The Comstock Lode: Stolen Credit, Blue Mud, and a Silver Empire

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The first great silver strike in American history was found by men who thought it was trash. Gold miners in the Virginia Range of present-day Nevada kept clogging their equipment with a heavy, sticky material they called the blue stuff. It was silver sulfide. This episode tells who really found it: the Grosh brothers, trained mineralogists who both died in 1857 before they could stake a claim, and Henry Comstock, the loud opportunist who went through their trunk and later bluffed his way into a share of someone else's dig.

None of the early claimants kept the fortune. The ore lay in huge soft pockets that no ordinary tunnel could support, so mining it required new inventions and enormous capital. Engineers answered with interlocking timber cubes, flat wire rope, spring-loaded safety cages, a seven mile water siphon, and a tunnel nearly four miles long. The roughly 320 million dollars that came out went mostly to financiers, helped build San Francisco, pushed Nevada into statehood, and left mercury in the Carson River.

• Comstock sold his holdings for 11,000 dollars and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Montana, Patrick McLaughlin sold for 3,000 and ended as a cook, and Peter O'Riley died in an asylum.
• Philip Deidesheimer's square-set timbering filled the mined-out voids with six foot wooden cubes, letting shafts reach more than 3,200 feet and consuming 80 million feet of timber a year.
• Andrew Smith Hallidie's flat wire rope of 1864 replaced hemp and iron chain in the shafts, and he later used the technology for San Francisco's cable cars.
• Hermann Schussler's inverted siphon carried mountain water across the Washoe Valley at 810 pounds per square inch, then the highest pressure water system in the world.
• Adolph Sutro spent eight and a half years boring his drainage tunnel, which reached the mines in 1878 after the richest ore was gone, while a failed miner named Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain at the local paper.