The Bonanza

by Bruce Patterson

Since people will take pride in anything under the sun, having a pride of place ain't much to be bragging about. If you spin a globe of the world, stop it with your finger and go wherever it lands, there you will find people who think they're living in the best place on earth. Frozen tundra, sand-blasted desert, steam bath tropics, wind-whipped mountains, tiny, isolated islands, savannas so flat and monotonous the sky takes over — it doesn't matter so long as you were born there. If you were born there, then there is no place else like it on earth.

That's one thing that makes some Californians so obnoxious. You hear Californians who don't know Cedarville from Poway, or Willow Creek from Shoshone, bragging about how their very own Golden State, scientifically speaking, that is, what with its cultural, topographical and ecological diversity, is by any measure far superior as a place to live than, say, Mississippi. And even if you are not from Mississippi, it makes you want to strangle them. As if logic could be applied in such matters. Fact is, in almost every Mississippi Township you will find any number of returned pilgrims who'd gone and lived in California and then left there because they hadn't liked it. To their way of thinking, out in California there were too many cars and too much noise, too much pollution and too many pricks and weirdoes. Sitting at some sagging lunch counter in some backwater Mississippi town, you might find somebody who will complain loudly that out there in California they ain't got no BBQ, no rhythm and blues and not a single body in the whole damned state who can cook a catfish.

So the proud inhabitants of Virginia City, Nevada, the semi-ghost town and tourist trap hanging on for dear life atop the tailings of what was once one of the world's richest Bonanzas, while they might go a bit overboard in laying on the local color and by decking themselves out in the traditional costumes, are not really too much different than the folks you'll find living in about any other small, out of the way, western town hoping to stake a claim to some tourists. At least Virginia City has some legitimate claims to fame and some genuine points of interest.

Nowadays some towns claim for themselves so much "Frontier Heritage" it's pathetic. (It's kind of like Boonville's boosters claiming that around here we've got ourselves this wonderful Mediterranean Climate). It's almost like the same committee of Heaven's Chamber of Commerce writes all of the tourist brochures for all of the towns out west. For instance, some years back my wife, my two grown sons and I returned from a visit to Ireland. We landed at LA International, fetched our car, made a beeline for the Mojave and out along old Sierra Highway we passed a fancy sign announcing, "Welcome to Historic Newhall." Because the most historic thing about Newhall is its left train track, and the second most historic thing about Newhall is its right train track, all of us got the joke and burst out laughing. I mean, back in Ireland, growing on the undersides of rocks were molds older than the town of Newhall.

So you can accuse the commonly accepted tales told about the American frontier west of being many things — preposterous claims, wild exaggerations, whitewashes, distortions, omissions, lies, damned lies and 14 carat fantasies — but being old ain't one of them. The last of the folks who came west in covered wagons were dying off about the time I was born. When I was growing up, right across the street there lived an old Cherokee gentleman who had witnessed the Oklahoma Land Rushes. When Wyatt Earp died, my dad was seven years old.

So, no matter how it's advertised, winding up the road toward Virginia City in the barren, churned-up, rocky defile known as Gold Canyon isn't like taking a road trip back into The Days of Yesteryear. Look beneath the surface of things and the experience is nothing like it. Visiting Virginia City is more akin to catching a glimpse into how we were just moments ago.

About halfway up Gold Canyon we park the car and take off on foot. We reach the summit of a small promontory, sit down and admire the view. Everywhere the hills are freckled with mine tailings. There are so many mounds of excavated dirt it looks like a family of giant, two-legged gophers had taken over. Hand some poor boys picks and shovels, tell them there's gold buried in the dirt and they will damn sure dig themselves some holes. An ambitious young man working a pick and shovel most of the day, most days, can very quickly produce a long tunnel and, judging by the mounds of tailings, hereabouts a lot of young men had worked a lot of days.

To get at the gold, they'd bore into the mountain and take off in any direction they felt was most likely. If they found a vein of gold, then naturally they'd follow the vein wherever it took them. And if the vein led to another one, either one bigger or smaller than the original, then that was fine. They'd follow that one, too. They'd burrow ahead any which way they wanted, in other words. Which made me wonder what happened when two of them tunneled into each other — when they just sort of burst in on each other, so to speak. Also it made me wonder why the hills we were sitting on didn't just collapse into the cavities beneath us.

A good number of the early prospectors in Gold Canyon were the sons of Ireland, so it pains me to report that they had to be among the stupidest lads ever to have fled the Emerald Isle. ("And a great shame it t'was to be rid of them," some might add.) For if awards were given out for monumental empty-headedness, if crowns were set atop the numbskulls of the most bone ignorant, bone stupid fools — if wishes were horses, these beggars would ride!

I shudder to think of their baleful misfortune. They were after gold, you understand, and they all knew what gold looked like. And here in Gold Canyon, without too much digging, they'd find some gold in flakes and nuggets. And the more they dug, by golly, the more they swung their picks, the more gold they'd find. But also — and this got to be aggravating — the more they dug, the more of this nasty, heavy blue clay they'd run into. In order to get at the gold, they had to move all of this heavy blue clay stuff out of their way. And there was so much of it that soon they were running out of places to get rid of it. Because freight wagons from the Truckee Meadows were regularly delivering supplies to town and then going back down the mountain empty, soon the prospectors were hiring the teamsters to cart off their mud.

"Just take it down the mountain and dump it somewheres out the way," they'd tell the teamsters while handing over their money.

So here were these poor, unlettered, clueless, luckless pilgrims paying rank strangers to haul off their Bonanza.

Try to imagine the bang-your-head-against-the-wall, drop your rifle butt on your bare toe, bite your tongue, crash in the bathtub kind of pain and humiliation that caused. No wonder so many of these accursed souls, once they'd realized the gravity of their miscalculation, degenerated into town drunks and babbling, foul-smelling village idiots.

The word "Bonanza" comes from the Latin word meaning "bonus," or "good." In Castilian Spanish, Bonanza means "fair weather" and, by extension, "prosperity." But in plain American up in these hills, "Bonanza" meant finding yourself a whole shitload of pure grade silver — more shining silver than a man ever imagined finding in his wildest dreams. Striking a Bonanza in this paydirt meant entering Paradise. Paradise here on earth, least ways, and that was plenty enough Paradise for most of these sinners and heathens. Striking a Bonanza hereabouts meant always having anything your little heart desired.

Of course, striking a Bonanza did you no good if you didn't know one when you saw one.

The early, one-blanket, one-donkey prospectors in Gold Canyon were lucky if after one day of all-day digging they came up out of their holes with five dollars worth of gold. While a single ton — not a large amount even when measured by the shovel full — of the mud they were discarding contained roughly $3,000 in pure grade silver and, as if God Himself was rubbing it in, another $900 worth of gold.

Imagine you were living down in sweltering Tonopah when you got the news. Between dodging sandstorms and flying tumbleweeds and mucking out stalls, you pick up a newspaper and read about how fabulously rich your old diggings up in Gold Canyon had turned out to be. How the whole damned mountain up there had come to be known around the world as the Comstock Bonanza. How a fellow could fall down about anywhere up there and land in silver.

Looking at the bright side, at least the newspaper story explained why all that mud you'd dug through all those months had been so damned heavy — it were full of metals, by golly! And having that mystery solved for you must have made you feel a whole lot better, too, which had to be worth something. Like, oh yeah, that's why I got that kink in my back. Like maybe now I'll just shoot myself instead of drowning myself.

The modern visitor doesn't have such a tough time of it. For as long as anybody can remember, Virginia City has been hawking cheap hot dogs, loose slots and ice cold beer. Other attractions include a number of gift and curio shops, artist studios, two excellent bookstores, a mine tour, a steam train ride and one of the west's most extensive pioneer cemeteries. You can avoid crowds by arriving in the morning.

Arcane tidbits, odd occurrences:

• The capital costs, plus the costs of the stock swindles, land frauds, extortions, kickbacks, insurance settlements, trials, adjudications and payoffs far exceeded the value of the silver extracted (about $6 billion in today's dollars). As a strictly economic proposition, society would have been far more prosperous had they left the Comstock Lode in the ground.


• In 1859 the Gold Hill Miner's Association outlawed gambling. The specified penalty for operating a game of chance was permanent banishment from the diggings.


• One day at high noon in the middle of the mining camp, a drunken James Finney dropped and broke a brand new bottle of whiskey. Since most of the horrified eye witnesses would rather have watched a church burn, James Finney claimed he'd dropped the bottle on purpose. From this moment forward, he loudly proclaimed, the dirt now having been properly christened, this here place was forever to be called, "Virginny City."


• During the late 1860s, over half the population of the entire Nevada Territory lived here.


• In 1880 there were 2,700 mine employees living here, according to research done by Wilber Shepperson. Of these, 816 were Irish born, 640 English born, and 544 were foreign born from other countries (China, Mexico, Germany, Peru, France, etc.). Also there were 770 American born.


• Henry Thompkins Paige Comstock was a two-bit confidence man who died "penniless" in Bozeman, Montana. He was nicknamed "Old Pancake" because, whenever he was mixing the batter for his bread, he always had one eye out the window speculating on how he'd get rich. In his later years he blamed his abject poverty upon "the rascality of civilization."


• The skyscrapers first erected in Chicago followed the design principles of a German born Virginia City mine engineer named Philip Deidesheimer. After his invention of the "Deidesheimer Square," any three dimensional void could be excavated and supported. Using his interlocking system of cubes, mineshafts could now go as deep as theoretically possible. Modern skyscrapers are framed like his mineshafts except upside down.


• The super strong and super flexible flat cables that power San Francisco's cable cars were designed and proven in the mines of Comstock.


• The world's first high speed elevators delivered miners to the lower depths of the mines under here. They were also the first mines to have electric lighting and electric ventilation systems.


• The west's largest trailer park built entirely on mine tailings is located right here in Virginia City.


• In 1863 somebody from the Barbary Coast wrote, "I have seen more rascality, great and small, in my brief forty days in this wilderness of sagebrush, sharpers and prostitutes than in thirteen years' experience in our not squeamishly moral state of California."


• Writing for the local newspaper, and responding to criticism of the foul treatment of Virginia City's Chinese laborers, Mark Twain wrote, "No California gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman... Only the scum of the population do it — they and their children; they and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians."


• Looking eastward at sunrise on a clear day, you can see the Shoshone Mountains some 115 miles away. The green streak of the Carson River is clearly visible in the foreground. Were it an arrow, it would be pointing at where you're standing.

A boom town is a place trying to make a future for itself while the getting is good. Then, after the bust, they realize that all they've really made was a past. And not much of one, either. But still a past is all that's left to bank on.