From Rags to Riches: The Story of the Silver Rush Kings and the "Big Bonanza"

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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 than 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 Mackey 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 gold fields 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 Fair 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. He 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 Fudd is the only Silver King not to have been born in Ireland. He's born in New York in 1826. He's born in New York in 1826, shortly after his Irish immigrant parents arrive. He catches the gold fever in 1849 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. Mackey Fair, O'Brien, and Fudd all spend 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. Fudd, with the 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 the Depression is the consumption of alcohol. He's right, and their saloon thrives. Fudd handles the business end of the operation while O'Brien greets customers and serves roast beef sandwiches that come complimentary with a drink. By the early 1860s, Fudd and O'Brien are dabbling in mining stock, buying and selling shares and mines that tap into the Greek Comstock Lude in Nevada. Fudd has an uncanny ability in stock trading.

Within a few years, he and O'Brien amass a small fortune. In 1868, they open their own stock brokerage office in San Francisco. Mackey and Fair, working separately, also spend the early 1850s prospecting in California.

Here's Comstock Lude historian Ronald James speaking to us at the location of the great Comstock Lude strike, which was made in 1859 by two Irishmen, Peter O'Reilly and Patrick McLaughlin. The first miners who came here were 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 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 learn 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. Love our stories in America like we do? Please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little. Give a lot. Help us keep the great American stories coming.

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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 Kentucky, a mine whose ore has supposedly been exhausted. Mackey sinks a new shaft in the Kentucky 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 wedded for new adventures and enterprises. While Mackey is working the Kentucky, James Fair becomes superintendent of the Ophir, 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 Ophir pit and they called it Ophir after Ophir, the gold mine of King Solomon in the Old Testament.

By asserting that this was the Ophir 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 Bitter O'Brien take notice of these two young upstarts on the Comstock. Soon they are discussing joining forces, and in 1869, the San Francisco stock brokers and the Comstock miners form a partnership. By the early 1870s, 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 cleefully reports to Ralston the Irishmen have been taken.

The Consolidated Virginia, says Sharon, is a bankrupt piece of property. Over a million dollars has already been wasted in the mine in fruitless exploration. Mackey and Fair have a hunch if they cut a new tunnel at a deeper level, they will hit a vein of ore. For several months, they tunnel, pouring $200,000 into the Consolidated Virginia, but hoisting up nothing but worthless rock.

William Sharon roars with laughter. Then one day, Mackey and Fair hit 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 12 feet.

Mackey and Fair send word to Flood and O'Brien in San Francisco. The stockbrokers quickly buy up as much outstanding Consolidated Virginia stock as they can. 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 Lode, 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 Lode, the combination of gold and silver, started expanding as they went underground, and at its widest, up to 60 feet wide of nearly pure gold and silver. The problem is, you cannot find gold and silver in the ground.

The problem is, you cannot find a log stout enough to span 60 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 Deidesheimer, who developed the square set timbering method, and it was basically a series of cubes that could be in their fashion added to so that whatever the stope, the empty space left over when you dug out all the gold and silver, whatever that stope 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 Virginias paying dividends of a million dollars a month, something like 100 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 fan tan. 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 deepest shaft here dropped over 3,000 feet, 3,200 feet. It's over 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 mile 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 rightfully 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 35-acre estate at Menlo Park. James Fear is elected to the US 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 IOU notes worth more than two million, like for giving two hundred million in today's money. When the great fire of October 1875 destroys the central part of Virginia City, including the town's Catholic church, St. Mary's of the Mountains, Mackey donates much of the money to have St. Mary's rebuilt bigger and better than ever. During a slow period on the Comstock, Mackey secretly pays a Virginia City grocer 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 Fear, William O'Brien, and James Flood demonstrate that her racial alger characters were not confined to novels, but were found for real in America. And there you have it, the story of the Silver Kings.

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