Every history of the Comstock arrives at the same sentence and hurries past it. The silver, they say, came out of the ground by hand, in the dark — and then they move on to the fortunes, the senators, the opera houses. That sentence is the whole story, folded up small. Under the boardwalks of Virginia City runs not a mine but a city turned upside down: a two-and-a-half-mile ore body hollowed into a honeycomb of timber and scalding rock, three thousand feet deep, worked in heat that could kill a careless man in an afternoon. The famous silver is the easy half of the Comstock. This is the hard half — how it was actually won, and what it cost the men who won it.
The rock that wouldn't hold
The trouble started almost at once. The Comstock's ore didn't run in a tidy vein you could prop with a beam and a post; it came in enormous, crumbling pockets — soft blue-gray rock dozens of feet wide that caved the moment it was dug out. At the Ophir mine the shaft was ten feet across at fifty feet down and better than forty across at a hundred and eighty, and no timbering anyone knew could hold a hole that size. Cave-ins were routine and lethal.
The fix came in 1860 from a twenty-eight-year-old German engineer named Philipp Deidesheimer, brought up from California to look at the problem. His answer, said to be inspired by the cells of a honeycomb, was to fill the void with timber instead of trying to span it: interlocking cubes of squared beams, roughly six feet on a side, stacked in every direction to whatever height and width the ore body demanded, the mined-out cells often packed with waste rock into solid pillars of wood and stone. Square-set timbering made it possible to take out an ore body of any size without bringing the mountain down, and it became the world standard for hard-rock mining for the next half-century. Deidesheimer could have patented it and grown rich; he didn't, and every mine on the lode used it for free.
It had one enormous appetite. A honeycomb that size, buried underground and never recovered, ate timber on a scale the country around Virginia City could not begin to supply — so the Comstock reached over the mountains and took the forests of Lake Tahoe, floated down flumes and hauled in on the railroad, until the eastern Sierra slope stood bare. One Comstock chronicler called the lode the tomb of the Sierras, a forest buried alive in the dark and never dug out again. The logging that stripped the Tahoe basin was the surface shadow of all that timber vanishing into the mines below.
Deep enough to boil
Down was worse than dark. The Comstock ran hotter the deeper it went — not the ordinary closeness of a mine but a geothermal furnace, rock warm to the touch and water that came scalding out of the walls. In the deepest workings the air pushed past 120 degrees and the water ran near 170, hot enough to cook a man who fell into it. Miners worked in short shifts, stripped to almost nothing, drinking gallons and cooling against blocks of ice lowered from the surface by the ton; the grim nickname for a Comstock miner was a hot-water plug. Winter meant snowshoeing to a shaft house and then dropping into a summer that never ended.
Getting down and back was its own hazard. Men rode the hoisting cages standing, hundreds of feet a minute into the dark, and a hand or a shoulder let stray between the cage and the timbered shaft was simply gone. Cave-ins swallowed whole rooms — one at the Chollar-Potosi in 1867 opened a sinkhole two hundred feet wide at the surface and took a dry-goods store down with it. Rare was the week without a funeral. If you want the feel of it rather than the figures, the Chollar Mine still runs four hundred feet of original square-set tunnel into the hill beneath C Street, and you can walk in far enough to feel the timber close overhead and the temperature climb.
The four-mile drain
Water was the enemy that never quit. The deeper the shafts went, the more scalding groundwater poured in, and the great Cornish pumps that fought it ran day and night and still lost ground. In 1860 a Prussian immigrant named Adolph Sutro looked at the problem and proposed something audacious: instead of lifting the water hundreds of feet to the surface, drive a tunnel four miles through the base of the mountain and let it drain out the bottom by gravity, ventilating the mines and carrying out ore on the way.
It took him nearly twenty years. He won a charter in 1865, then watched the Bank of California crowd — who owned the mines and the mills and liked their monopoly — turn against him, afraid a drainage tunnel would loosen their grip. What finally paid to start the digging, in 1869, was the miners themselves, who wanted the escape route and the fresh air, especially after what happened that April at the Yellow Jacket. Sutro's crews bored 3.88 miles of near-perfectly straight rock — sighted true by reflected sunlight at noon — and broke into the Savage mine in 1878, within eighteen inches of the mark. It was a genuine engineering marvel, and it arrived too late: by then the richest ore was already out and the shafts had gone deeper than the tunnel could reach. Sutro read the situation, sold his stake, moved to San Francisco, and got himself elected mayor. His tunnel is still down there, quietly draining the old workings to this day.
The Yellow Jacket
The reason the miners wanted out had a date. Before dawn on April 7, 1869, fire broke out around the 800-foot level of the Yellow Jacket, at Gold Hill just south of Virginia City, and found the one fuel a Comstock mine had in endless supply: the square-set timber itself. The three mines down there — the Yellow Jacket, the Kentuck, the Crown Point — were cut through to one another for ventilation, which now meant smoke and poison gas poured freely from one into the next. Men going down on the morning cages rode straight into it.
At least thirty-five died, and perhaps as many as forty-five; the exact number was never settled, because eleven bodies were never recovered. The fire would not go out. Rescuers were driven back again and again, the burning levels were finally sealed to smother the flames, and the rock down there stayed hot for years — still red three years on. It remains one of the worst mining disasters in American history, and it happened, by grim luck, at shift change, or the toll would have been far higher. The funeral processions ran for days, the miners' union marching behind the coffins.
Four dollars and eight hours
The men who did this work came from everywhere. By 1880 a third of Virginia City was Irish, many from County Cork, trading the Appalachian coal seams for better pay and daylight between shifts; the Cornish "Cousin Jacks," the finest hard-rock men in the world, favored Gold Hill; there were Germans and Mexicans and Welshmen and African Americans, and more than a thousand Chinese, to whom the mountain was Yin Shan, the Silver Mountain — though the Chinese were shut out of the underground and the union both, and left to grade the railroads, cut the cordwood, and run the laundries and gardens.
For the men the union did admit, this was some of the best-paid industrial work on earth. In 1863 the miners organized one of the first lasting unions in the American West and drew a hard line: four dollars a day for any work underground, and in time an eight-hour shift. They had unusual leverage. A strike would idle the pumps, and idle pumps meant a flooded, ruined mine — so the owners, for all their power, mostly paid rather than fight. For a generation the Comstock miner was the aristocrat of American labor, and the union all but ran Storey County. It was a real achievement, and it belonged to the men on the inside of the line the union drew.
The easy half and the hard half
The rest of the Comstock story is the one everyone tells: the Big Bonanza of 1873, the Irish "Silver Kings" — Mackay, Fair, Flood, O'Brien — who rose from nothing to fortunes that helped build San Francisco and seed the Hearst empire; the wealth that rushed Nevada into statehood and rode the Virginia & Truckee down to Carson City to be struck into coin. That is the boom, and the bust that came after, and it is the easy half — the money, which is always the part that gets remembered.
The hard half began two thousand feet down, in 120-degree dark, in a honeycomb of timber that had eaten a forest, with a scalding river at your back and a fire always one dropped candle away. Whose land the silver was taken from in the first place is its own reckoning, told at the far end of this region. But the winning of it — the how — is the part the ghost-town postcards leave out. Every dollar that ever left the Comstock left on the backs of the men who went down for it, and a fair number of them never came back up.