Comstock Lode and Virginia City

The Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada in what became Nevada Territory. Rich silver ore attracted prospectors, engineers, merchants, financiers and labourers, and the mining camp of Virginia City rapidly developed into one of the most important boom towns of the nineteenth-century American West.

Working the Comstock required increasingly deep shafts, expensive pumping and hoisting machinery, and large pools of capital. Fortunes were made and lost in mining shares while fires, cave-ins, water, labour disputes and volatile ore values made the district exceptionally hazardous.