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But do you know that almost half of the homes on the Navajo Reservation do not have clean running water? With your support, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School is ready to give water to Navajo families.
So we invite you to help provide this precious gift of life to those in need. Contrary to many average Americans, Navajo families survive on just 10 gallons of water per day. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. Millions of people have turned to Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic, because it just feels different.
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And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and from business to history and everything in between, including your stories. Send them to ouramericanstories.com. They're some of our favorites. In the annals of American capitalism, there is probably no crazier, wilder, more chaotic boom-to-bust and back-again phenomenon. In the Comstock Load in the 1860s, the richest couple of square miles on Earth.
This small section of dirt changed the destiny of the United States. Here to tell this rags to riches frontier tale is Old West historian Roger McGrath. Here's Roger. If ever there were real-life figures who could have been characters in a Horatio Alger novel, it was the Silver Kings. John Mackey, James Fair, William O'Brien, and James Flood epitomized the rags to riches American dream.
John Maciew is the engineering genius of the Silver Kings. Born in Ireland in 1831, he immigrates with his family to New York in 1840. He reaches the California goldfields in 1851. He enjoys hard physical work and mining camp life. He has almost no formal education and had stuttered badly when young.
but he is blessed with extraordinary intelligence. James Ver is a mine superintendent without peer and a shrewd financier. Born in Ireland in 1831, he immigrates with his family to Illinois during the early 1840s. He has enormous energy, a trenchant mind, and a natural aptitude for all things mechanical. He joins the Gold Rush to California in 1849.
William O'Brien is born in Ireland in 1826 and brought to New York as a small child. By the time he joins the gold rush of 49, he has grown into a large man of erect carriage. he will soon have a head of prematurely white hair. His size, posture, and hair give him a dignified appearance. Unlike his partners, he is soft spoken, with an avuncular, kindly quality about him.
is the least forceful of the Silver Kings, but his gregarious and genial nature make him the most popular and ideal for public relations. James Mudd is the only Silver King not to have been born in Ireland. is born in New York in 1826, shortly after his Irish immigrant parents arrive. He catches the gold fever in eighteen forty nine and sails around the Horn to California. He has a quick wit, a shrewd mind, a volatile temper, and a powerful drive to succeed.
He is a genius in trading stocks and in finance. MacEphir, O'Brien, and Flood all spent in the early 1850s. prospecting and mining in California, and each has some success. With his earnings from the Diggings, O'Brien opens a marine supply store in San Francisco. flood with money he has made.
opens a livery and carriage shop just down the street from O'Brien. Both lose their businesses, though, in the Depression of 1855. They then join forces and open a saloon. O'Brien reasons the only thing that does not go down in a depression is the consumption of alcohol. He's right, and their saloon thrives.
Flood handles the business-ended operation while O'Brien greets customers and serves roast beef sandwiches that come complementary with a drink. By the early 1860s, Flood and O'Brien are dabbling in mining stock, buying and selling shares in mines that tap into the great Comstock load in Nevada. Flood has an uncanny ability in stock trading. Within a few years he and O'Brien amassed a small fortune. In 1868, they opened their own stock brokerage office in San Francisco.
Mackey and Fair, working separately, also spent in the early 1850s prospecting in California. Here's Comstock Lode historian Ronald James speaking to us at the location of the great Comstock Lode strike, which was made in 1859 by two Irishmen, Peter O'Reilly and Patrick McLaughlin. The first miners who came here We're after gold. Gold's easy. Gold doesn't combine with many things, so you can actually even pick it out of their washed dirt with tweezers and you hope for a nugget, but you find little flakes of gold.
And that's how you can pull the gold out. The two miners who were coming up here, a couple of Irish immigrants, were just looking for a good place to dam up a natural spring so they could get water. And they were hoping that they could find some water, throw some dirt into their long toms, which were these wooden boxes, and wash the dirt. While they were damming a natural spring they found, which was right up here, they started throwing some of the dirt in there and found immediately that they were uncovering Several ounces of gold, and it was a very good day. And it was the first of many good days, in fact, 20 years worth of good days.
They were complaining for those first few weeks after the strike in June of 1859. These early miners complained about this blue mud that gummed up their works because, as you wash away the lighter soil, it leaves gold behind, but it was also leaving behind this blue mud that was really obnoxiously heavy, and it was hard to separate it from the gold.
So, after several weeks, they took an ore sample over to California and said, What exactly do we have here? And what they found was that if you had a ton of this stuff, it would produce over $800 in gold when gold was selling for $16 an ounce. But what was really surprising was that it was that it would Produce over $3,000 in silver when silver was selling for $1.60 an ounce. And so that's really where everyone understood just how wealthy this ore body, or using the Cornish word load, was, and then it became known as the Comstock Load. When they learned of the Comstock Load strike at Virginia City, they head over the Sierras to Nevada.
The people who came to the Comstock were an international body of people. Nevada actually had, in the 1870 census, more foreign-born per capita than any other state in the nation, more than the great immigrant. states of you think of Massachusetts and Boston and New York and how vibrantly international those places were, Chicago. A lot of Europeans obviously, a large group of Chinese lived here. They came from all over.
They often arrived as single men. And so it was a very masculine community. And when we come back more on the lives of these four risk takers, the Silver Kings, the story of the Comstock Load continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation's 250th anniversary, I'd like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College.
And Hillsdale isn't just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on communism is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again, go to hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. There's nothing like sinking into luxury.
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An average American household consumes over 300 gallons daily. 40% of Navajo families residing on a reservation the size of West Virginia struggle to survive on less than 10 gallons of water per day. Yearly St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School delivers over 1.5 million gallons of clean water to these families. You can help support St.
Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. Millions of people have turned to Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic, because it just feels different. Where other AIs often sound a little robotic, Claude has been designed with special research that informs its character, meaning that Claude just gets it when it comes to empathy and emotional intelligence. That's why Claude has become the if-you-know-you-know choice for dating advice, career coaching, gathering your thoughts for those important life decisions, and more. Give Claude a try for free at claude.com.
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The Silver Kings. Let's pick up with Roger McGrath, where we last left off. Mackey works as a pick and shovel miner for $4 a day, then as a timberman for $6.
Soon he develops his own business, excavating and fortifying tunnels. Much of his pay is in the form of stock certificates.
Now most of these prove worthless, but a few give him enough money to buy the Kentuck, a mine whose ore has supposedly been exhausted. Mackey sinks a new shaft in the Kentuck and hits a rich deposit. During the next several years, the mine pays over a million dollars in dividends, huge money in the 1860s. Mackey also has said he will retire as soon as he has $25,000 in the bank.
Well now he has many times that, but his appetite has only been whetted for new adventures and enterprises. While Mackie is working in the Kentuck, James Fair becomes superintendent of the Ofer, one of the richest mines on the Comstock. In 1868, he enters into a partnership to develop new mining properties with Mackey. I'm standing at the base of the Ofer Pit. And they called it Ofer.
After Ophir. the gold mine of King Solomon in the Old Testament. By asserting that this was the Ofer mine, they were claiming that this was a mine of biblical proportions. And they got it right. Because Hundreds of millions of dollars came out of the ground beginning right here.
Back in San Francisco, Jim Flood and Biddle O'Brien take notice of these two young upstarts on the Comstock.
Soon, they are discussing joining forces. And in 1869, the San Francisco stockbrokers and the Comstock miners. form a partnership. By the early eighteen seventies, through wise investments and daring gambles, The four Irishmen are challenging William Ralston of the Bank of California. For control of the Comstock.
In 1872, they buy the consolidated Virginia mine for $100,000 from Ralston's right-hand man in Virginia City, William Sharon. Sharon gleefully reports to Ralston: the Irishmen have been taken. The Consolidated Virginia, says Sharon, is a bad. bankrupt piece of property. Over a million dollars has already been wasted in the mine in fruitless exploration.
Mackey and Fear have a hunch if they cut a new tunnel at a deeper level. they will hit a vein of war. For several months they tunneled, pouring two hundred thousand into the consolidated Virginia. but hoisting up nothing but worthless rock. William Sheeran roars with laughter.
Then one day, Mackey and Fair, had a delicately thin vein of ore. They try to follow it. But it disappears. They find it again, but again it disappears. They find it a third time.
This time the vein begins to widen. to a foot, to several feet, to a half dozen feet. to twelve feet. Mackie and Fair send word to Flood O'Brien in San Francisco. The stockbrokers quickly buy up as much outstanding consolidated Virginia stock.
as a kin. The deeper the new shaft is sunk in the consolidated Virginia, the wider the vein becomes. At the 1500 foot level, the vein is more than 50 feet wide. The ore is so rich, waste rock has to be added to it to put it through the stamp mill. The Irishmen have discovered the very heart of the Comstock load.
what is called the Big Bonanza. For the rest of their lives, They are known. as the Silver Kings. Here again is Ronald James. In 1873, they found what was called the Big Bonanza.
Here, the Comstock Load, the combination of gold and silver, Started expanding as they went underground, and at its widest, up to sixty feet wide. Nearly pure gold and silver. The problem is, you cannot find a log. stout enough to span sixty feet. Even 20 feet without snapping because it has to hold up a mountain, and mountains want to collapse in on empty space.
So they brought in a German immigrant by the name of Philip Didesheimer who developed the square set timbering method. And it was basically a series of cubes that could be in modular fashion added to so that whatever the stope. The empty space left over when you dug out all the gold and silver. Whatever that stoke was shaped like, you could fill it up with a stout. Framework of timber, and then you would fill it back with waste rock as you dug even deeper inside the mine.
So it was a really nice, stable way to support. A mine as you were pursuing precious metals, and that was exported throughout the world. It's only the first of many inventions: flat wire cable, the safety cage. This was the first place where dynamite was experimented with in a big way underground. It was the first place where air-compressed drills were used.
So it became one invention after the next that defined international underground mining for the next 50 or 60 years. By 1875, the Silver Kings are fabulously wealthy. The consolidated Virginia is paying dividends of a million dollars a month, something like a hundred million in today's money. San Francisco is seized by a speculative mania. If the consolidated Virginia has hit the big bonanza, other mines might also.
Thousands of shares of mining stock trade daily. People make and lose fortunes overnight. Char women buy the hotels they scrub floors in. Hack drivers give away their carriages to live on Knob Hill. Chinese gambling dens close because Chinese are gambling in mining stocks instead of fantan.
From 1873 to 1882, the consolidated Virginia yields $65 million in gold and silver and pays $43 million in dividends. More than 4 billion. in today's dollars. Here again is Ronald James. The the deepest shaft here dropped over 3,000 feet, 3,200 feet.
It's over a half mile, a straight elevator drop. And keep in mind, this is in 1870, 1880, when most people have never ridden an elevator anywhere. And to imagine these people being dropped down over half miles straight down, it really is something. There was a law on the Nevada books that said it's against the law to talk to a hoist operator. He was the fellow who was running the spool as it lowered the cages down.
And it's illegal to talk to a hoist operator while he's working because if you distract him and he's off by 10 feet, that could be fatal to the guys in the cage as they drop down. The Silver Kings all live writheously well and die with multi-million dollar estates. William O'Brien Contributes to charities and supports all his close relatives, especially the McDonough and Coleman families of San Francisco. James Flood buys San Francisco real estate, erects numerous buildings, funds new business ventures, and establishes the Nevada Bank. The Nevada Bank later merges with Wells Fargo.
He donates large sums to charities. He and his wife and their children live on the fabulous thirty five acre estate at Menlo Park. James Fair is elected to the U.S. Senate from Nevada, but spends most of his time accumulating real estate in San Francisco. He becomes the city's largest taxpayer.
He also establishes two banks and a railroad. John Mackey forms a telegraph company, lays a cable across the Atlantic, and breaks the Western Union monopoly. He makes more millions. During his lifetime he gives away more than five million in gifts. he also tears up I OU notes worth more than two million.
like forgiving 200 million in today's money. When the Great Fire of october eighteen seventy five Destroys a central part of Virginia City, including the town's Catholic Church, St. Mary's of the Mountains. Mackie donates much of the money to have Saint Mary's rebuilt bigger and better than ever. During a slow period on the Comstock, Mackey secretly pays a Virginia City grocer to to supply provisions to any miner at work.
He also is the largest contributor. to Sisters Hospital, requiring only that his donations be kept confidential. John Mackey, James Fair. William O'Brien and James Flood. demonstrate that heratial algae characters were not confined to novels.
but were found for real. in America. And there you have it, the story of the Silver Kings. This is Lee Habib, the Silver Kings story here. on our American stories.
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But do you know that almost half of the homes on the Navajo Reservation do not have clean running water? With your support, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School is ready to give water to Navajo families.
So we invite you to help provide this precious gift of life to those in need. Contrary to many average Americans, Navajo families survive on just 10 gallons of water per day. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. This is an iHeart Podcast.
