The Comstock Lode & Eilley Bowers — 1859, Nevada Silver

Summary

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.

Timeline

The Rush

The Comstock country had been picked over for years before anyone understood what was under it. Prospectors had panned modest placer gold out of Gold Canyon on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson since the early 1850s, in what was then the far western edge of Utah Territory. The brothers Ethan Allen and Hosea Grosh suspected silver as early as 1857 but died before they could prove or profit from it. The men who came after kept cursing a sticky blue-black mud that fouled their equipment, never guessing it was the real treasure.

Into this rough, transient world came Alison "Eilley" Orrum, born in Forfar, Scotland, on September 6, 1826, a farmer's daughter who had married young, followed a Mormon-convert husband to America, and made her way west. Twice married and twice parted — first from Stephen Hunter, then from Alexander Cowan, whom she divorced in 1860 — she ended up alone in the mining camps of Gold Canyon, where she did what a capable woman could do in a country full of unattached men: she opened a boardinghouse, cooked, took in washing, and kept the miners fed and housed.

That boardinghouse was her mine before she ever owned one. Miners short of cash paid their board and laundry in the only currency they had — "feet," or fractional shares, in their claims. Bit by bit Eilley accumulated a ten-foot length of a claim on the ledge that would become the Comstock. Nearby worked a Missouri-born muleskinner and miner named Lemuel Sanford Bowers, universally called Sandy, who held an adjoining ten-foot claim. On August 9, 1859, Eilley and Sandy married, and their two modest strips of ground became one twenty-foot claim — sitting, as it happened, directly over one of the richest pockets of silver ever found in North America.

The Diggings

The discovery that made them had been made just weeks before, in June 1859, when O'Riley and McLaughlin's clogging blue clay was assayed at Grass Valley and Nevada City and pronounced fabulously rich in silver. Henry Comstock, a blustering prospector who had claimed the ground for grazing, talked and threatened his way into a share and lent the lode his name. Word raced over the Sierra, and the rush ran backward — Californians who had come west for gold a decade earlier now poured east over the mountains for Nevada silver. The camp on the mountainside became Virginia City, and within a few years it was a brick-and-stone metropolis with theaters, newspapers, and a stock exchange floating above a labyrinth of mines.

The Bowers claim was perfectly placed and, crucially, close to the surface, so the ore could be taken out almost from the start without the immense capital that deeper mining would later demand. The silver came up by the ton. At the peak their mine was said to yield as much as a hundred thousand dollars a month, and they extracted on the order of a million dollars in ore, roughly half of it profit — a sum that made the boardinghouse keeper and the muleskinner two of the very first Comstock millionaires. It was the kind of luck the lode would hand out only rarely, and never gently.

Around them the Comstock was becoming an industrial wonder and a national force. The German engineer Philipp Deidesheimer invented "square-set timbering," a honeycomb of interlocking timber cubes that let miners hollow out ore bodies too vast to hold themselves up. Adolph Sutro would bore a four-mile drainage tunnel through the mountain; Hermann Schussler would pipe water across the valley under the highest pressure in the world. The lode's bullion strengthened the Union treasury during the Civil War and pushed Nevada to statehood in 1864. And it created dynasties — the Bonanza Kings John Mackay, James Fair, James Flood, and William O'Brien; the banker William Ralston; the senator-to-be George Hearst, whose Ophir money would one day fund his son's newspapers. The Bowerses were not in that league of financiers, but for a few golden years they spent as though they were.

The Reckoning

What the Bowerses wanted, money could not quite buy. With their fortune they set out to live like the gentry Eilley had glimpsed in Scotland. Beginning in the early 1860s they built a grand stone mansion in Washoe Valley, designed with the help of a former California governor, J. Neely Johnson, and finished with Carrara marble fireplaces and imported fittings — a house said to have cost on the order of four hundred thousand dollars. In 1862 they sailed for a grand European tour to buy its furnishings, throwing an open banquet with free champagne for all of Virginia City before they left. "I've been in this country amongst the first that came here," Sandy toasted the crowd, by the telling in the 1881 History of Nevada. "I've had powerful good luck, and I've got money to throw at the birds." The famous, telling story is that Eilley hoped to be received by Queen Victoria and was refused — a divorced woman of common birth had no place at court — a small humiliation that the money could not erase.

The reckoning came as it came for nearly everyone on the Comstock who mistook a rich pocket for an endless one. The Bowers ore was near the surface, and surface ore runs out; by the mid-1860s their mine was failing, and Sandy poured money into other ventures that did not pay. He died at Gold Hill on April 21, 1868, of inflammation of the lungs, only thirty-five years old, and was buried on the hill behind the mansion. The children the couple had hoped to raise were already gone — two infants dead in 1860 and 1861 — and the adopted daughter they cherished, Persia, died in 1874. Eilley, twice rich and now alone, watched the fortune dissolve into debt.

In 1876 the mansion and what remained of her property were sold at auction to satisfy a judgment against her; the house she had built to be received like a lady passed to other hands for a fraction of its cost. Bankrupt and bereaved, Eilley fell back on the one skill that had nothing to do with silver. Since her Scottish youth she had kept a "peep stone," a crystal for scrying, and now she set up as a professional fortune-teller, "Mrs. L. S. Bowers, the Washoe Seeress," reading the future for the people of a camp whose own future was running out beneath it.

What Decided It

What Became of Them

Eilley Bowers practiced as the Washoe Seeress for years, in Virginia City and later in San Francisco, telling fortunes with her peep stone as the great mines themselves declined and the Comstock's golden age closed. Deafness eventually made even fortune-telling impossible. A claim she pressed against the government — for thousands of dollars she said she and Sandy had given to the Union and to frontier defense — went nowhere. She drifted into genuine destitution, became for a time a charge of the Washoe County poorhouse, and was finally sent west, by one account put on a San Francisco train by Reno officials with thirty dollars in her hand.

She spent her last two years at the King's Daughters Home, a charity in Oakland, and died there on October 27, 1903, at seventy-seven — once one of the richest women in the United States, ending as a pauper dependent on the kindness of strangers. With the help of a later owner of her old mansion, her ashes were carried back to Nevada and buried on the hill behind the house she had built, beside Sandy and their daughter Persia. The three of them lie together above the valley they had meant to lord over.

The Bowers Mansion still stands in Washoe Valley, restored and open to the public as the finest surviving monument to Comstock wealth — and to its impermanence. The lode that made Eilley Bowers a millionaire and then a fortune-teller had behaved no differently toward the men who found it. The Comstock's deepest lesson is written in the parallel fates of its discoverers and its luckiest amateurs alike: the silver enriched the financiers who could command capital and technology, and left almost everyone who actually found or first owned the ore with nothing but a story.

Lessons

References

• Comstock Lode Wikipedia
• Eilley Bowers Wikipedia
• Alison (Eilley) Oram Bowers Nevada Women's History Project
• Sandy and Eilley Orrum Bowers Online Nevada Encyclopedia