Beggars’ Tomb
Gould and Curry Mine
Mill outside Virginia City,
Nevada, in 1867, midway
through its operating life.
68 AMERICAN HISTORY
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SThe Bonanza King:
John Mackay and
the Battle Over the
Greatest Fortune in
the American West
Scribner, 2018; $30
rags to
honest riches
Gregory Crouch (China’s Wings, Enduring
Patagonia) details, telling the story of a
wealthy man who worked hard for his living.
Like many risk-takers of his day, Mackay
headed West and made a fortune sifting
Nevada dirt. In 1859, lacking money for a
horse or mule, he hiked more than 100 miles
from the California goldfields, arriving at a
mining camp near what would be labeled the
Comstock Lode. He hired on at $4 per day as a
common miner, and through determination
and perspiration advanced to timberman, then
gang boss, shift-leader, and foreman. With
partners, Mackay gained control of the Con-
solidated Virginia Mining Company in 1872.
That operation’s 1873 discovery of a silver-
and gold-laced vein of ore extending 1,200 feet
underground made the owners rich and led
the press and the public to nickname Mackay
and partners the “Bonanza Kings.”
In Crouch’s brilliant telling, Mackay’s life
illustrates not only how mining technology
evolved, but how the United States took
John William Mackay came from far less than
humble beginnings. The son of penniless
Catholics in Dublin, Ireland, he was nine when
he sailed with his family to America in 1840.
The Mackays joined thousands of immigrants
crowding a squalid Lower Manhattan slum.
On the inadequately-drained arteries of Five
Points, feral pigs rooted amid human and ani-
mal waste, kitchen slops, ash, and the rotting
remains of dead beasts. Fifty years later, now
one of the world’s richest men, Mackay would
look out from his corporate office onto City
Hall Square and Frankfort Street, scant blocks
from where he lived as a child.
This titan of 19th century American indus-
try enjoyed success to match that achieved by
Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Leland
Stanford, and Collis Huntington. However,
unlike those and other robber barons, Mackay
kept his good name. Lacking any penances to
perform, he established no reputation-scrub-
bing, publicity-generating philanthropies.
Thus, time’s passage erased an ascent that