Tag: comstock lode

Fort Churchill, Nevada

Fort Churchill State Historic Park is south of Route 50 on U.S. Highway 95A, forty miles east of Carson City, Nevada.

A little history: After victory in the Mexican-American war in 1848, the United States annexed the land that includes the fort’s location and made it part of the Utah Territory. In 1861, the land was included in the Nevada Territory, created in response the the discovery of silver in the Comstock Lode near Virginia City. Nevada became the 36th state just three years later, on October 31, 1864. The date was chosen to provide political support for Abraham Lincoln’s second presidential election. All these events played a role in Fort Churchill’s existence.

Today the fort’s location feels remote, but back then things were happening nearby, as immigrants settled the Nevada Territory. The Overland Stagecoach line passed through beginning in 1858. In 1860, the neighboring Buckland’s Ranch became a Pony Express station. Construction of telegraph lines through the area began later that year. Most important, the Comstock Lode silver mining communities of Virginia City and Dayton, Nevada, were just over 20 miles away, and the 1859 discovery of silver brought miners and others across the mountains from California.

All this activity distressed the Native Americans living in the area, who had once occupied the land exclusively. Disputes with newcomers arose over hunting and other land rights. For example, the smelting of silver ore required large quantities of wood, which was converted to charcoal for use in the smelting process. This stripped the surrounding land of trees, and with them pine nuts, an important part of the ecology of the dry desert area, already difficult to live in. The Native Americans, dispossessed from their normal existence, became increasingly hostile.

Then, in 1860, white men based at Williams Station, a Pony Express stop in the area, kidnapped several Native American women from the Paiute tribe. In response, the Paiutes burned Williams Station and killed those they found there. This led to the formation of a force of 105 white vigilantes. Loosely organized and under the nominal leadership of William Ormsby, they set out to punish the Paiutes. The resulting battle, near what is now Pyramid Lake, did not go as the vigilantes expected. The Paiutes, led by their chief, Numaga, defeated the revenge party, killing 76 of them, including Ormsby.

Alarmed, those living and working in the nearby Comstock Lode area requested the protection of regular army troops. Fort Churchill was built to house those soldiers.

Construction of the fort began in the summer of 1860, and 58 adobe brick buildings were completed by autumn of the same year. The fort was intended to be a staging area and supply depot, so no surrounding walls were built, but the layout of the buildings in a quarter-mile square can still be seen today. It was named for Sylvester Churchill, the Inspector General of the U.S. Army, and 337 men were stationed there.

Twelve women, some of them wives of soldiers stationed at the fort, also lived and worked there. The women were “laundresses,” who washed, ironed, and mended the soldiers’ uniforms. They were paid for these services by the soldiers themselves, not the Army, but the Army required them to have a “certificate of good character.” This was intended to discourage any hanky-panky.

Even after the fort was completed, hostilities with the Native Americans continued. In 1865, Fort Churchill’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles McDermit, was killed in an ambush. At the time, he was leading an expedition against the Paiutes.

During this period, the Civil War was being fought in the states to the east, and Fort Churchill played a role in the conflict. There were rumors that Southern sympathizers arriving from California intended to take over Virginia City. The presence of Union troops discouraged them, and helped keep the new state of Nevada oriented toward the Union and not the Confederacy.

But by 1870, only ten years after its construction, Fort Churchill’s usefulness had come to an end. It was abandoned that year and sold at public auction for $750 to Samuel Buckland, the Buckland of the nearby Buckland’s Ranch Pony Express station. The fort fell into ruin, pillaged for building materials that were used elsewhere.

In the 1930’s, sixty years later, the Civilian Conservation Corps renovated the fort, and in 1970 it became part of the Nevada State Park System. Today, 150 years after it was abandoned, remnants of Fort Churchill still exist, preserved by the dry desert climate.

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Historical accounts about the origin of Fort Churchill vary. The version told here is based largely on material presented in today’s state park.

Virginia City, Nevada

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.