Virginia City's Celebrities

There were a couple of celebrity characters in Virginia City in the 1860s and 1870s.  One involved the Territorial Enterprise, a freewheeling, uninhibited, frontier piece of journalism run by Joseph T Goodman and Dennis McCarthy.  One of their first reporters was a young man of 30 named Samuel Clemens, who had began using the pen name of Mark Twain in 1863.  Sam was not content to stick to bare bone facts.  Better yet, he liked to let his imagination take flight as he did with his 1865 short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County".  Twain was on his way - reporting for the highly successful Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City by 1870.

Another character of Virginia City arrived  in 1864.  A famous actress, Adah Isaacs Menken was persuaded to come to Virginia City to perform by Tom Maguire, who owned the local opera house.  Legends of her past proceeded her and the townspeople were thrilled at the prospect of her arrival.

Menken's Jewish parents were from New Orleans where Adah learned French, German, Spanish and Hebrew and translated Homer's Iliad from Greek.  She was skilled in dancing, singing and riding.  She matured into an uninhibited and temperamental beauty and launched two separate careers.  As a poetress, she won praise from poets and her friends included Charles Dickens and Walt Whitman.  As an actress, she was all the rave in London, Paris and New York and the American West.

Menken's most sensational role was in Mazeppa, which played to a standing room only crowd in Virginia City.  She disrobed on stage (actually wearing flesh colored tights) and was tied to a snorting horse.  Proper Victorians were shocked of course, but enthusiastic Virginia City miners made her an honorary fireman.  Mark Twain compared the act to acrobatics rather than acting in the Territorial Enterprise. 

Adah was married four times (Isaacs her second husband, Menken her fourth) and responding to gossip about her love affairs, she said, "I never lived with Houston, it was General Jackson and Methuselah and other big men." 

Next time..The Stagecoach Cometh
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On this Day in Pioneer History:  " On August 10, 1846, the Smithsonian is created after a decade of debate about how best to spend a bequest left to America from an obscure English scientist.   President James K. Polk signed the Smithsonian Institution Act into law.

Pioneer Pieces: Nevada or Bust...

No discovery has ever rivaled the intensity or concentration of those pioneers headed across the Sierra Mountains!  They left San Francisco and the California mining towns in droves, almost depopulating them in their pursuit of the Nevada foothills.

For 30 years (1840s - 1870s) Comstock mines in Nevada continued to produce riches.  In fact, mining in Nevada become quite advanced in those years. Here is a bit of background of the mining of silver ore:

During the prosperous years, the Comstock worked 8 hour shifts, and employed 1/3 of the total population of Virginia City (25,000 population).  They used explosives, drills, air conditioners, ice water storage, modern hoisting techniques and even telegraph connections and bathroom on each level of the mines.

Once the raw ore was mined, it went to the stamp mill where iron stamp shafts turned the ore into powder.  The crushed ore powder mixed with water and then went to the settling tank where the amalgamated ore became quicksilver.

Eventually, 3/4 of a billion dollars of gold and silver were mined in Nevada alone!  In the 1800s that was quite a fortune and helped to build the fortunes of many of our historic wealthy famlies.

Next time...Mining Towns Grew Up Fast

Pioneer Pieces: Gold in Them Hills?

The discovery of gold in Nevada was to change the entire history of the West, finance the Union cause in the Civil War, and make the name "Comstock" a worldwide phrase.

But wait - it wasn't GOLD they found in Nevada, it was SILVER - and silver that wrote the destiny of Nevada (the Silver State, the Hard Money State, the One Sound State).

Let's back up to the beginning for a moment...in 1859, in Washoe Digging (original name of Comstock), a prospector found a heavy, dark ore on his claim on the side of Mt Davidson.  He sent it to his friend, Judge James Walsh of Grass Valley, California.  The judge took it to Ott's Assay Office in Nevada City and the rest, well you know what happens next...

The Judge saddled his horse, loaded his mule with provisions and headed out that very night for western Utah, via Donner Summit.  So far this discovery had been kept a great secret - until morning came and the Judge looked behind him to see the entire town following on his trail. The Silver Rush to Washoe was on...

Next Time...Nevada or Bust