Comstock Lode, 1859

The Comstock Lode did not actually begin with Henry T. P. Comstock, who vastly underestimated the worth of what he found and who, along with his cronies, was something of a late player in the game.

On their way to the California mines, Mormon prospectors, as early as 1848, had discovered a quartz vein containing gold in the Washoe Mountains east of the Sierra Nevada. As the gold appeared to be of inferior quality and small in quantity, the Mormons continued their trek to the Golden State. They did however take with them tales of their miniscule find, which began to permeate the California goldfields as the placer mining started to die out and the possibility of individual strikes gave way to corporate mining successes. The so-called old sourdoughs wistfully dreamed of recreating the heyday of 1849, when anyone could make a fortune overnight with the right mixture of skill and luck in nearby Nevada—if only the opportunity presented itself.

However, through the mid-1850s, Nevada kept its secret locked underground in an immense vein of variegated ores located some 6,500 feet above sea level [Page 162]on Mount Davidson and extending from Gold Canyon to Six-Mile Canyon. Some placer miners who eked out a minimal living had staked nearly 100 claims in the area without much result.

In 1859, however, the situation changed radically when Henry Comstock and James “Old Virginny” Finney staked two 50- by 400-foot claims at Gold Hill near the head of Gold Canyon. Simultaneously, two Irishmen, Peter O'Reilly and Patrick McLaughlin, staked claims at the head of Six-Mile Canyon. Because the spring that watered the Irishmen's claims emanated from Comstock's holdings (or so he said), Comstock claimed a portion of anything the Irishmen found and invited a friend, Emanuel Penrod, to join in the partnership. The combined claims were eventually christened the Ophir Mine—mentioned in the Bible as the source of King Solomon's wealth. The claims did indeed yield gold, but of a tainted quality. A bluish-black substance was intermixed with the gold, and the five miners routinely separated the unwanted mineral from the yellow ore and tossed it away. Although none of the group was ever interested enough to investigate the composition of the blue material, a prospector from Truckee carted a sack of it to an Assay Office in Grass Valley, California.

The samples assayed turned out to be 75 percent pure silver, worth $3,876 per ton, and 25 percent gold, worth $876 per ton. When the results became known, a good portion of Grass Valley pulled up stakes and headed across the Sierra Nevada toward the Washoe diggings.

The original Ophir Mine owners, realizing that the gold and silver vein extended deeper than the mere placer surface mining they were performing, had by this time already filed lode claims. Consequently, when the California gold seekers arrived, they found that all of the valuable land was firmly in the control of Comstock and his partners.

Unfortunately, all of the Ophir's initial creators, as also chronicled in the Bible, sold their birthrights for a “mess of pottage.” Each assumed that the Ophir would play out fairly quickly, as had all the other mines in the area, and each decided to sell his share as soon as possible to the newcomers. The aggregate total of what they received for their shares was $26,000. The Ophir eventually yielded more than $11 million.

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