A cube of gold 14.2 inches on each side weighs one ton.

 A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds.

Scripophily is the hobby of collecting of stock certificates, bond certificates and other papers. Mining stock certificates are quite popular, not only because of the history they represent, but because of their beauty. The engraving styles and intricacy makes many of  these old stocks a work of art.

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Click the certificate above for a full listing of Nevada stocks from scripophily.com. Credits to same for the Stray Dog Mine cert.  Goldfield, Nevada.

The Comstock Lode- Single Greatest Strike in the World  1860 to the late 1880s  Washoe Region, Western Nevada

As the California gold fields were quickly claimed and or picked over, many miners began wandering the mountains of the West, following word of mouth in search for the "Great One."

In the spring of 1859, Pat McLaughlin and Peter O'Reilly were among a number of independent prospectors who returned to Six-Mile Canyon at the foot of Mt. Davidson in search of gold. And find gold, they did. Dan DeQuille, editor of the Territorial Enterprise and author of The Big Bonanza described the find as such.

 "In the spring of 1859, a considerable number of miners returned to six mile canyon to work. They made their headquarters at Gold Hill where two or three log houses including a large log boarding house had been erected.

Peter O'Riley and Pat McLaughlin set to work up at the head of ravine, where the ground began to rise toward the mountain. They used rockers and found small pay. They were becoming discouraged.

The manner in which the grand discovery was made was not very romantic. What our miners found was a great bed of black sulphuret of silver, a decomposed ore of silver filled with spangles of native gold. This gold, however, was alloyed with silver to such an extent that it was more the color of silver than of gold.

When the discoverers struck into the odd looking black dirt, they only thought that it was a sudden and rather singular change from the yellowish gravel and clay in which they had been digging. They at once concluded to try some of the curious looking stuff in their rockers.

The result astounded them. Before, they had only been taking out a dollar or two a day, but now they found the bottoms of their rockers covered with gold as soon as a few buckets of the new dirt had been washed. They found they were literally taking out gold by the pound. In a few weeks after the discovery had been made, and the work had been advanced further into the croppings of the lode they were taking out the gold at the rate of one thousand dollars per day. This they were doing with the rockers. Taking the harder lumps left on the screens of the rockers, one man was able to pound out gold at the rate of 100 dollars per day in a common hand mortar. "      p 24, 25 The Big Bonanza. Dan DeQuille First published 1876. This edition copyright 1974 Nevada Publications Box 15444 Las Vegas, NV 89114

McLaughlin and O'Reilly were duped by a fellow miner, Henry Comstock, into believing they had actually encroached upon Comstock's claim. They obliged and included H. T. P. Comstock as one of the claim holders. This claim, the Ophir, was one of the richest on the Comstock Lode. Comstock was a booming, boisterous character who at one time bought another man's wife. (She only stayed with Comstock one winter before she fled with another young drifter.)

According to the books of the Virginia mining district, Comstock sold his share of the Ophir and several other claims along with the water rights to Caldwell Spring for "$10 to me in hand paid, and for the further consideration of ten thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars to be paid by (Judge) James Walsh according to  the provisions and terms…" At the time, the value of the sale was considered a wind fall and Comstock  opened a store in Carson City and a branch  store int Silver City about three miles down the canyon from Gold Hill.  He soon lost it all, some say because of his overly generous nature. Comstock wandered through Idaho and Montana prospecting as he went. Comstock shot himself in the head on September 27, 1870 near Bozeman City, MT. Dan De Quille goes on in his book to recount others' descriptions of Comstock as unbalanced and "a little cracked" in the "upper story" even during his years in Virginia City.

Gold was the lure, but the real money was in the sticky blue mud

which exasperated the hard rock miners. The mud plugged up sluices and rockers, stuck to shovels and boots and generally made a nuisance of itself.

"For some weeks they dug down the rich decomposed silver ore, washed the gold out of it and let it go to waste, throwing it anywhere to get it out of the way of the rockers. Being very heavy it settled to the bottom of the rockers, covered up the quicksilver they contained and prevented the thorough amalgamation of the gold. The miners all thought well of the diggings but for this stuff. It was the great drawback.

About the first of July 1859, August Harrison, a ranch man living on the Truckey Meadows visited the new diggings about which so much was then said in the several settlements. He took a piece of the ore and going to California shortly afterwards carried it to Grass Valley, , Nevada county. He gave the specimen as a curiousity, to Judge James Walsh, who took it to the office of Melville Atwood, an assayer in the town. The ore was assayed and yielded at the rate of several thousand dollars per ton in gold and silver.

All were astonished and not a little excited when it was ascertained that the black looking rock which the miners considered worthless and were throwing away was almost a solid mass of silver. "   The Big Bonanza Dan DeQuille  (p 30, 33)

In all the ways the California gold fields had been difficult, the Comstock Lode and Virginia City proved rougher. Panning streams and hydraulic mining worked well in California. The Comstock gold and silver required hard rock mining.  Coyote holes, small hand dug tunnels usually less than forty feet in depth, wouldn't work here. Deep shafts were required. The sole prospector quickly sold out his claim or joined on with a mining company as a laborer. Getting the ore out of Mt. Davidson required big money, heavy equipment, mining companies, investors and a large work force. It was the beginning of an industrializing process that transformed mining in the West forever.

Virginia City took form along the lode, perched against the side of Mt. Davidson at an elevation of 6262' along C (main) Street. Canvass tents, and log houses were hastily thrown up all over the mountain. Paths became streets. A visitor to Virginia City today will stand in admiration at buildings requiring an additional floor on the off mountain side with the foundation chiseled into the mountain. Streets run up and down at a pitch in excess of 15%.  Winters were harsh. Supplies had to be mule trained in from Carson City along an arduous even when passable route. Despite the hardships, saloons, and gaming houses quickly rose up. Seventeen thousand people flocked to the Washoe region within the first year. Virginia City boasted 12,000 residents during the 1860 census.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

The Ophir mine installed the first steam hoisting machinery on the Comstock in 1860. The mine was worked through an inclined shaft which followed the drift of the ore vein. A track was laid down the incline. A 15 horsepower donkey engine raised and lowered a car on the track. Draining the mine was accomplished with a small pump, and keeping the mine dry even at 180 feet which the Ophir reached in December of 1860 was no small feat. The vein of ore was 45 feet wide at this level. The standard practice of posts and caps to hold up the roofs of the tunnels and caverns would not work at this great width. The company sent to California for Philip Deidesheimer. A graduate of the Freiberg School of Mines, the world's foremost institute of mining technology, Deidesheimer, had practical experience in both the mines in Germany and California. After only weeks on the Comstock sites, he developed a new system of "square set" timbering, a deep-mining support technique so effective it changed deep mining the world over. The square sets allowed the mine shafts to be sunk to great depths, up to 3000 feet,  and were quickly applied across the West. Without the square-sets, the mines at the Comstock would have quickly fizzled.

Square sets are a frame of timbers constructed in the shape of cribs, four feet by five or six feet in size. These cribs are piled one on top of the other and secured with framing to any height needed. The weight of the mountain around the shaft or tunnel was evenly supported along the framing.  Where the vein was of great width, a number of these cribs could be filled in with waste rock, forming pillars of stone reaching up to the roof of the mine. Timbering the mines inspired innovative logging techniques - which soon stripped the hills of trees for stretches of a hundred miles. To this day, the eastern slope of the Sierras vividly shows the scars of strip lumbering.

In the turn to industrial mining, many prospectors became wage earners, stripped to the waist to work in the underground tunnels of the Ophir, the Yellow Jacket or the Crown Point mines. Beneath the surface  hundreds were killed, maimed, or seriously injured. There were periods when a man was killed every week by cave-ins or fires ... a man injured every day by falling into shafts or sumps of hot water.

Working 2,000 feet underground brought severe occupational hazards - heat exhaustion, pneumonia, silicosis (miner's lung) and rheumatism. Heat increased 5 degrees Fahrenheit every hundred feet. At 3,000 feet, clouds of steam obscured a man's work, wooden pick handles became so hot that miners had to use gloves, work time was reduced to 15 minutes out of each hour, and the ice allotment went up to 95 pounds a day per man.

Mining for GOLD and SILVER in Nevada meant work, money and incredible risk. For more opinion on gold rush era books check out BOOKS  on this site.

For more on the Comstock lode, check out

The Big Bonanza by Dan De Quille

Comstock Mining and Miners by Eliot Lord

Roughing It by Mark Twain

For your convenience, click here for more Comstock Lode selections at amazon.com