The Miners Leave Virginia City
June, 2008
By John Evanoff
Without a doubt, the great ledge of quartz of the Comstock Lode
and the mounds of bluish mud containing high grade silver coming
from the many mines and mills in and around Virginia City was slowly
dwindling to a mere few thousand dollars a day by 1890. Some say
the dream of a metropolitan center began to melt away in 1880 when
other strikes occurred around the west. Maybe it was the way the
rich got richer and moved to Carson City and San Francisco and the
way stocks were sold among the many who tried their hand at speculating.
Perhaps, it was the big companies taking over and the miners working
day and night to bring the ore up from half a mile down. Slowly
though, Virginia City was changing. In May of 1881, the city gave
up its influential owned government to the county commissioners
and only a few mining companies which had bought up the majority
of smaller claims had stuck around looking through the immense ore-body
in hopes of finding another great bonanza. The miners union, although
strong, was starting to lose men to claims in other parts of Nevada
and to Alaska as well as in other countries. The companies and stock
holders of Virginia City paid good wages to the miners for that
period of time; at least to those with experience. But when supervisors
sometimes left for other companies and claims, they would take a
dozen or more good men with them and mining companies had a hard
time replacing them. Still the noise went on and the city was busy
night and day.
From the time in 1859 that James Fennimore, named
“Old Virginia” by his drinking buddies, first drunkenly
broke his bottle of liquor by accidentally stumbling over a rock
and christening the fumble as “Virginia”, the town grew
so fast that history books still advance the premise it was greed
to its highest adventure. By 1875, more than 20,000 people lived
on the slopes of Mount Davidson and almost all the way down Six
Mile Canyon. The many characters whose prospecting led to the Comstock
Lode being one of the most sought after bonanzas in the world eventually
left for other fields or became rich beyond means and became barons
of other industry. Many of these larger-than-life folks concocted
other get-rich-quick schemes and eventually went broke.
In the region, more than fifty mills stamped and
reduced thousands of tons of rock to garner from them millions of
dollars in precious metals. Even the great fire of October, 1875
which destroyed more than two thousand structures in a half mile
wide swath of the town was of no great importance to the work to
be done to release the wealth from the ground. Within three months
of the great fire of Virginia City, all the homes and most of the
businesses and structures were rebuilt and the Virginia & Truckee
Railroad ran more than forty trains a day to furnish enough wood
and supplies so the entire town could be whole again. So that it
never happened again, firefighters were hired full time and a set
of huge water tanks was built along the hillsides above Virginia
City with a maze of hydrants throughout the streets prepared to
handle any fire. The high pressure hoses were rolled on large spools
near each hydrant insuring that the fire would be out before it
ever got our of hand.
Some of the deepest gold mines exceeding more than
3,000 feet were hit with bad luck in 1888 when an underground creek
was struck open and filled a number of the mines to a level that
became financially impossible to completely dry out through pumping.
By this time, many of the surface miners had already left for strikes
in Austin, Eureka and points south and east. To the dismay of many
of the stockholders, the strikes seemed to be losing their potency.
The superior mining techniques of the great Consolidated California
& Virginia, Yellow Jacket, Gould & Curry, Ophir, Savage,
Confidence, Best & Belcher, Crown Point, Overman, Alta, Baltimore,
Hale & Norcross, Potosi and the Challenge milled more than a
million dollars in bullion each quarter, but the stockholders wanted
more. With prices of stock much higher than gold itself, some economists
believed the end was very near anyway. The constant haggling and
speculator promises of new bonanzas finally cracked the money pot
until only a few mines were left to dig for treasure.
If you take the time to climb to the top of Mount Davidson and look
down on Virginia City, you may hear the ghost’s whispers of
new finds just below the streets in the winds that come up the canyon
to meet your face in the morning hours. I believe, with the way
gold is aiming ever higher and maybe even over a thousand dollars
an ounce and silver soon going above what an ounce of gold sold
for in 1888, we may see the bonanza strikes again. But until that
time, we are left with a little sleepy tourist town that attempts
to take you back to when times were better and only reinvents itself
as a shadow of that period. As you look north into the Truckee Meadows,
you see the growing municipalities of Reno and Sparks below Peavine
Peak and are reminded of how in their meager days, they once tried
to reinvent themselves on many occasions as the capital of divorce
and gambling.
Looking south to Eagle Valley and Carson City,
you can almost imagine the time when the Virginia & Truckee
rail yards teemed with an industry of servants the likes no one
in the west had ever seen before. More wealth and technology came
through that area in those illustrious three decades than in all
of America. In fact, it was Virginia City that won the Civil War
for the Union with its big bonanza and eventually led to Nevada
being declared a state.
The view to the Sierra Nevada, Mt. Rose and Slide
Mountain is still today a most remarkable and memorable spectacle.
If you look across Washoe Lake to Bowers Mansion and Old Washoe
City, squint a bit and remember that a dozen mills and more than
ten thousand people moved lumber, supplies and hundreds of miners
a day up the steep dirt road of the Jumbo Grade to the mines, it’s
easy to imagine Washoe City almost became the capital of the state.
Without a doubt the view to the east with Virginia
City, Gold Hill and Silver City still gives me goose bumps. This
area was by far one of the busiest places on and in the earth for
quite awhile. Wonder upon wonder happened at this spot and all from
the treasures of the Comstock Lode. I can visualize walking down
Main Street with Mark Twain listening to another one of his crazy
stories and knowing he would dream up more to keep the conversation
going. I can hear the whistle of the Virginia & Truckee still
today, because of the wild imaginings of a few proud Nevadans and
the Northern Nevada Railway Foundation. If you get a chance, take
the ride and listen to the stories. Walk through Boot Hill and visit
the museums and bars along the main streets of these three feisty
towns. The charismatic prospectors who pursued the big bonanza and
the many that made fortunes grubstaking them in these isolated rugged
canyons were all great story tellers, acquainted with many bottles
of booze and lived adventurous and hard working lives. Their exploits
have produced novels, short stories, movies and marvelous contraptions
we still use today. In the shadow of Mount Davidson, it’s
easy to acknowledge the famous Virginia City as the true and one-and-only
legend of the west.
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