The Bonanza King

‘… many of the richest men had been busted several times, and all of them knew they might well be broke again tomorrow.’

I spent many summer days in my youth playing ‘miner’ in the tailings of the Empire Mine in the Mineral King Valley. In current-day Sequoia National Park, the valley was the site of an electric silver rush in the 1870s, and over 100 years later I hid from my friends in the still-standing dynamite shack and looked for pieces of ore cart by the rock shelf where the stamp mill once stood. We heard stories about the mining days around the campfire from rangers and old timers. This is what brought me to want to read The Bonanza King by Gregory Crouch. His tales of the history of the Comstock Lode take place primarily on the east side of the sierras, but that era of American history, that time and that place in the American West has always held a great interest for me.

Crouch’s book is the best of historical profile. He intertwines the storied life of John Mackay with an intricate background that amply fleshes out his subject. This background includes: Irish immigration, roughin’ it Mark Twain, the transcontinental railroad, The Pony Express, the development of the telegraph, the building and commerce of San Francisco, and the funding of The Civil War. These topics are covered with care, interest, and a direct relevance to his main subject, Mackay.

Born in grave poverty in Ireland during the potato famine, he immigrated to New York and found his way to the shipyard. He took to carpentry work that would later help him in the mines when he travelled to the West Coast in the early 1850s chasing the fever. He eventually made his way to Virginia City and through hard work and a series of ingenious deals, he became a majority owner in the richest ore deposits on the mountain. He uses this wealth to invest and develop many other business ventures, but it is in the shovels and sluice boxes that he develops his grit and his connections.

Mackay is only one of the great characters Crouch covers in his book. And his descriptions of the life of the miner and the economics of the times are truly entertaining. The men battle it all: weather, legal wrangling, monopolies, insider trading, disease, and endless speculation. Bad deals and dumb luck. Crouch’s book excels for me in the explanations of the engineering feats, in both the building of the mines and the extraction of the metals. These were both things that my imagination ran about when playing up on the Empire Mountain in my youth. I always wondered what the inside of that mountain looked like and I knew they didn’t just pull bricks of silver out of the rock. How did they do it? Crouch’s writing enables a layman like myself to fully comprehend all the happenings hundreds of feet underground.

The Bonanza King is history told by that cool teacher you had in school, the one you remember making you actually want to go to class. (Shout out to Mike O’Toole and Carl Guarneri). If you have any desire to learn about life in the old west, you need to read this book.

Note: Crouch provides some great supplemental material on his website here: http://gregcrouch.com/the-bonanza-king-maps

Thank you to NetGalley, Scribner Books, and Gregory Crouch for the advanced copy for review.

Thanks to Net Galley for making this book available.

Fascinating biography of John Mackey, the wealthiest 19th century American giant of industry that you have never heard of! The son of Irish immigrants raised in NY tenements, 49er, common miner (above and below ground), hard worker, manager, mine and mill owner, bank owner, and more. If you know anything about California history, you will recognize a lot of the names associated with the Comstock Lode and Virginia City, NV.

John Mackay was a co-owner of what turned out to be the best-producing mine in the Comstock, and of its mills. He co-owned the Bank of Nevada, created a new trans-Atlantic telegraph company to rival Jay Gould, mixed with European royalty, and was very very wealthy.

Before all that he was the child of Irish immigrants. He grew up in a NY slum and sold newspapers. He was a 49er. He was a common miner, both placer and below ground. He worked hard, had a little luck, and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

While Mackay and his wife Louise Hungerford Bryant are both very interesting, this book is also full of other interesting details. The names of those heavily involved in the Comstock will be very familiar to many interested in California history (Hearst, Sutro, Clemens/Twain, etc). The technical advances in mining the occurred around the Comstock lode were amazing--from the braking system on the lifts (which was then applied to create SF's cable cars), to the mills, to the timbering system. Mackay's ways of working around his problems by creating competition occur again and again.

Crouch certainly did his research--the bibliography is large and varied. I was a little confused by the book endnotes vs the chapter endnotes (I prefer footnotes myself). There were some things that I found missing, especially given how comprehensive this book is: 1) the system of adding shares to the mines is not explained. Were these stock splits (2 for 1, 3 for 1) or were they additional shares created to be sold? It matters, as splits would mean every shareholder had to pay more in assessments (and might force some to sell), but any one owner's dividend total would stay the same; while adding new shares to sell would decrease dividends per share; and 2) despite the many mentions of the huge amounts of mercury used to mill Comstock ore, Crouch never mentions the New Almaden mercury mine outside San Jose. Is this where their mercury came from? If they got it elsewhere, why?

I received a free Kindle copy of The Bonanza King by Gregory Crouch courtesy of Net Galley  and Scribner, the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus pages.

I requested this book as  I am an avid reader of American history and the description of the book sounded interesting and covered a subject about which I have not previously read. This is the first book by Gregory Crouch that I have read.

I found this book to be well researched, written and an very interesting read. The author's writing style makes it more like you are reading a novel versus a piece of history.

The main subject of the book is John MacKay and how he became one of the wealthiest men in America through persistent hard work and wise business decisions. The book also covers in details the early history of mining in the western United States starting with the California Golf Rush. Significant time is also dedicated to MacKay's involvement in the early communications infrastructure. The book ends with what happens to the main characters in the book and to the empire that MacKay built.

The book really resonated wth me as I am very familiar with the area around Downieville, California (my in-laws lived there for several years) and MacKay spent some significant time in the area.

I recommend this book to those who are interested in American hisotry and to those who have an interest as to how mining developed in the western United States.