The Comstock Connection, Silver Money and a Railroad Town

Reno was born in eighteen sixty-eight, but it was rich from eighteen fifty-nine. That was the year gold and silver prospectors scratching along the eastern slope of Mount Davidson in the Virginia Range struck one of the largest silver deposits the world had ever seen. They called it the Comstock Lode, named for Henry Comstock, a Canadian miner who had little to do with its actual discovery but talked his way onto the claim anyway.

The Comstock lit northern Nevada like a match on dry grass. Virginia City, twenty-two miles to the southeast, swelled from nothing to a roaring industrial city of twenty-five thousand people. The ore body produced more than three hundred million dollars in silver and gold during its peak decades, wealth that financed the Union during the Civil War, built San Francisco's grandest mansions, and paved the way for Nevada statehood in eighteen sixty-four, rushed through Congress at Abraham Lincoln's urgent request.

Reno served as the Comstock's freight and finance gateway. Ore wagons rolled north from Virginia City to Reno's rail depot, where the silver left Nevada bound for San Francisco's mints. Lumber, machinery, food, and labor flowed back the other way. The Virginia and Truckee Railroad completed its route between Virginia City and Carson City in eighteen seventy, and the connection to the Central Pacific at Reno came two years later, locking the two towns into a single economic system.

When the richest veins finally ran thin in the eighteen-eighties, Reno did not collapse as Virginia City did. The railroad gave it a more durable economic spine. But the wealth that had coursed through Reno's economy for two decades left fingerprints that lasted far longer, in the university endowments funded by Comstock fortunes, in the stone commercial buildings that replaced the original tents, and in the mining school that one of the Bonanza Kings would endow to carry his name into the next century.