Digging up story of a silver magnate
In 1859, the San Francisco correspondent for the New York Times touted California as “the greatest country” and its climate the finest “in the known world.” He boasted that prospectors got rich quick, though he also complained that “half naked and half starved Indians” were “much given to whisky when whisky was given to them.”
In “The Bonanza King,” Gregory Crouch, a native Californian, takes readers back to an era when thousands of men prospected for gold and silver in the American West, while Indian tribes were ravaged by whiskey, smallpox and war.
John Mackay, “the bonanza king,” made millions as a mine owner and later as an industrialist and financier, though he did not become as well known as the Gilded Age’s “robber barons” — as muckraking journalists called them.
Crouch’s biography will certainly make him better known than he is today, albeit by a small circle of scholars.
But it’s unlikely Mackay will suddenly become as renowned as oilman John D. Rockefeller, railroad tycoon Jay Gould or the real estate titan John Jacob Astor.
Mackay wasn’t nearly as flamboyant as they
The Bonanza King John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West By Gregory Crouch (Scribner; 466 pages; $30)
were. As Crouch explains halfway through his book, “Mackay played his cards close to his chest through his whole life.” Even when he met and befriended Mark Twain, he didn’t boast about it.
Born in Ireland in 1831, Mackay immigrated to the United States, sold newspapers and worked as a carpenter in New York before he turned to mining in California.
Crouch tries to cast him as “the most beloved rags-to-riches story in America.” But in the pages of “Bonanza King,” he appears neither as a beloved Horatio Alger figure nor as a reviled robber baron.
Indeed, he’s largely an invisible man who never wrote his autobiography, rarely talked to reporters and died in London in 1902, decades after he and his Irish partners unearthed the “Comstock Lode,” a deposit of silver ore so vast that The Chronicle correspondent Dan DeQuille dubbed it “The Big Bonanza.”
The lode, which was named after Henry Comstock, was the first major discovery of silver in the United States. As Crouch explains near the end of his book, “The Big Bonanza” provided at its height “more than 42 percent to the total annual coinage in the United States.”
In the book’s first half, there’s hardly a direct quotation from Mackay, and that’s too bad. He’s a silent as well as invisible man.
Indeed, in “The Bonanza King,” Mackay doesn’t become an intriguing figure until 1866, when he married Marie Louise Hungerford, a glamorous New York widow who was snubbed by her American contemporaries, and who became one of the best-known hostesses in Europe thanks to her husband’s wealth.
Crouch describes the Paris social scene where Mrs. Mackay entertained former President Ulysses S. Grant, along with French aristocrats, and where Mackay behaved like a character in a Henry James novel about New World millionaires among Old World snobs.
According to a story in the New York Herald that Crouch references, Mackay spent 1.5 million francs for a Paris mansion; his wife spent 500,000 francs “on its furnishing.”
Crouch doesn’t psychoanalyze Mackay, though he writes that he “kept himself scrupulously clean” perhaps because of his “years of dirty mining.” More insights like that one could have enlivened this book, though Crouch isn’t interested in psychology.
What appeals to him is typography, geology, sociology, and the history and practice of mining in the American West, a subject covered before by many writers, though most didn’t have Crouch’s flair for marshaling facts and his ability to craft an epic tale.
No one does a better job than Crouch when he explores the subject of mining, and no one does a better job than he when he describes the hardscrabble lives of miners.
“Mining was hard, dirty, and repetitive, like digging an endless ditch,” he writes.
Mining also bred competition, hatred and violence. In 1870, “a white mob attacked Chinese laborers” in Empire City, Nev., and “destroyed their huts and property.” No one was arrested or prosecuted.
And mining wrought terrible environmental degradation and the pollution of San Francisco Bay that continues to this day.
Crouch points out that while no San Francisco street carries Mackay’s name, “if one knows where to look, San Francisco’s connections to the old Comstock Lode remain strong.”
Walk up Nob Hill, stop at 1000 California St. and admire the mansion built by Mackay’s partner James C. Flood, which is now the home of the Pacific-Union Club.