Comstock Lode

Yeah, they have a variety of tours.

Right now the ones popping are the Grave Whispers of the Comstock Lode, Bats in the Belfry, and right now they have Hauntober.

So you can do all...

It's like a whole month of fucking scary activities that you could do.

It was due to his genius, and he deserved the credit.

And so enough people who didn't really know all the backstory heard that, and it was eventually called the Comstock Lode.

This mine would become the biggest discovery of silver in America.

It transformed the state and the region.

The real peak is with the discovery of the big bonanza [upbeat music] which was found in the consolidated Virginia and the California mines, and that was found in 1873.

And really, it lasted for almost nine years, that part of the lode.

Virginia City didn't exist before the discovery of the Comstock Lode.

Within a few years, it had a population of 4,000, and within a decade it had ballooned to more than 25,000.

It's not like the, the quantity of gold is declining that rapidly, but obviously, with the decline in the, that earliest phase, the placer phase, you don't see that, you know, that, that kind of rush of population in the way you see in 1849, 1850, 1851, and, and the, the, it, it begins to ebb.

And partly it begins to ebb because there's mining strikes elsewhere, the most famous being the Comstock Lode in Nevada, so close to the Sierra gold fields in many ways, that you get a lot of people jumping from California over to, to the Comstock Lode, over to Nevada.

Similarly, the Fraser River up in, uh, Vancouver area, you have people moving into, you know, there, and so forth.

So, you know, I think the pattern repeats itself, but the rush itself is more becoming less, m- less a rush and more of a trickle in the later years.

These were men who bought claims, organized mining operations, and extracted absolutely absurd amounts of gold and silver from the earth.

The Comstock Lode in Nevada, discovered in 1859, produced something like four hundred million dollars worth of silver over twenty years.

The men who controlled those mines, George Hearst, James Fair, John Mackay, James Flood, became obscenely wealthy almost overnight.

George Hearst is particularly interesting because he's proof that being good at finding valuable rocks doesn't necessarily make you good at anything else.

She is said to have lost $150,000 in one day on stocks as the markets fluctuated wildly.

Among her losses were a stake in the Comstock Lode."

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Next week, a yarn about the lust for gold and the things it can do to a man.

The story takes place in the famous historical ghost town of Virginia City, Nevada, site of the famous almost fabulous Comstock Lode, where sudden death was all too often the price of finding a rich vein of gold or silver back in the middle of the late century, where even today there's gold to be found, and sometimes murder.

I think you'll like this one, especially the switch at the end of it.

So join us, won't you? Yours truly, Johnny Dollar.

Morning broke on Gold Hill with the desert turning gold Men were walking to the mountain like they'd done a thousand times before With a lantern in their hand and another working day They kissed the ones who loved them and slowly walked away

Built during the height of the Comstock mining boom, it once stood at the heart of a community shaped by silver, ambition and extraordinary danger.

But on the morning of April 7th 1869, disaster struck beneath the ground.

Fire broke out in the Yellowjacket mine.

And before you go looking for its ghosts, we need to understand the people who came from them.

Gold Hill grew during one of the greatest mining rushes in American history.

The discovery of the Comstock Lode transformed this part of Nevada.

Gold and silver brought thousands of people into the region, and communities such as Gold Hill and neighbouring Virginia City grew rapidly around the mines.

The camp that grew up around his discovery took his name, though the spelling was later changed, reportedly so that people would pronounce it right.

For years, Bodie was nothing special, just a handful of miners scratching away while the big money went to richer strikes in nearby Aurora and the Comstock Lode over in Nevada.

Early mining companies came and went and failed.

Then in the late 1870s, everything changed.

Twain went west as a young man to work for one of the region's few newspapers.

It was silver that drew people to Nevada, to the massive deposit discovered in 1859 known as the Comstock Lode.

The town at its heart was Virginia City.

Twain lived and worked there for a couple years in the early 1860s.