The Roar and the Silence, by Ronald M. James

My heart gave a skip of exaltation as first I saw [Virginia City] lying sprawled there in its canyons and along the scarred moun- tainside-the greatest mining camp ever in America! ... It was not long before I imbibed the [folklore] and history of the camp from hospitable old-timers. -Wells Drury, upon arriving at the Comstock Lode in 1874.

INTRODUCTION

Virginia City clings to the steep side of Mount Davidson. It is an improbable town site. Before the 1859 strike that spawned the city, placer miners worked the sand and gravel of Gold Canyon far below, living in tents and shacks. They settled in enclaves where nature provided water, for drinking and washing sand away from gold, and cottonwoods, for shade and a break from the wind. Those early prospectors could not have envisioned the future Virginia City, looming far above. J. Ross Browne, one of the first authors to describe the community, observed that the climate was one of "hurricanes and snow; [its] water, a dilution of arsenic, plumbago, and copperas; [its] wood, none at all except sage-brush." He went on to point out that no one has "tide to property ... [but that there is] no property worth having."'
One hundred years later, American television exploited the history of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode almost as if that heritage itself were a body of ore. The Bonanza series conjured up an image of a mining boomtown situated on conveniently level ground. In the television Virginia City, unlike the real place, there were no buildings balanced on 40-percent grades, with extra stories built on the downslope side and foundations scraped into the mountain on the other side. Wagons rolled effortlessly into TVs Virginia City, once again denying the improbable location and nature of the West's premier mining town.
Coincidentally, tourists who come to visit the site of one of the world's richest ore strikes also struggle with the reality of Virginia City's peculiar disposition. Directed by signs along the main thoroughfare to parking downhill, flatlanders from throughout the world ascend the steep grades to view the silent remnants of the nineteenth-century mining boomtown. With chests heaving from exertion, they come to realize that if the silver deposit had not been discovered, no one would have planned a town on this mountain. The city stands nearly a mile and a half above sea level, on ground so steep that in the nineteenth century runaway wagons became a daily and unremarkable-occurrence.
Still, as any miner knows, it is not possible to establish mines where people would most like to live. The discovery of ore dictates the location of the mine, and nature sometimes deposits that ore inconveniently. Such was the case with Virginia City. Historians should never lose sight of this fundamental fact concerning the town that was often called the Queen of the Comstock Mining District: its location, perched high on a steep, desolate mountain that was inaccessible to the rest of the world, shaped its development and its nature. First of all, then, Virginia City is a product of its place. While the land furnished the bedrock upon which miners and entrepreneurs built the mining district, it also served as fertile soil for the growth of myth, a process that began long before television. The real Comstock may provide an irrefutable basis for good history, but since the earliest days legend has given resident, visitor, and those far away a prism that transmuted the appearance of the mining district, challenging and continually altering perceptions. While one might prefer to disregard the Comstock myth as an annoying distraction, it has become part of the place's reality, warranting its own study and appreciation during the course of any effort to come to terms with the district. The myth of the Comstock adds a second element essential to an understanding of the place.
A third critical aspect revolves around Virginia City's international context. Separated from the rest of the world by mountains and desert, hundreds of miles from major metropolitan centers, the town was nevertheless part of a global community. Its citizens arrived from everywhere. As one of its alumni, Samuel Clemens, pointed out, all the peoples of the earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland. "I And when the bonanza days were over, the Comstock had given back such notables to the global community as Clemens in the guise of Mark Twain, as well, is many new aristocrats, among them George Hearst, Adolph Sutro, and John Mackay.
In addition to the mining district's cosmopolitan population, other aspects of the new community tied it to someplace else. Virginia City imported its technology, its architecture, and nearly every other element of its existence. Its mining industry produced tons of gold and silver that flooded the international marketplace. At its height, the Comstock startled visitors with the noise of its machines, the clanking metal of its stamp mills, the shrill whistles, and the constant rhythm of its engines. The cacophony of this industrial colossus echoed in the hills day and night. The entire world eventually heard the roar of the Comstock. Although the mining district was on the periphery, it was intimately connected to the core of the international system.' Significantly, John Mackay's silver helped lay the first transatlantic cable, thereby making the world a smaller place, translating into a broader context what the Comstock had done as a microcosm.
Still, Virginia City was sufficiently removed from the rest of the world that its rocky slopes provided a habitat for an extraordinary type of society, fashioned from a synthesis of Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The depth of its ore required a new technology. Distances to be traversed for transportation of goods, timber, and water also mandated innovation. Virginia City was stamped out of imported materials, but at the same time it created its own persona, which eventually influenced the entire mining world.
A fourth characteristic of Virginia City is that it was always in flux. It is not possible to point to any one year or span of years as giving definitive expression to what the mining town was like. Virginia City alternated between boom and decline, again and again. A single portrait cannot capture the nineteenth-century community; at the very least two snapshots are needed, to illustrate both sides of its economic cycle. Even this is insufficient, however, since each period of prosperity and depression assumed its own distinct form.
With these four observations in mind, it is possible to proceed. Virginia City was and is a remarkable place, and its riches continue to stir the imagination.

Ronald James1998