Comstock Silver

James Doyle had been in the Comstock for six years when he decided he was done with the Comstock.

This was not a decision that happened all at once. It happened over the course of a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1875, sitting in the mouth of a drift he had been working for three months, eating his lunch in the dark because the candles were expensive and he had learned not to waste them during the break. The ore they had been pulling out of this section was lower grade than the company had advertised it to be, which was the fourth time in six years that the company had advertised ore grades that turned out to be optimistic. He chewed his bread and thought about this pattern.

By the time he came up out of the mine he had made up his mind.

Virginia City in 1875 was still the largest city in Nevada, still producing silver, still full of men who had arrived expecting to get rich and were in various stages of revising that expectation. The city sat on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson at six thousand feet, a vertical town that climbed the hillside in layers of hotels and saloons and ore processing facilities and boarding houses. Doyle had lived in it for six years and had made reasonable wages and had not gotten rich, which put him in the majority.

He took the Virginia and Truckee Railroad down the mountain to Carson City and then the Central Pacific west to Reno, which he had passed through twice before without stopping. The third time he stopped.

Kellerman's saloon was on Virginia Street, which he had been told was the main street, and it looked like a main street saloon -- a long bar, eight tables, bottles arranged with some thought about appearance on the shelves behind. A German man of about fifty was wiping down the bar when Doyle came in on a Thursday afternoon, and Doyle ordered a beer and the German served it without conversation, which Doyle appreciated after six years of conversation in confined spaces.

He sat at the bar for two hours. Other men came and went. A Chinese laundryman delivered a package of tablecloths to the back. A woman came in and spoke to the German in German for several minutes and then left. The beer was cold. Doyle ordered another one.

Somewhere around the second hour he realized he was not in a hurry to leave.

He had not thought specifically about Reno as a destination. He had thought about not being in Virginia City, which was a different thing. But the saloon was clean and the beer was cold and the street outside had the particular quality of a place that was still accumulating rather than declining, which he had developed a sensitivity to after six years of watching Virginia City try to pretend it was not doing the latter.

He told the German he was looking for work. The German -- Kellerman -- said he wasn't hiring. Doyle said he wasn't necessarily looking for bar work. What did the town need? Kellerman thought about it and said: a good carpenter, another doctor, someone who could handle a freight wagon without breaking it.

Doyle had driven freight wagons in Pennsylvania before the mines. He was in the freight business within the month.

He became a regular at Kellerman's, which was where he had started, on Thursdays after his route. He and Otto Kellerman did not become close friends in any way that either of them would have described as friendship, but they developed the kind of reliable mutual regard that men who are in the same place at the same time for enough years tend to develop. Doyle watched Kellerman's son Frank grow up behind the bar. Kellerman watched Doyle's freight business expand to three wagons and then contract back to two after the railroad took most of the long-haul work.

The Comstock kept declining. Doyle read about it in the newspaper on Thursday mornings and felt, not quite relief, but the specific satisfaction of a man who had made a decision at the right moment and knew it.

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