In a previous post I told the story of the California Gold Rush. We thought about telling you about some of the other gold rushes of the era, but none of them were nearly as interesting or influential as the one in California. But then it occurred to us that, since gold wasn’t the only metal to cause rushes, we could tell you a bit about silver rushes in the Old West. Though there were silver rushes in many countries (e.g., Argentina, Mexico, Canada), the US had its fair share of them, too. But the first and most significant silver rush in US history was the rush to the Comstock Lode in Nevada.
The Comstock Lode was discovered in 1857, and turned out to be the richest silver deposit in the US. It got its name from Henry Comstock, a sheepherder and a prospector, even though he wasn’t the one to discover it; the people credited with the discovery were Ethan Allen Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh, the sons of a Pennsylvania minister, and veterans of the California gold fields. The two died before they were able to record their claims, and eventually Henry Comstock took over their cabin. For months, he worked their claims, trying to find gold, but he never struck it big, and he ended up selling the claims for a low price; the namesake of the richest silver deposit in the US died a poor man.
All That Glitters Is Not Gold… But Sometimes It Is Silver
As time passed, the claims changed hands several times, with different people prospecting for gold. Though some gold was found, pretty soon it got to a point where it was impossible to dig it up because of lairs of blueish clay that lay under the initial deposits. Because gold deposits aren’t usually split into two parts, most miners figured that all the gold had been found and left. However, eventually it was discovered that the blue clay was actually silver. Lots of silver.
As can be expected, news of the discovery spread like wildfire, and pretty soon people all over were rushing to the Sierra-Nevada territory. The news attracted not only miners, but also promoters and traders. As in the California Gold Rush, the massive influx of people who came to find their luck in this silver rush contributed greatly to the development of the area. Small mining camps and trading posts suddenly became important supply centers; towns and new camps popped up like mushrooms after the rain; existing towns got bigger and bigger. The best example of such a town is Virginia City.
Virginia City was a very small town in 1859; it only had two or three stone houses. But no more than one year later, the town grew significantly, and acquired a metropolitan appearance. The first newspaper of the area —The Territorial Enterprise—which was founded in 1858, had moved its headquarters and presses to the town. For several decades, Virginia City was the “capital” of the lode and a main center of commerce and luxury.
One of the famous people who lived in the town was Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain) who spent a year panning for silver and gold in the area, and later got a job as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise newspaper. It was during his time in Virginia City that he started to use his now famous pen name, and later in his life his experiences in Virginia City were a large part of the basis for his book, “Roughing It.”
As a result of the population boom that was in the area, the Nevada territory was created in 1861, and three years later it became a state. In the beginning of 1877, the population in Virginia City started to decline and around 1930 only 500 people still lived in the town. As a matter of fact, after 1880 all the mining centers in the country, not only the Comstock Lode, began to lose population; after the ore was gone, the leaders took their fortunes and left for other places. Between 1880 to 1900 Nevada lost a full third of her population.
Work in the Comstock Lode was dangerous. In order to reach the deeper deposits of silver, the miners needed to dig very deep in the ground, reaching depths of over 700 feet (about 213 meters, for our metric readers). But the deeper they went, the more they had to worry about underground fires and floods, in addition to the possibility of being scalded by the water, since at such depths it tends to get hotter and hotter. If disaster struck, the miners had to always be ready to rush back to their cages, and hope that their fellows topside could pull them out in time.
As was bound to happen, a few big companies got ownership of the mine. The mines in the Lode were developed over the years, and its ownership changed hands several times, to the point where it’s hard to actually say how many companies owned the Comstock Lode. And though the Comstock Lode yielded an estimated $305,779,612 between 1859 to 1882, most of the companies weren’t profitable to their owners: as more and more ore was removed, companies resorted to new, often wasteful mining techniques.
Until next time
Stego
In a previous post I told the story of the California Gold Rush. We thought about telling you about some of the other gold rushes of the era, but none of them were nearly as interesting or influential as the one in California. But then it occurred to us that, since gold wasn’t the only metal to cause rushes, we could tell you a bit about silver rushes in the Old West. Though there were silver rushes in many countries (e.g., Argentina, Mexico, Canada), the US had its fair share of them, too. But the first and most significant silver rush in US history was the rush to the Comstock Lode in Nevada.
The Comstock Lode was discovered in 1857, and turned out to be the richest silver deposit in the US. It got its name from Henry Comstock, a sheepherder and a prospector, even though he wasn’t the one to discover it; the people credited with the discovery were Ethan Allen Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh, the sons of a Pennsylvania minister, and veterans of the California gold fields. The two died before they were able to record their claims, and eventually Henry Comstock took over their cabin. For months, he worked their claims, trying to find gold, but he never struck it big, and he ended up selling the claims for a low price; the namesake of the richest silver deposit in the US died a poor man.
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