywood has deceived us.  

Can we get closer to the truth?  Let’s start with a strike-it-rich story from Sandy and Eilley Bowers.  They 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 collected no more than half a million dollars and that he “spent it as fast as it came.”  He and 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.   Soon the blob was mined out.  Sandy tried mining some more but found nothing and at 38 died of silicosis.  Eilley made the mansion into a resort, but it 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 a hill behind the mansion.  Old photos show the hill barren, cleared of almost every tree, but it’s green now.

Virginia City has several much bigger 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, but they no longer work.  There’s a much smaller cemetery a mile south at Gold Hill, a Virginia City suburb.  I was wandering around the cemetery 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.” 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.  

I spotted a lineup of three nearly identical tombstones, simple slabs, semicircular at the top, for Richard, George, and James Bickle, three brothers who came to the Comstock from England.  Aged 33, 30, and 29, they all died on April 9, 1869.    They might have died like the five men standing at the base of a Comstock shaft when a mining cart full of heavy equipment came crashing down on top of them, but they didn’t.  The commonest accident on the Comstock was falling down a shaft.  That happened to about a third of the 300 fatal accidents that Eliot Lord counted on the Comstock, but they didn’t die that way either.  They died in the single worst accident on the Comstock, an underground fire that killed 34 men, most of them working in the Crown Point Mine.

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 the five.  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.  I don’t know how much of that went to Jones, but it was enough for him to buy a seat in the United States senate.  He remained there for 30 years before retiring to Miramar, a Queen Anne mansion he built on the coast at Santa Monica.  It was demolished in 1938, but there’s a monument to Jones in a nearby park, and it’s close to what is now the Fairmont Miramar.  There’s no monument to the three Bickle brothers.  I understand that it’s unreasonable to expect one, but I would like to believe that Senator Jones every year on April 9, the date of the 1869 fire, remembered the men who died making him rich.  Color me naive.

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 to raise 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 named Richard Bucke, but it was late in the year,  They hit storms and deep snow.  They ate 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.  Bucke 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 provincial insane asylum.  I know it’s a mordant joke, but I can’t help linking his second career to his first one.

I should have mentioned that the name Comstock comes from Henry Comstock, another Canadian.  Comstock 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 and, indirectly, the germ of son William Randolph Hearst’s money–but Henry Comstock was happy to sell his share of the mine for $11,000.  

“A bird in hand,” he might have thought.  He opened two mining-supply stores but Eliot Lord writes that “his customers usually paid him in promises.”  Comstock went bankrupt and, these are Lord’s words, “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 in Nevada since 1851.  William Wright, Mark Twain’s mentor, writes 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.

I hear someone say that, given the choice between frostbite in the mountains or a mansion in Paris, they’d take the mansion, plus some of those oysters.  

Who wouldn’t?  Mark Twain worked his way up from cub reporter on The Territorial Enterprise to become Dr. Samuel L. Clemens, courtesy of Oxford University.  Twain presumably enjoyed his success.  I recall that the pianist Arthur Rubinstein wrote in his autobiography that as a young man he came close to hanging himself in desperation.  He wrote at much greater length of his later years as a bon vivant enjoying wine, women, and song, with women 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 life in the lower classes, there’d be nobody to envy the people at the top.  Trust me, this would not please the people up there.  Someone driving a Lexus is usually quietly pleased to notice that the car in the next lane is a Toyota.  Tell me that somebody driving a BMW 5 Series doesn’t shrink a bit if the car in the next lane is a 7 Series.

I want to look a bit more at the unfortunate souls supporting the upper class both logistically and psychologically.  There were a lot of them in Virginia City.   Eliot Lord reports that in 1860, at the start of the 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 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.  

I don’t disagree, but come 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 powered by compressed air.  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.  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 as a reminder of the immense counterbalance to the pump rod reaching down 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 bolted together.  

Underground, 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 a hundred pounds, was raised and dropped by a steam-powered camshaft.  I stopped and scrutinized the museum’s specimen camshaft and the half dozen stamps it controlled.  How noisy would it have been?  In 1866, the Comstock mines kept 1271 stamps pounding day and night.   William Wright, alias 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 or bother mine owners delighted by the sound of making money, but most people today would probably think they’re damned lucky to have moved beyond this crude, even brutal technology.  

There’s nothing new about this celebration of progress.  Most people heading for the Comstock in 1861 were probably delighted to learn that a 101-mile toll road had just opened to Placerville.  Stage lines now offered trips to Sacramento in only 18 hours, and one operator advertised redeyes–he didn’t use that word–with 5 pm departures from Virginia City and breakfast in Sacramento, 120 miles away. A decade later, the first V&T train rolled into Virginia City, and I imagine passengers praising the Lord at never again having to take a stagecoach.   I also imagine Richard Bucke up there in charge of the Ontario insane asylum learning of the railroad and shaking his head as he remembered losing his foot to frostbite only 20 years earlier.

I myself stayed in Carson City, which today is less than three hours from Sacramento.  The hotel was generic, part of a chain of a thousand identical places, but it was predictably comfortable, and there was a good supermarket a few blocks away with more or less anything I wanted.   Chain restaurants, too. 

All this welcoming of progress is what John Kenneth Galbraith called “conventional wisdom.”  I want to depart from it and suggest that the mining museum in Virginia City teaches us that the 19th century was the apogee of the technology with which human beings are intuitively comfortable.  

See a walking beam and you understand what it does.  See a stamp mill, and you get it.   Same with square sets.  The museum has a wood-splitter designed to split timbers into twins each a foot square.  I’ve never seen a splitter that big, but it was instantly comprehensible.  

Then there’s the newer world.  This morning a workman was doing something to one of the elevators I take almost every day.  The machinery on top of the car was prodigiously intricate.  I told him, “Everyday I put my life in this thing, and I don’t have a clue how it works.”  Down the hall, another worker was swapping out drinking fountains.  I said something like, “I remember when a fountain was a pipe with a valve.”  He tried to explain why the integrated refrigeration required so much machinery, and I mentioned the elevator.  He said that he, too, had noticed the pile of tools that the elevator guy was working with, and now I’m reminded of asking someone the other day if he remembered when car windows opened with a crank.  He did, with some nostalgia, because he, like the fountain-repair guy, wasn’t thrilled by the technologies that make our lives more comfortable. He understood or at least believed that there is no going back to stairs and room-temperature water and window cranks. Open a car door with a key?  Come on.  Still the mind makes that little jump and wonders how to open an electric window in a car that has gone off the road and plunged into water.    

What does it do to human beings when they no longer understand the technology they use?  The conventional wisdom says nothing at all; they simply adapt, the same way I’ve switched from using a  typewriter to using a word processor and then a computer.

But if that’s the conventional wisdom, the alternative is fearing that our reliance  on technology we don’t understand leaves us not only uneasy but functionally reduced, which is a non-confrontational way of saying stupid.  

If you said that sentence to me, I’d reject it mostly out of pride.  We might go back and forth a bit, at which point I might disengage and say “whatever.”

That’s a fine word.  I mean that The Oxford English Dictionary–it’s my favorite dictionary, but whatever–says that the word has a long history as a pronoun and adjective and even as a noun,  but, as an interjection signifying “passive acceptance” or “tacit acquiescence,” appeared in 1985 in Platoon, Dale Dye’s novel derived from the film by Oliver Stone.  Wouldn’t you know it?  The Marines do what they’re told.  Whatever.  So 50,000 people die on one side and more on the other.  Whatever.  I take the elevator, drink the water, push the window control, not to mention the key fob.  Whatever.  I’d say I’m approaching that “functionally reduced” category.

You may still insist that we’re smarter than ever.  I mean just look at our politics.  Oh, wait, wait, don’t do that.  And now Eliot Lord steps forward one last time and reports that Virginia City’s bookshops and news vendors in 1867 sold 325 copies of Harpers’ Monthly, 112 copies of the Atlantic, 194 volumes of Dickens and 44 volumes of Shakespeare.  This is clearly impossible.   Miners don’t read Shakespeare.  Name the last president of the United States who read Shakespeare.  Nobody reads Shakespeare.  You have to go back before streaming video, before television, before radio, before the technologies that we are sure make our lives better.  But everything’s fine.  Just wave your arm and say the word.  You know the one.  Eight letters, three syllables.  You can’t remember?  No problem.  Whatever.