Comstock Inferno

Would the world ’s richest mine survive the Comstock Fire?

- Gregory Crouch

A gray dawn crept into leaden skies over Virginia City, Nevada, on the morning of October 26, 1875. The uniform layer of cloud rushing over the Sierra Nevada Mountains from California portended storm. Fierce winds thundered down the sides of Mount Davidson, churning the dust, thrashing the sagebrush and moaning around the walls of the town.

A booming mining community of about 15,000 terraced onto the mountainside built directly over the world-famous Comstock Lode, Virginia City was the dominant settlement in the state and, arguably, the most important between San Francisco, California, and St. Louis, Missouri.

Staggering quantities of gold and silver had been mined from the Comstock Lode in the 16 years since its discovery— around $200 million worth—making it the Silicon Valley of the age. And the ore body recently struck more than 1,000 feet below the downtown streets in the Consolidated Virginia Mine dwarfed anything previously known. The Con. Virginia’s riches had been revealed only 10 months before, but the mine was already paying more than $1 million of dividends per month.

One of the few persons out that early morning was 10-year-old Grant Smith, scouting for pigeons to shoot with his slingshot. Passing in front of Mooney’s Stable, Smith heard the cry, “Fire!”

The boy looked uphill into the driving wind and saw a thin stream of smoke trailing from a small, one-story frame boarding house belonging to Kate Shay, otherwise known as “Crazy Kate.” People in the adjoining houses had heard a coal-oil lamp break during a drunken fight, one newspaper would later report.

A “garden hose could have put out the fire” at that first alarm, Smith recalled, but scarcely a drop of rain had fallen for months, the town was tinder dry and the fire department arrived tardy.