Virginia City is north of Route 50 in western Nevada. In 1859, ten years after gold in California sparked the California gold rush, the first major discovery of silver in the United States made Virginia City a boom town.
That discovery was called the Comstock Lode, after a miner named Henry Comstock, but the actual discovery was likely made in 1857 by two brothers, Ethan Allan Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh. Unfortunately, two crucial problems bedeviled the Grosh brothers: They weren’t sure how much value was actually in the ground, and they didn’t have enough money to find out.
As a result, the Groshes set out for California, intending to raise funds so they could cash in on their discovery. They never made it. They were caught by winter in the Sierras, and one brother died there. The other, after frostbite and amputation, went home to Canada.
They had left behind in Virginia City a locked chest holding gold and silver ore, and Henry Comstock was in charge of it. He opened it, and learned that valuable ore was in the vicinity. Comstock and other miners quickly staked claims and dug, and Comstock hit the vein of ore originally discovered by the Grosh brothers.
Like other early prospectors on the site, Comstock was looking for gold, not silver. An important method of finding gold was to run water over mined earth, washing gravel and dirt away and leaving gold behind. Comstock and a partner used this method, but found they didn’t have enough water. They dug a pit, hoping water would collect in it, but ten feet down they found gold. This led to more digging, including a trench in which they found a blue-black material — called “blue stuff” — that contained silver. Thus Comstock’s name, not the Grosh’s, has come down in history
But like the Groshes, Comstock and his fellow prospectors didn’t know how much ore was hidden in the ground, and they couldn’t afford the extensive mining operations required to find out. At least five of them, including Comstock, sold rights to their claims to others and subsequently lost everything, dying broke.
Others, with more money, persevered, and ultimately Comstock’s discovery came to be called a bonanza, which in mining terms means an exceptionally large and rich mineral deposit.
The “big bonanza” was discovered fourteen years later, in 1873. It was 1,200 feet down, and over twenty-two years of extraordinarily profitable mining yielded $105,000,000 in silver and gold. The four men who controlled this strike became so rich they were known as the Bonanza Kings.
Over time, Virginia City and the surrounding area experienced speculations, mining disasters, and frauds, but the mines and the metal were magnets and the population grew to 25,000. Virginia City citizens enjoyed amenities such as the Territorial Enterprise newspaper, which had a reporter named Samuel Clemens. He first used the pen name Mark Twain while reporting for it.
Difficulties inherent in extracting the ore during the silver boom led to innovations in mining technologies. These included invention of “square set timbering,” a method of supporting the soft rock surrounding the interior of the mines. New methods of draining the mines were also developed, coping with water that was cold near the surface but so hot deeper down it could cook an egg or scald a man to death. To reach those depths, elevator cages carried men and ore into and out of the mines. Hemp rope supported those cages, but as the shafts went deeper, the rope began to fail. Metal chain links were tried, but those failed, too. The solution was the invention of wire rope made of twisted metal cables. It worked, and later came to be used to propel San Francisco’s cable cars.
So much ore was mined that existing ways of processing it were too slow and new methods were developed, substantially increasing production. At the time, silver was a monetary metal along with gold, but the Comstock Lode flooded the market with silver, forcing the U.S. government to demonetize it.
There were other far-reaching effects, too. Silver from Virginia City helped pay for Union armies during the Civil War. It also financed the commercial development of San Francisco, including substantial construction in the city’s financial district.
Eventually much of the ore obtainable by existing methods was extracted, and Virginia City’s importance declined. Today, the town exists largely as a tourist destination, although a company called Comstock Mining still works the Comstock Lode.
