Blue Metal and Blue Fire, The Comstock Lode, Eighteen Fifty-Nine

It started with a complaint. Two Irish prospectors, Peter O'Riley and Patrick McLaughlin, had been panning for gold on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson in the spring of eighteen fifty-nine when a rangy, talkative man named Henry Comstock showed up, declared that the land was his, and demanded a share. They let him talk his way in.

Comstock, true to form, also talked his way into the history books. The blue-black mud clogging their Long Tom sluice, the stuff they kept cursing and throwing aside, turned out to be the richest silver ore ever found in North America. When an assayer in Grass Valley, California, weighed it and did the math, the number came back extraordinary: nearly three thousand dollars a ton.

Within weeks, the California gold fields emptied. Every miner who could walk, ride, or be carried crossed the Sierra. By the summer of eighteen sixty, ten thousand people occupied the slopes above Six Mile Canyon, and Virginia City was already a city in the fullest sense: newspapers, hotels, three churches, and a dozen saloons.

The Comstock produced more than three hundred million dollars in silver and gold over the next twenty years, most of it in the eighteen seventies under the management of the Bonanza Kings: John Mackay, James Fair, James Flood, and William O'Brien, four Irish immigrants who had arrived in California with nothing. Mackay alone became one of the wealthiest men in the world. The money did not stay in Nevada.

It built San Francisco. It funded the Bank of California. It capitalized the Central Pacific Railroad.

And in eighteen sixty-four, when the Union needed both votes and cash, it convinced a president and a Congress to admit a territory with fewer than forty thousand people as the thirty-sixth state of the union. The Comstock did not just make Nevada. It helped save the country.