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The Comstock Lode and the Mining Frontier |
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Digital History ID 3149
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The richest silver deposit in American history was discovered in 1857 in Nevada. Two brothers, Evan and Hosea Grosh, found the deposit, but died before they were able to record their claims. Henry Comstock, a sheepherder and prospector, who cared for the brothers' cabin, unsuccessfully tried to find gold on the land, sold his claims within months, and died a poor man. But the silver lode came to bear his name.
While the Comstock claim did contain some gold, miners were
unable to get to it because it of an abundance of bluish clay.
It turned out that the clay was silver of exceptional purity.
This discovery triggered a rush of thousands of miners to the
area. A railroad was quickly built and the area became one of
the most heavily industrialized areas in the West.
Virginia City, a town built on top of the mother lode, was
the most important city between Chicago and the Pacific in the
1870s. The population soared from 4,000 in 1862 to 25,000 in 1874.
The town's six-story hotel had the only elevator west of Chicago,
and downtown had 110 saloons, several opium dens, and 20 theaters
and music halls.
Largely because of Virginia City's population boom, Nevada
Territory was created in 1861 and statehood came just three years
later. By the 1870s, over $230 million had been produced by the
mines, helping to finance the Civil War and bolstering the value
of the Union's paper greenbacks. But beginning in 1877, Virginia
City's population began to decline, and by 1930, only 500 still
lived in the town.
Working the Comstock Lode was extraordinarily dangerous. Apart
from the risk of cave-ins and underground fires, miners had to
worry about underground flooding. The temperature of water below
700 feet rose to 108 degrees. When miners penetrated through rock,
steam and scalding water would pour into the tunnel, and miners
had to jump into cages, risking death if the hoisting mechanisms
failed to lift them quickly enough.
It was in Virginia City that Samuel Clemens acquired the pseudonym
Mark Twain. At the age of 26 in the summer of 1862, with just
$45 to his name, Clemens accepted a job as a $25 a week reporter
for Virginia City's most influential daily newspaper. A year later
he began signing the name "Mark Twain" to his columns.
In a letter to his mother he described life in the rowdy mining
town:
I have just heard five pistol shots down the street.... The
pistol did its work well...two of my friends [were shot]. Both
died within three minutes.
In his book Roughing It, Twain described the arduous
process of refining the ore. Workers, wielding sledgehammers,
broke up the ore, which was then pulverized by machines. The dust
was mixed with water, mercury, and salt in heated tubs. The mercury
attracted particles of silver and gold. When heated, the mercury
evaporated, leaving pure gold and silver. About 15 million
pounds of poisonous mercury were used to extract gold and silver
from the ore. Today, the Comstock mines are contaminated with
levels of mercury 26 times higher than the federal standard.
One of the earliest discovers of the Comstock Lode's silver
riches was George Hearst, who later found more mineral wealth
in the mountains of Utah and South Dakota and finally the Anaconda
copper deposits in Montana. His son, William Randolph Hearst would
become the nation's most powerful publishing baron. Beginning
with The San Francisco Examiner, which his father gave him in
1887, when William was 24, he would develop the nation's first
media empire, including newspapers in most major cities and a
string of magazines.
In the late 1850s and 1860s, gold and silver strikes brought
thousands of miners to Nevada and Colorado. The discovery of gold
in Colorado in 1858 brought more than 100,000 to the area. On
land that was promised to Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians in an
1851 treaty, Denver was founded in November 1858. The discovery
of precious metals in Nevada and Colorado in the late 1850s was
followed by rushes to Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and the
Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1870s.
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