Manly gambles: the politics of risk on the Comstock lode, 1860-1880 - Virginia City, Nevada

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1993 by Gunther Peck

During his tour of the great silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada in 1876, journalist and geologist Eliot Lord was both impressed and horrified by the "cool" detachment of Cornish miners as they risked their lives underground in pursuit of hard currency. Lord was particularly fascinated by the daring of one Cornishman who fell into a shaft 1,300 feet deep only to emerge unscathed minutes later "by an astonishing combination of coolness, strength, and luck." As he climbed out of the pit, the Cornishman remarked matter-of-factly, "By the bloody 'ell. If I hadn't caught hold of the pumpbob nose, I'd a been scattered all abroad." Lord used such anecdotes to paint a portrait of the Cornish miner as a dispassionate gambler, who daily wagered his financial and bodily assets, whether in games of blackjack above ground or in earning wages underground. Wrote Lord, "The miners' fondness for gambling leads them to regard the possibility of death ... as a risk that every gamester must face, and they stake their lives on the cost because they consider the chances in favor of their preservation."(1) Like many middle-class professionals in the 19th century, Lord considered gambling to be immoral and blamed miners' high mortality rates and enduring financial insecurity upon their penchant for taking risks.(2) Determining which forms of risk were morally acceptable had become crucial to the middle class's ongoing project of self-definition in the 19th century.(3) In this respect, Lord's description of all wage-earning miners as gamblers tells us more about his own class's struggle to define legitimate gain than it does about working-class notions of risk-taking. Yet, Lord's was an ambivalent moralism, tinged as it was with admiration for the miner's potential heroism. From Lord's nostalgic perspective as a citified Eastern professional, the Cornish miner embodied admirable aspects of a heroic but vanishing manliness, long associated with the frontier, in which individual bravery and manly skill rather than market laws and machines governed the productive lives of men. If Lord condemned the manly gambles that miners took every day, he also venerated their risk-taking ethos which had, so the popular frontier myth went, conquered the wilderness and brought civilization to a savage desert.(4) But middle-class reformers such as Lord were hardly alone in struggling to create a moral economy of acceptable and above all rational risks.(5) Miners on the Comstock grappled with their own notions of acceptable risk, but they grounded their definitions of it in the daily challenges of wage work. While all classes of men and women in Virginia City and nearby Gold Hill took chances, the substance and meaning of risks varied tremendously along occupational, gender, and racial lines. The experience of risk and the cost of failure depended a great deal on what was at stake in the gamble--a day's wages, a person's reputation, the well-being of one's family, a percentage of company profits, an arm, or a life itself. While all miners on the Comstock may have appeared equally reckless to Eliot Lord, the experience and significance of their underground gambles differed significantly for single and married miners, and for Chinese and Irish miners. Rather than being characteristic of a timeless and classless "frontier" culture, risk-taking in Virginia City sparked debates about the changing nature of work, manhood, and citizenship on the rapidly industrializing frontier.(6) Historians of the mining west have devoted relatively little attention to the class-based experience and meaning of risk because of its associations with the celebrated individualism and upward mobility of Frederick J. Turner's frontier.(7) For many western historians, "class" and the "frontier" have been, almost by definition, oxymoronic terms, despite recent attempts by historian Carlos Schwantes to reconcile the two concepts in his provocative discussion of a "wageworkers' frontier."(8) Labor historians such as Melvyn Dubofsky have understandably rejected Turner's formulation of western development and argued that the West's labor history was singularly exploitative and class-ridden.(9) Yet, Dubofsky avoided tackling the thorny problem of class on the frontier by locating the "origins" of the western working class in the frontier's disappearance after 1890.(10) This conceptual hurdle continues to confront even the most recent and sophisticated literature of the "new" Western history. In their essay, "Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History," for example, William Cronon, Jay Gitlin, and George Miles recognize the existence of class relations in frontier economies, but argue that "self-shaping" identities such as class emerged most forcefully in the transition from frontier to region.(11) This essay seeks to examine the "problem" of class formation on the frontier by exploring the contested meanings of that quintessential frontier activity--risk-taking.(12) I argue that the popularity of risk-taking among miners did not reflect their individualism, conservatism, or some kind of false consciousness, but rather lay at the core of a gendered and racialized sense of working-class autonomy.(13) Examining the way miners defined and took risks during the "flush times" provides an important window into the origins and shape of class consciousness on the mining frontier. Although an analysis of the contested meanings of risk could encompass nearly all of Virginia City's social groups and illuminate the relational nature of class, race, and gender formation, my aims in this essay are more modest; I will focus upon the class-based geography of risk among white male residents of Virginia City and Gold Hill as a case study of how working-class consciousness on the frontier acquired meaning and definition through dialogue with middle-class reformers and capitalists.(14) The first section contrasts the experience of risk for working-class miners and middle-class professionals during the 1860s as a dramatic depression refigured the nature of financial and physical risk-taking on the Comstock Lode. The second section explores the contested meanings of risk by examining how two all-male organizations--the Gold Hill Miner's Union and the Improved Order of Red Men, Pi-Ute Tribe #1--rationalized its consequences. The final section considers how competing middle-class and working-class notions of acceptable risk shaped the patterns of dialogue and conflict between miners and capitalists on the Comstock. In Roughing It, Mark Twain vividly satirized the "speculative frenzy" that had transformed Virginia City from a barren desert into a bustling metropolis of 10,000 people between 1860 and 1865: Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad almost fierce intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy.(15) Twain realized that miners' gilded hopes were rarely fulfilled and his comparison of money and dust anticipated the dramatic "bust" Virginia City experienced a year later when prices on the local stock exchange plummeted four-fold in just two months. Yet, Twain had only an inkling of the dramatic transformation in productive relations that Virginia City was experiencing during the early 1860s. The stock market crash of 1864 accelerated a profound re-organization and consolidation of property ownership on the Comstock in which a few large mining companies emerged as the principal producers of silver and gold. Expensive investment requirements, a shortage of outside capital, and low stock prices forced many mining companies out of business. Those that survived the crash, however, expanded production throughout the ensuing depression.(16) By 1865, the vast majority of miners on the Comstock Lode no longer worked above ground on their own claims, but instead toiled underground for wages in large, highly-capitalized mine operations.(17) A brief examination of the changing rates of occupational and residential mobility on the Comstock Lode during the 1860s clarifies the impact of the 1864 depression on the community's emerging class structure. The percentage of the work force who were miners remained relatively constant during the 1860s, averaging about 40% of all residents on the Comstock. Similarly, the percentage engaged in unskilled tasks, the skilled trades, and professional jobs remained roughly the same before and after the 1864 depression.(18) What changed and changed dramatically during the 1860s, was people's occupational and residential mobility. In 1862, residential persistence in Virginia City and Gold Hill was extremely low, particularly among miners; only one out of four miners remained on the Comstock a year later. In 1868, more than two out of three miners remained on the Comstock the next year.(19) In comparison to other American cities, residential turnover remained high in Virginia City and Gold Hill, but it was considerably lower than in the "flush times." Job mobility, both upward and downward, was likewise dramatically lower in 1868 than in 1862; in 1868 only one in twenty persisting residents of Gold Hill changed occupations, while in 1862 nearly two out of five changed jobs. These statistical patterns illustrate how rapidly economic categories hardened and opportunities decreased for men and women of all occupations with the development of industrial mining on the Comstock. Perhaps most indicative of the transformation of economic life was the increasing stratification of personal wealth and land ownership in Virginia City and Gold Hill. By 1870, a small middle class, representing one in seven residents and comprised primarily of clerks, professionals, and small proprietors, controlled over half of the community's personal wealth. Miners, by contrast, comprised 43% of all male occupation holders on the Lode, but owned just 12% of the total wealth listed in the 1870 census. This stratification was partially mirrored by the patterns of home ownership in Gold Hill and Virginia City; members of the middle class were 50% more likely to be married and own their own homes than were miners. Perhaps perhaps the most salient and significant "fact" about wealth and land ownership in 1870, however, was that only 18% of all male occupation holders owned any property on the Comstock. By 1870, very few "capitalists" in fact lived in Virginia City or Gold Hill; much of the community and most of its extracted wealth was in fact owned by the Bank of California and its superintendent, William Sharon, who lived in San Francisco. The growth of industrial mining not only transformed patterns of occupational mobility, personal wealth, and property ownership on the Comstock, but also dramatically altered the shape and meaning of risk-taking for all classes of fortune seekers in Virginia City. For miners, wage work changed, but did not eliminate, the financial insecurities of mining. Striking "paydirt" as a placer miner involved a considerable degree of chance and most claims did not supply steady forms of income. But wagework hardly gave miners a risk-free income, for although wages on the Comstock remained high--$4 a day throughout the 1860s and 1870s--steady employment was unusual, even for "skilled" white miners. Changes in the value of silver and gold, falling stock prices, and financial panics frequently left miners suddenly out of work. If wage work preserved miners' enduring financial insecurity, it also homogenized the nature of such risk. Never before had individual miners had less seeming control over the outcomes of their daily gambles. "Luck" for the frontier wage earner no longer meant striking a rich vein of one's own ore, but rather consisted of procuring steady work at steady wages and maintaining, above all else, steady health. Perhaps the most serious new risks that wage-earning miners took on were the occupational dangers of underground work. Fire, poisonous gas, explosions, cave-ins, and other hazards killed or injured more than 900 miners between 1863 and 1880, giving the Comstock Lode one of the worst industrial accident rates in the world during these decades.(20) The physical risks of placer mining--frostbite, starvation, bandits' guns--paled in comparison to the dangers of deep-lode mining. Given the fact that mining companies rarely if ever compensated workers and their families for lost wages or livelihoods, the financial consequences of these injuries were daunting indeed. All miners, no matter how "skilled," learned to expect the unexpected when working underground. Sometimes, even this maxim left miners ill-prepared for the fatal moment. In the winter of 1867, two men on their way to work underground in Gold Hill were killed when "a small dog accidentally happened to fall from the surface ... knocking them off the cage and precipitating them to the bottom of the shaft."(21) Unlike the Cornish miner who caught the pumpbob nose, these two men lost the daily gamble of underground wagework on the Comstock. Industrial mining also transformed the experience and meaning of risk for large mine-owners, but in ways that illustrate the class-based differences between financial and physical risk. Although mining accidents took a heavy financial toll on mine companies, no Comstock capitalists were ever killed by the daily gambles of mining and only rarely were white collar, middle-class employees affected by mining accidents.(22) When a fire raged out of control in the Yellow Jacket mine of Gold Hill for two weeks in the spring of 1869, killing 42 miners underground, the company experienced only a temporary halt in ore production, a financial setback that was soon calculated and rationalized in terms of temporarily reduced profits and higher stock assessments.(23) Nowhere was the transformation of risk along class lines more visible than in the development of Virginia City's frontier stock exchange. In 1860, just one year after silver had been discovered in Virginia City, money was itself a scarce commodity and most financial transactions were conducted by barter or with newly created stock certificates. Wrote Eliot Lord, "sales of claims for money were comparatively rare, but barters were incessant."(24) Placer miners and would-be capitalists alike traded stocks with one another in lieu of currency and more precise financial arrangements. With the creation of the Washoe Stock Exchange in 1862, however, the barter of mining stocks increasingly fell under the control of large stock-trading companies and banks with financial connections far beyond Virginia City. By 1863, the principal traders on the new exchange were not placer or wage-earning miners, but an expanding class of professional stock brokers with direct links to banking houses in San Francisco and New York. Of forty official stock exchange members in 1863, twenty-five were listed in the Virginia City directory as professional brokers with addresses in San Francisco and New York, while the remaining fifteen comprised a cross-section of Virginia City's professional community. Doctors, lawyers, notary publics, and most of the city's municipal officers, including the mayor, justice of the peace, county assessor, police and probate judges, and secretary of the school board, rounded out the stock exchange's membership.(25) Many miners continued to purchase stock after the depression of 1864, but the local exchange was increasingly an arena of professional risk-taking in which few if any miners ever made the "paper fortunes" celebrated by Mark Twain. Miners continued taking financial risks but more often did so within their own predominantly male, working-class communities.(26) They spent much of their leisure time placing bets in local saloons or in the streets whenever occasions arose.(27) Any physical contest, whether involving men, dogs, chickens, or even bears, quickly became the focus of intense discussion and wagering on the streets above the greatest silver strike in America.(28) When two small dogs got into a fight in downtown Gold Hill in January 1867, "a crowd of more than two hundred persons gathered, all eager and excited to see whose pup would come out ahead." When one of the "pups" finally got the better of the other, money flowed freely through the crowd. Losers quickly paid the victors, whether in coin or drinks at the nearby saloon, where many soon migrated.(29) Although these contests were intensely competitive and often violent, there were few enduring winners in such affairs; today's winners were tomorrow's losers, as most "earnings" remained within the same working-class community of single men. The mutualistic nature of these violent contests did not make contestants "primitive rebels," for the sensibilities that informed such behavior were often predicated on enduring gender hierarchies outside the work-place, in this case affordable access to Virginia City's community of prostitutes.(30) Prize fights and gambling contests nonetheless formed important elements of an alternative working-class culture in Virginia City, one that venerated chance and limited economic gains, rather than rational capital accumulation. Risks were shared rather than calculated in these spontaneous contests, as were their consequences.(31) The different experience and contested meanings of risk for working-class miners and middle-class stock-brokers and businessmen were perhaps best expressed in the ways their respective fraternal organizations celebrated and rationalized risk-taking. For members of the Gold Hill Miners' Union (GHMU), the mutualistic sensibilities of working-class gambling contests informed the design and administration of the union's health benefits program. Founded in January 1867 and constitutionally dedicated to resisting the "tyrannical, oppressive power of capital," the GHMU soon pledged itself to paying the medical bills and funeral costs of every member injured or killed on the job. All of the risks and gambles underground were to be shared equally above ground. The only restriction in receiving benefits was at least two months of union membership. The financial ledger of the union between 1867 and 1870 provides a glimpse of the union's benefit program in action. Throughout these years, the union devoted the bulk of its strained resources to providing sick benefits to injured members. Miners paid monthly assessments to the union's sick fund and contributed additional amounts from their pockets at union meetings, mostly in the form of one or two dollar donations. Assessments and miners' donations were not clustered around Christmas or other "charitable" occasions, but were spread evenly throughout the year, reflecting the constant and demanding needs of the union's injured members.(32) The mutualistic nature of the union's benefit program is brought into sharper relief when one considers the demographic character of Virginia City's working class. Like most miners in Virginia City and Gold Hill, members of the Comstock unions in 1870 were highly transient, only occasionally married, and usually propertyless.(33) The union's short residential requirement for membership and health benefits were ideally suited to its young, predominantly single, male membership. The bulk of the union's resources was in fact directed towards providing aid to its single members, rather than to married miners and their dependents. When the financial burden of paying its medical expenses threatened to bankrupt the unions in the fall of 1867, the unions resisted protecting the benefits of more permanent and settled members by lowering sick payments for all miners from ten to eight dollars a week. The benefits program was not a conservative institution, created to reward stable elements of the working class, as David Emmons found in the Butte Miners' Union, but rather one that protected the health and mobility of all miners on the Comstock.(34) The GHMU's connection to a working class that celebrated risk-taking and luck were reflected in the union's fund-raising efforts on behalf of its injured members. Like other fraternal organizations in Gold Hill, the GHMU's constitution stipulated that members had to be "men of good moral character," but only intoxication and profanity were deemed fineable offenses in the union's by-laws.(35) Prize-fighting and gambling, by contrast, were morally acceptable or at least compatible with the union's mutualistic sensibilities. Lotteries were in fact central features of many union fund raisers, as were shooting contests, card gambling, and cock fights. The birds and equipment for such activities were in all likelihood provided by James Orendorff, one of a half dozen honorary members of the union, and owner of the largest and best-attended cock and dog fighting pit in Gold Hill. By gambling together above ground, union members sought to overcome the unequal financial burdens faced by individual losers of the daily gamble underground. The union's adaptation of such popular forms of working-class leisure to its political project represented its own form of risk-rationalization, one that strengthened the mutualistic nature of risk-taking while also making its meaning potentially more oppositional.(36) If miners' notions of acceptable risk embodied aspects of their working-class identity, they also expressed their racialized identity as white men. Members of the Virginia City and Gold Hill Miners' Unions perceived Chinese laborers as a grave threat to their independence, despite their demonstrated capacity for risk-taking and collective action during the great Union-Pacific railroad strike of 1867, during which thousands of Chinese workers put down their tools and demanded higher pay, an eight-hour day, and an abolition of whipping.(37) When 1100 of the same Chinese laborers were hired to build a railroad to Virginia City in the summer of 1869 by William Sharon, however, the Comstock unions published the following indictment of Chinese workers: Capital has decreed that Chinese shall supplant and drive hence the present race of toilers.... Can we compete with a barbarous race, devoid of energy and careless of the State's weal? Sunk in their own debasement, having no voice in government, how long would it be ere ruin would swamp the capitalist and poor man together? ... We appeal to the working men to step to the front and hurl back the tide of barbarous invaders.(38) This somewhat contradictory indictment of Chinese workers as both "barbarous" and "devoid of energy" was both racialized and gendered, one in which Chinese workers, rather than wage labor itself, threatened miners' independence and the civic order.(39) Chinese workers were not merely job competitors, but also embodiments of an un-republican dependence caused by the evils of capitalism.(40) The Chinese could perform the "degraded" work of laundry service and railroad construction, but only white miners were men enough to take the "real" gambles of underground wage work. Risk had a sharply different shape and meaning for members of the Improved Order of Red Men, Paiute tribe #1, one of the most intriguing middle-class fraternal societies to appear in western Nevada. The Red Men were not in fact