MANLY GAMBLES: THE POLITICS OF RISK ON THE COMSTOCK LODE, 1860-1880 By Gunther Peck Yale University Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article/26/4/701/958973 by guest on 27 September 2021 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-factlv, "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."! 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.' 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 gov­ erned the productive lives of men. IfLord 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." 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 theirdefinitions of it in the daily challenges of wage work. While all classesof 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 702 journal of social history summer 1993 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 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article/26/4/701/958973 by guest on 27 September 2021 For many western historians, "class" and the "frontier" have been, almost by defi­ nition, oxymoronic terms, despite recent attempts by historian Carlos Schwantes to reconcile the two concepts in his provocative discussion of a "wageworkers' frontier."B Labor historians such as Melvyn Dubofsky have understandably re­ jected Turner's formulation of western development and argued that the West's labor history was singularly exploitative and class,ridden.9 Yet, Dubofskyavoided 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 con, ceptual hurdle continues to confront even the most recent and sophisticated literature of the "new" Western history. In their essay, "Becoming West: To, ward 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.V 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" pro~ vides 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 di­ alogue with middle-class reformers and capitalists.!" 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 # I-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: MANLY GAMBLES: THE POLITICS OF RISK 703 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. IS Twain realized that miners' gilded hopes were rarely fulfilled and his comparison of money and dust anticipated the dramatic "bust" Virginia City experienced Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article/26/4/701/958973 by guest on 27 September 2021 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 transforma­ tion 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. Ex­ pensive 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.l" 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 operarions.l/ 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 constantduring 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.P 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.