Stories by Topic

Founders & Early Settlers

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Mining Barons & the Bonanza Kings

• John Mackay: How a Working Miner Became the King of the Comstock: John Mackay arrived on the Comstock as a wage-earning miner and left it one of the richest men in the world. The mansion that bears his name wasn’t even his to begin with, and the fortune behind it came from what he knew underground, not luck.

Notorious Figures

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Women of the Comstock

• More Than Silver: The Women Who Built the Comstock
  From a Scottish boardinghouse keeper who became one of the richest women in America, to a widow who shot her unfaithful lover in front of his wife, the Comstock’s women lived lives as wild as any prospector’s. Meet the millionaires, madams, and quiet survivors history almost forgot.

Stagecoach Drivers & Frontier Travel

• Keep Your Seat, Horace: Hank Monk, the Comstock’s Most Famous Stage Driver
  Hank Monk once drove the fourteen miles from Virginia City to Carson City in barely an hour. The ride that made him famous nationwide, terrifying Horace Greeley down the Sierra, may never have happened quite the way the legend remembers it.
• One-Eyed Charley Parkhurst: The Stagecoach Legend Whose Secret Shocked the West
  For nearly thirty years, One-Eyed Charley Parkhurst handled stage teams over some of California’s hardest roads. When the celebrated driver died in 1879, friends preparing the body for burial discovered a secret Charley had carried for decades.

The Comstock Lode

• The Founding of Virginia City and Nevada’s Path to Statehood
  Two brothers found silver on the Comstock in 1857 and died before they could prove it. The man whose name the lode carries had not found it at all. Nor, it turns out, did Nevada become a state the way the story is usually told.
• Beneath Virginia City and Gold Hill: The Sutro Tunnel’s Great Comstock Gamble
  Adolph Sutro promised a tunnel that could drain the Comstock, carry ore and miners, improve ventilation, and provide another road out of the deep mines. By the time it finally reached the lode, the Comstock had already begun to outrun the dream.
• Property Lines 2,000 Feet Underground
  In 1867, a federal judge ordered one of the Comstock’s great mining companies to admit a rival survey party underground. The dispute exposed a strange truth: beneath Virginia City, the man who owned the ground above might not own the silver below.
• Eight Years Looking for Silver: How Virginia City’s Savage Mine Kept Digging Between Bonanzas
  For years, Savage Mine crews drilled, blasted, timbered, and sank deeper while rich ore remained elusive. Shareholders kept sending money underground because on the Comstock, one barren drift could still end a few feet short of a fortune.

Major Mines

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Life Underground

• The Tomb of the Sierra: How Lake Tahoe’s Forests Built the Mines Beneath Virginia City
  At the height of the Comstock bonanza, an estimated 80 million board feet of lumber vanished into the mines each year, much of it never to return. Its journey from Lake Tahoe required steam tugs, mountain railroads, flumes, and the V&T.

The Silver Boom and Bust

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Murders & Trials

• Julia Bulette’s Last Night: Murder, Evidence, and Legend in Virginia City
  After refusing the opera house’s side entrance, Julia Bulette returned to her cottage at 4 North D Street and expected a visitor. By morning, her neighbor would cross the few steps between their doors and find her dead.
• Did John Millain Really Kill Julia Bulette? Weighing the Case Against the Comstock’s Convicted Man
  John Millain hanged for Julia Bulette’s murder in 1868, but his own confession names two other men inside her house that night. Was he her killer, or the lookout left holding a revolver while someone else did the strangling?
• Have We Found the Real Julia Bulette Gravesite?
  Except for the fake tourist gravesite, Julia Bulette’s real grave has been lost to the public, worn away by wind and time, though a few old-timers likely still know the exact spot. Two photographs, taken years before Virginia City’s famous tourist grave existed, may finally point us back toward it. The search continues.

Vigilante Justice

• The 601: Vigilante Justice in Virginia City
  Late one March night in 1871, masked men sealed the streets around Virginia City’s jail, forced their way inside, and took Arthur Perkins to his death. The number pinned to his body, 601, soon became one of the Comstock’s most feared signatures.

Unsolved Cases

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Virginia City Chinatown

• Silver Mountain: Life and Loss in Virginia City’s Chinatown
  They called it Yin Shan, the Silver Mountain, and built a city of nearly 2,000 people on its edge. Virginia City ate at their tables, sought out their doctors, and voted seventeen thousand to one hundred eighty-three to keep more of them out.

Immigrant Communities

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Immigration and Labor on the Comstock

• Foreign-Born and Indispensable: Immigrant Labor and the Making of the Comstock
  By 1870, nearly half of Virginia City had been born somewhere else. Irish miners risked four dollars a day underground while Chinese immigrants, barred from those same jobs by union custom and prejudice, built the laundries, kitchens, and medicine that kept the district alive.

Homes & Mansions

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Civic & Public Buildings

• The Fourth Ward School: Virginia City’s Monument to Education — Built to seat 1,025 students behind a mansard roof and a watchtower, the Fourth Ward School had indoor flush toilets and gas lighting in 1876, luxuries most Comstock households still lacked. When the mines gave out, fewer than 200 pupils remained to fill it.
• Six Hundred Crystals: The Famous Chandelier of Virginia City’s Crystal Bar — A saloon dismantled and hauled across town. A Prohibition disguise as an ice cream parlor. Virginia City’s famous chandelier survived both, and still hangs today in the very room federal surveyors once measured and photographed for the record.

Churches & Cemeteries

• Ghosts of Virginia City: The Stories, the Scares, and the True History Behind Them
  At the top of the Old Washoe Club’s spiral staircase, a woman in blue is still said to wait after dark, for a lover who never came home. Or for the man who made sure he never would.

Work and Trade

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Food & Saloons

• Behind the Swinging Doors: What Virginia City’s Saloons Were Really Like
  In 1864, nine shots rang out inside Wood & Wilson’s saloon over a card-room quarrel. Behind Virginia City’s hundred-plus saloons stood a world of exclusive millionaires’ clubs, Black-owned fine dining, imported London water filters, and a myth of gunfights later rebuilt for tourists.

Entertainment & Leisure

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Family Life

• Beyond the Mines: Daily Life in 1870s Virginia City
  Virginia City was more than mines, saloons, and sudden fortunes. Behind the Comstock boom, ordinary residents built schools, rode the railroad, attended the opera, sought medical care, raised families, and made an unlikely city work on a steep Nevada mountainside.

The Great Fire of 1875

• The Morning Virginia City Burned
  A boardinghouse flame at dawn became the greatest fire the Comstock ever saw. By afternoon, thirty-three blocks lay in ashes, Chinatown was destroyed, and thousands stood homeless in the first snow of the season.

Other Comstock Fires

• The Globe Hotel: The Fire Beneath Virginia City’s Fourth Ward School
  Eight months after the Great Fire of 1875 leveled much of Virginia City, residents watched smoke rise again, this time from the Globe Hotel’s laundry. In under an hour, fifteen to twenty buildings between C and D streets were gone, and old fears returned with the flames.

Mine Disasters

• The 1869 Yellow Jacket Mine Fire: Nevada’s Deadliest Mining Disaster: The candle-and-timber story became the official version almost immediately. But Alfred Doten, reporting from the scene for the Gold Hill Daily News, later insisted the sworn inquest testimony placed no candles anywhere near where the Yellow Jacket fire began.

Rebuilding After Disaster

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Gold Hill History

• Struck First, Remembered Second: The Founding of Gold Hill, Nevada
  Gold Hill’s prospectors found the Comstock Lode’s southern edge before the strike that made Virginia City famous, then incorporated specifically to avoid being swallowed by their wealthier neighbor. A daughter born in the mining camp later played at Wimbledon.

Gold Hill's Mines

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Gold Hill Today

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