“Good to see you, boy!”
He was a fine-looking man, thickening through the waist but stylishly dressed, sporting black whiskers with slashes of white on either side of his big grin. My mother headed back into the house.
I told him I was bound for Virginia City on newspaper business.
“Sad place,” he said, shaking his head, and settling in the chair beside me with his shiny boots up on the rail. “Thanks, hon,” he said, when my mother brought him a glass of lemonade.
“You spent some time there, didn’t you?” I said.
“Briefly, briefly,” he said. “They got your money away from you pretty fast on the Washoe.” He grinned at me, as though we both appreciated his weakness.
“Tell me about the Comstock,” I said.
“Never been there, have you?”
“Never been to Nevada at all.”
“The Comstock paid for the War, you know. Made San Francisco what it is today besides. Silver ore and stock games.” He managed to nod and shake his head at the same time in some inner recollection and amusement. Then he assumed a serious expression.
“Well, sir, there are two canyons running off Mount Davidson, Six-mile Canyon and Gold Canyon, and there was an old bird that’d staked some claims there named Henry Comstock. Old Pancake he was called. There was some gold but an awful lot of trash blue mud with it, till somebody sent in that blue for assay and it proved out about three thousand dollars a ton silver.”
My mother watched us from the far chair, gauzed in blue smoke from the cigar I had brought her. “Tell him about that mine you had an interest in,” she said.
“They say there were seventeen thousand claims around Mount Davidson in the ‘60s, and five of them were mine,” my father said. “In ‘63 alone there were some three thousand Comstock properties selling shares on the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Most came to naught, like mine. Or got euchered up because someone was a lot smarter than you were.
“The Ophir, the Hale and Norcross, the Yellow Jacket, the Consolidated-Virginia and the Con-Ohio had run holes down to five or six hundred feet where they begun to peter out. Shares dropped to next to nothing and the Ralston Ring and the Bank of California started buying up shares and claims, and Ralston sent Will Sharon to Virginia City to take charge of things. The Big Bonanza came in at a thousand feet and made fortunes for Ralston and Sharon, and Nat McNair and those Irishmen that controlled the Consolidated-Virginia, and a pack of other fry. So the Bank of California and Frisco began living high on Comstock silver.
“Then there was a bewilderment of stock options and shenanigans, boomers and plungers, assessments and bankruptcies, fake bonanzas and real ones, until the whole mess of it blew up and the Bank of California went bust and Billy Ralston took his last swim. Sharon ended up with his debts and assets, paid off debts at pennies on dollars and held onto the assets and showed himself to be the sneaking rotten two-timing son of a bitch he is. I hear he has got his hands full of this Rose of Sharon lawsuit, howsomever.”
I asked if he had known Highgrade Carrie. His eyes squinted just a bit before they fixed on mine.
“Heard of her, Son,” he said. “Quite a woman, I believe. The Miner’s Angel.”
“Angel is as angel does,” my mother said.
“Angel does is just why she was called the Miner’s Angel,” my father said.
When it was time to go my father gave me a lift on his borrowed gray, up behind his saddle, which made me feel like a boy. I looked back to wave to my mother on the porch.
Braced against my father’s back, jogged with the horse’s motion, I recalled the good and the bad of my childhood. The Gent had been a strong part of the good. We had fished off the riverbank by the big snag, seated side by side with our poles at the same angle, lines falling together into the brown swirl of water. He had taught me how to play ball, patiently pitching the baseball to my mitt, a hand-me-down from Michael, and patiently pitching to Brian’s bat. He had brought me home new books I had known he could not afford. He had never paid attention to what he couldn’t afford.
I remembered him weeping when Michael punched him in the eye and left home.
“Those were beautiful ladies in Virginia City,” my father said over his shoulder. “Julia Bulette and Highgrade Carrie. Those were some times,” he said.
“A Mrs. Bettis said she’d known you on the Washoe,” I said.
“Don’t recall anybody by that name. What’s she look like?”
I didn’t do very well remembering what Mrs. Bettis had looked like, much less describing her.
“Probably her married name,” my father said. “Or she was using a different name. Lot of folks used different names, on the Comstock.”
He left me off at the station, with promises to take me out for a fine dinner the next time he came down to the City. On the train there was a half-hour wait before the conductor called the all-aboard, and the cars lurched and jangled with the tug of the engine.
On the Truckee & Virginia headed south down the Washoe Valley, I gazed out the window at the eastern peaks of the Sierra Nevada. The snow line was so regular it looked drawn with a ruler. The snow caught the sun like some heavenly show of the purity of nature, but I could see by the sparse timbering of those lower slopes that men had been at work cutting down the forests and sawing up the logs for cordwood, and for cribbing for the stopes of the Comstock Lode.
After a halt in Carson City, the train chuffed on around the mountain, up and up, curve after curve, tunnel after tunnel lined with blackened zinc against the sparks from the smokestacks, slow enough so I could get out of the cars to stride alongside, on up toward Mount Davidson, Virginia City and the Comstock Lode. The mountain was scarred with coyote hole mines and weathered shacks. I descended from my car into the depot below the town to the thin distant crashing of stamp mills.
A few bums, a shawled woman with a sickly child by the hand and a blanket Indian with a face as dark as mud stood watching the passengers come off the train. I climbed the hill in the shadow of the mountain, with my satchel slapping against my leg, up to C Street where stores and saloons fronted on boardwalks in need of repair. Virginia City was not a bustling community.
In the International Hotel, where spittoons glinted among the potted palms on worn carpeting, the racket of the stamps was felt through the soles rather than heard. I engaged a room on the second floor. There did not seem to be any other guests. When I opened my window that looked out on C Street and down a canyon slashed with tan dumps and tailings, the stamp mills’ pounding came loudly again.
A horse car with a weary gray horse and a listless driver took me and a red-shirted miner with a crippled leg north out C Street, to where I had been directed to the Consolidated-Ohio, which had absorbed the Jack of Spades. From a rutted wagon road I gazed down on a spur of track where there were flatcars stacked with cordwood and a cluster of wooden buildings with corrugated iron roofs splashed with patches of rust, all of them centered around a central two-story structure with tanks and ladders and smokeless chimneys on the roof, and a glimpse through high windows of ranks of dusty machinery. Over the tallest section of the main building were the fading letters: CONSOLIDATED-OHIO. The Con-Ohio appeared to be shut down.
As I strolled down the wagon road toward the mine, a bearded man wearing a wicker-sided conductor’s cap appeared out of a shed and leaned on his crutch watching me approach; another lame man.
“We’re closed up, friend,” he said, when I came up.
“Just wanted to see the famous Jack of Spades,” I said.
“Nothing to see. Closed down. I’m just here so nobody’ll come past and see there’s nobody here.”