Gamblers' Millions

SILVER KINGS (286 pp.)--Oscar Lewis --Knopf ($4).

Panning out the thin gold in Nevada's Carson Valley in the 1850s, miners cursed a heavy blue sand that clogged their rockers. In 1859, "Old Pancake" Comstock and three others, playing a hunch, staked out a 1,500-ft. claim around the mouth of a small spring where the blue sand was thick. They sent a sample of crumbly stuff across the mountains to an assayer in Grass Valley, Calif. He tested it twice, to be sure. There was no doubt: the stuff that gold miners had cursed and kicked aside was rich in silver.

That was the beginning of the famed Comstock Lode, but it was 15 years before it really paid off--when it became the royal domain of four shrewd Irishmen. In just one year (1874) each became a multimillionaire. Oscar Lewis, annalist of San Francisco and author of a good book (The Big Four) on the builders of the Central Pacific, has written a thoughtful history of the men who exploited Corn-stock's richest ore. He makes it clear that the West as a whole gained nothing from this strike but a prolonged fever and a legend.

All of the original claim holders sold out early. Writes Lewis: "When Alvah Gould sold, for less than $500, his half interest in the Gould & Curry, he boasted of having duped his fellow Californians; but his claim yielded 15 millions, and Gould ended his days operating a peanut stand in Reno."

The Big Bonanza. The men who made and kept the great Comstock fortunes were good gamblers with a certain kind of brains. Two of them, John W. Mackay and James G. Fair, had been pick-&-shovel men in their time. The two others, James C. Flood and William S. O'Brien, never -ot closer to mining than the floor of San Francisco's Mining Exchange. Mackay and Fair, who came to the top in the rough & tumble life of Virginia City, get more than two-thirds of Author Lewis' space.

A big man with a hot temper and a soft heart, Mackay became a miner for love of the exercise and a mine-owner for love of the game. In Virginia City he spent his evenings at a gymnasium taking on all comers for three bruising rounds each. His regimen was rare in a town where for a time every other building on the main street was a saloon, and where the brothels were the pride of the West. With another of Virginia City's diversions, however, Mackay was thoroughly at home, and that was speculation in mining stocks.

Ambitious men moved in, capable of trying to dominate the entire Comstock. One was a cold little bank manager named Sharon. One of his exploits was the "Hale & Norcross corner" in 1868, by which he got control of an important mine. When production declined and stock shares fell soon afterward, Sharon resorted to a common technique: he sold most of his stock to avoid paying stock assessments, knowing that he could buy it back cheap when new ore was uncovered. At this point Mackay and his partner Jim Fair, as a gamble, began their own raid on Hale & Norcross.

Flood and O'Brien, the San Francisco brokers, carried out the trading for them so cleverly that Sharon never woke up to it until he was boughKQut: Mackay and Fair were in control. ThenlheLinine began to pay. This was luck; but it was nothing like the luck that followed. A year or so later, on another gamble, they boughfthe worn-out property of the Consolidated Virginia Co. They tried a new diggmg. A 1,500 feet, they struck an ore body that averaged $380 a ton, ten times the value of ordinary Comstock ore. This was "the Big Bonanza" about which, as a contemporary wrote, "the fancy of the coolest brains ran wild."

The Western Princes. A man who paid $800 for 100 shares of Consolidated Virginia in 1871 could sell them four years later for $1,280,000. Mackay, Fair, Flood and O'Brien became incredibly rich. They owned the mining properties; they also owned the mills that reduced the ore and the supply companies that equipped them. Their enemies charged that they made $50 million in three years merely through trading in their own stock. In any case, few others greatly profited from the fever of speculation in silver shares.

Says Author Lewis: "So much of the fluid wealth of the Pacific Coast had been poured into the hoppers of the brokerage offices that the financing of other enterprises became extremely difficult. A sort of creeping paralysis spread over the economy of the region, with many business failures and widespread unemployment. Thousands were impoverished not only by the stagnation of trade but by enormous stock losses. . . ."

Mackay used to say that he made his money out of the ore, and advised speculators to put theirs in a savings bank. Mackay hated the title of "Bonanza King," which he said "makes me just a damn millionaire with a swelled head." By far the most generous as well as the ablest of the partners, Mackay emerges from Lewis' account as an archetype of all that was most attractive in U.S. rich men of the era. He had many charities and gave away $5,000,000 in personal gifts before he died. Where Jim Fair was crafty and boastful, Flood cold and unapproachable, O'Brien amiable and simple, Mackay had a downright, salty dignity.

While Mrs. Mackay was engaged, for a quarter of a century, in dazzling Paris and London as the most magnificent of U.S. hostesses abroad, her husband lived in U.S. hotel rooms to which down-&-outers continually pursued him. Millionaire Mackay knew that he was often imposed on. Once, when he offered to pay for the burial of a miner who had been killed in an explosion, the undertaker sent him a bill for $600. Mackay remarked that if the miner's legs hadn't been blown off he supposed the bill would have been $1,000. A friend of Sam Clemens, who had roughed it in Virginia City for a while, Mackay shared Clemens' attitude toward Europeans. He took pleasure in solemnly assuring his wife's titled friends that the pigs and family had shared living quarters in the Irish hut of his childhood. Mrs. Mackay's response to these remarks is not recorded.

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