John Mackay and the School He Never Attended
Near Reno, Nevada
In front of the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering on the University of Nevada campus, there is a bronze statue of a man in work clothes, hands in his pockets, looking out across the quad with an expression that is difficult to read, part satisfaction, part wariness. The statue was cast by Gutzon Borglum, the same sculptor who would later carve Mount Rushmore into the Black Hills of South Dakota. Ten thousand people attended its dedication in nineteen oh-eight. The man it depicts was John William Mackay, and he never attended a university in his life.
Mackay arrived in California in eighteen fifty-one as a penniless Irish immigrant. He worked as a miner, learned the trade from the ground up, and eventually followed the silver strikes east to the Comstock Lode in Virginia City. In the early eighteen seventies, he and three partners, the group history would call the Bonanza Kings, found and controlled a single ore body they called the Big Bonanza, inside the consolidated Virginia and California mines. In just five years, the Big Bonanza produced more than one hundred million dollars in silver and gold. Mackay became one of the wealthiest men in America.
He died in nineteen oh-two. His widow, Marie Louise, and his son Clarence set about distributing his fortune in ways that would honor his name. At the University of Nevada, Clarence Mackay donated one hundred thousand dollars for a school of mines building in nineteen oh-eight and pledged six thousand dollars per year for salaries for five years. The university had established a school of mines in eighteen eighty-eight, one of the oldest in the country, but it lacked the facilities to match its ambitions.
The Mackay School of Mines opened in nineteen oh-eight as a classical stone building in the center of campus. Over more than a century it trained generations of mining engineers for operations across the American West and beyond. The school's mission has evolved, it now covers earth sciences, geology, and environmental engineering alongside traditional mining, but the name remains. And Borglum's Mackay still watches the quad, in work clothes, as if he has just come up from the shaft.
