The Comstock Lode & Eilley Bowers — 1859, Nevada Silver

In the summer of 1859, on the bleak eastern slope of Mount Davidson above the Carson Valley, a pair of Irish prospectors named Peter O’Riley and Patrick McLaughlin cursed the heavy blue-gray clay that kept clogging their rockers and gumming up the gold. When the clay was finally assayed, it turned out to be the thing they had been throwing away: silver ore of staggering richness, three parts silver to one part gold. They had stumbled onto the Comstock Lode, the richest silver strike in American history, and the camp that grew over it — Virginia City — became for two decades one of the wealthiest square miles on earth.

The Comstock produced something on the order of three hundred million dollars in silver and gold, helped pay for the Union’s war, hurried Nevada into statehood in 1864, and built the banks and mansions of San Francisco. It minted a new aristocracy of “Silver Kings” and “Bonanza Kings.” Yet the men whose names are stamped on it — Henry Comstock, O’Riley, McLaughlin — sold out early for a pittance and died broke or mad, the lode’s first proof that finding the silver and keeping it were two different things.

No life captures the Comstock’s whole arc — the dizzying rise and the total fall — better than that of Eilley Orrum Bowers. A Scottish-born boardinghouse keeper who took mining “feet” from miners who couldn’t pay their bills, she and her third husband, the muleskinner Sandy Bowers, found their two small adjoining claims sitting atop one of the richest seams in the lode. They became, almost overnight, among the first Comstock millionaires, with money, as Sandy boasted in a famous toast, “to throw at the birds.”

They built a granite mansion in Washoe Valley, toured Europe to furnish it, and reached for a respectability that always stayed just out of grasp — Eilley, by the old story, was refused an audience with Queen Victoria. Then the surface ore played out, Sandy died young, their children died, and the fortune drained away. Eilley lost the mansion, reinvented herself as a fortune-teller called “the Washoe Seeress,” and died penniless in an Oakland charity home in 1903. The Comstock made and unmade her exactly as it made and unmade its discoverers.