The Age of Gold (60 page)

Yet the stage-drivers were dazzling enough, at least in their own opinion. Secure in their ability to do what neither the division agents nor the owners—nor anyone else, for that matter—could do, namely cover the requisite hundred miles a day over mountains and deserts, through rain and snow, they scarcely deigned to deal with lesser mortals. Clemens described one of the select fraternity dismounting after a night on the road.

Clemens and the other paying customers rated hardly better. “The overland driver had but little less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers.”

Occasionally the stage would pass a wagon train, an encounter that reminded both parties what an improvement the former was over the latter. “Just beyond the breakfast-station we overtook a Mormon emigrant train of thirty-three wagons,” Clemens wrote of a stretch slightly east of South Pass. “And tramping wearily along and driving their herd of loose cows,
were dozens of coarse-clad and sad-looking men, women and children, who had walked as they were walking now, day after day for eight lingering weeks, and in that time had compassed the distance our stage had come in
eight days and three hours
—seven hundred and ninety-eight miles!”

Although the stage was the fastest mode of ordinary travel across the plains and mountains, it wasn’t the fastest means of communication. That honor went to the year-old Pony Express, whose riders tore past Clemens and the stage like a prairie whirlwind. For many days Clemens and the others strained their eyes eagerly for a glimpse of these intrepid racers, who covered 250 miles a day carrying letters—typically business correspondence—that were literally worth their weight in gold. But somehow the riders all passed the stage in the night, until one day when the stage driver, from his elevated perch, called down, “Here he comes!”

The overland stage relieved the travelers of much of the tedium of crossing the trans-Missouri West, but it couldn’t entirely eliminate the
hardship. The Great Salt Lake Desert slowed the stagecoach to a painful crawl. “Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes,” Clemens requested of his readers. “Imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes.” The sun beat down with relentless malignity. Not the faintest breath of air eased the heat or lifted the travelers’ spirits. “There is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound—not a sigh—not a whisper—not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird—not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air.”

The lost souls crowded especially close in the Carson Desert. The barren waste that had nearly consumed Sarah Royce and her family still bore grim evidence of the toll it had claimed.

O
N THE WESTERN SIDE
of the Carson Desert were the towns— which was to say, the mines—of Nevada. There Sam Clemens encountered George Hearst, the greatest miner of the Gold Rush era, and indeed the most successful miner in American history. Hearst looked every inch the rugged man of the earth. His craggy brow and prominent nose appeared to
have been rough-chiseled from rock, and his flowing beard always seemed several months from its last appointment with shears or razor. He chewed tobacco religiously, and his juice-streaked beard and spotted shirt betokened his faith.

Hearst and the Clemenses shared Missouri as a home state, although Hearst left it more than a decade earlier, to come out with the overlanders when the trip still took months rather than days. Like Lewis Manly, Hearst had experience of lead mining—in Missouri rather than Wisconsin—and like Manly he guessed that digging gold couldn’t be any harder than digging lead and must be more lucrative. As it happened, the mass of miners already in the field (Hearst didn’t reach the mines till the autumn of 1850) put him off temporarily. He fell into operating a theater in Nevada City, an establishment that enjoyed a monopoly among the five thousand inhabitants of the town after a March flood in 1852 swept away the dramatic competition. The second floor of the building housed a reading room, where Hearst and his partners set out newspapers delivered from the wider world to Sacramento but left uncalled-for at the post office by their intended recipients. On one of his visits to Sacramento he discovered an opportunity in commerce, and so opened a general store on K Street, not far from where Leland Stanford set up shop.

But Hearst’s heart was in the dirt. As a boy he had spent so much time nosing around mines and pits and holes that the remnant Indians in Missouri called him “Boy That Earth Talks To.” The earth in California told him that a particular quartz ledge outside Nevada City was deeper and richer than it appeared to the thousands of others who had been over that ground. Naming the mine “Merrimac,” after the Missouri river on which he grew up, he dug it out and demonstrated that the earth didn’t lie to George Hearst. He did the same with a mine he called the Potosi, after a Missouri mine (itself named after the famous Bolivian district). Before long he owned a pile of money and a reputation for uncanny insight into matters mineral.

It was this reputation that caused him to learn, in 1859, of an unusual load of black dirt sent to an assayer in Nevada City. The sample came from
Washoe, as the district beyond the Sierras was called. The prospectors who sent it were interested in its gold content, which proved considerable. But what amazed the assayer, who shared his amazement with Hearst, was that the part of the sample that was not gold, and which the Washoe miners had apparently been throwing away, was loaded with silver, worth three thousand dollars a ton.

Hearst headed east at once. A hundred miles from Sacramento, on the slopes of a nondescript height named Sun Peak, he found the mine that was the source of the black ore. The mine was called the Ophir, and the owners included a wily prospector named Henry Comstock, whose stake in the mine owed more to his pushiness than to any priority in discovery. Luck—bad luck—was involved, too; a number of Comstock’s partners met untimely deaths, leaving no heirs to dispute his thereby increased portion. As the wealth of the Ophir and the surrounding district became known, Comstock christened the lode underneath it after himself. (One of his partners, a Virginian with a weakness for drink, answered Comstock by accidentally dropping a bottle of whiskey on the ground near the mine; as the booze ran out he salvaged what he could of the situation by declaring the site baptized, as Virginia City. This partner, too, died suddenly, pitched headlong from his horse while drunk. Eventually Comstock himself suffered a violent death, by his own hand, after his wife, who had fled a polygamous Mormon marriage to be with him, then fled him.)

Hearst knew more about the value of the Ophir than its owners, and he arranged to purchase a one-sixth interest for a relative pittance. He proceeded to employ the mining expertise he’d brought from Missouri and sharpened in California, and developed the mine. He imported steam engines, hoists, and pumps, and drove deep into the heart of Sun Peak. When the ore vein proved more extensive than anything in California, requiring more elaborate means of shoring up the roof and walls of the mine, he installed a new modular system of “square set” timbering devised by a German engineer named Philip Deidesheimer. In time the Ophir was yielding millions of dollars per year, making Hearst a very rich man, and making Nevada—as the territory was formally named on being carved from Utah
subsequent to the new discoveries—the focus of hopes and dreams much like those that had populated California a decade earlier.

I
T WAS THEN EVADA
boom that attracted Orion and Sam Clemens, and it was the Nevada boom that got Leland Stanford started building—as opposed to merely advocating—a Pacific railroad. In the early 1860s, Stanford cut a considerable figure in California: wealthy businessman, governor, leader of the newly ascendant Republican party. He was an obvious partner for anyone intending to start a major project in California, especially a project requiring an alliance of public and private resources.

Theodore Judah thought so. Judah was a Connecticut native who developed a monomania for a Pacific railroad. He was an engineer but, more important, a promoter; many judged him a lunatic. He wrote of trains crossing the country in forty hours, traveling a hundred miles an hour, powered by locomotives with driving wheels fourteen feet in diameter. Yet Judah complemented his flights of fancy with hikes of reality. He trudged the ridges and valleys of the Sierras with his surveying instruments, determined to demonstrate the feasibility of a line across that mountain wall. Meanwhile he sought subscriptions for a scheme to raise money to get the construction started. San Francisco spurned his offer, but Sacramento was more receptive. Stanford’s friend and fellow Republican, Collis Huntington, listened to Judah’s pitch and was intrigued. Huntington shared the idea with Mark Hopkins, with Charles Crocker, and with Stanford. The four sponsored a further survey by Judah, and in the interim drew up articles of incorporation for the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California. On June 28, 1861, they filed the necessary papers. Leland Stanford was listed as president.

Stanford knew no more about railroads than Huntington, Hopkins, or Crocker, and considerably less than Judah. But having been nominated (for the second time) for governor just a week earlier, he lent the project a political heft the others lacked. Judah was frank about the importance of Stanford’s political connections. “A good deal depends upon the election
of Stanford,” Judah informed a friend, “for the prestige of electing a Republican ticket will go a long way toward getting us what we want.”

Stanford’s election did indeed go far toward getting the Central Pacific what it wanted, although Stanford initially remained more cautious than the obsessed Judah. Stanford wasn’t entirely convinced that a railroad clear across the continent was feasible, but he believed that a much shorter line was, and could earn him and his partners a handsome profit. The opening of the Comstock mines had generated a demand for convenient access from the west; Stanford intended for the Central Pacific to provide it. He personally examined the route over the mountains.

Stanford and his partners hoped to tap Nevada’s mineral wealth even before their railroad crossed the Sierras. The rails would wait on the largest fills, the deepest cuts, the longest tunnels through the most refractory rock; but meanwhile the company could employ its knowledge of the terrain, its initial grading, and its construction crews to build a wagon road to the
Comstock. The tolls on the road would generate a revenue stream that would facilitate work on the railroad. Stanford and the others organized a separate company, the Dutch Flat & Donner Lake Wagon Road Company, for this purpose. By the spring of 1864 it had achieved its goal. “NEW ROAD TO WASHOE,” boasted an ad in the
Sacramento Union
. “The Dutch Flat Road is now open for travel, and teamsters can save three days in the round trip to Virginia City, and carry fully one quarter more freight on account of light grades.” By this time the railroad had reached Newcastle; as an introductory offer (which revealed the interlocking nature of the rail and road companies) haulers would have their tolls waived on cargoes loaded at the railhead. “Teamsters, try it and see for yourselves,” the notice urged.