Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (77 page)

In 1981 few people, even in San Francisco, knew much about
Sunol. That changed after Bosco’s election made world news. The Chinese newspaper
People’s Daily
reported that Bosco was proof that Western democracy was a failed system—it couldn’t even distinguish between people and dogs. Sunol residents, now the focus of international controversy, retorted that the newspaper had no sense of humor. Bosco served the community, mainly by being himself. Residents enjoyed “bribing” the mayor with beef jerky or ice cream. Tourists were encouraged to pet him. He made the spotlight again when he appeared on
The Third Degree
, a TV game show where celebrity panelists tried to guess his occupation (they failed). And the national media—including Tom Brokaw of NBC—would sometimes meet with Bosco for an “interview.” Bosco was such a success that Sunolians reelected him six times. He was mayor until 1994, when he died at age 15. He is memorialized in the Sunol restaurant Bosco’s Bones & Brew, where a life-size replica stands atop the bar and dispenses beer with a lift of its leg.

Four-legged mayors have presided over several other communities across the United States.

• Clay Henry III is the third generation of goats to be mayor of Lajitas, Texas. Clay III also reportedly drinks beer—30 or 40 a day. (Really.)

• A donkey named Paco Bell out-campaigned a llama to remain the mayor of Florissant, Colorado.

• A goat named Opie won the 2004 mayoral election in Anza, California. “Opie stands for why so many people moved out here,” said one local resident. “We don’t want some human sitting on a throne.”

• Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, elected a dog named Junior Cochran as its mayor. Twice. (He beat out another dog and a donkey.)

“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to somebody else.”

—
Mitch Albom

So you think you’d like to own an interest in a gold and silver mine? Be careful what you wish for. Here’s the final installment of our story. (Part III is on page 338.)

H
AND OVER FIST
In all, more than $320 million worth of gold and silver ore was pulled from the Comstock Lode between 1859 and 1878, the equivalent of between $400 and 480
billion
today. (By comparison, in 2007 Microsoft Corporation had revenues of $51 billion.) And yet for all the wealth that came out of the mines, the overwhelming majority of investors who bought stock in the mining companies over the years
lost
money in the bargain.

Part of this was due to the fact that the operating costs of the mines were staggering. The mines consumed an enormous amount of resources, including millions of pounds of mercury and other chemicals (used to extract the gold from the ore), more than 600 million board feet of timber, and another 2 million cords of firewood. Wages in Virginia City were some of the highest in the world—compensation for the remote location, the dangers of most mining jobs, and the high cost of living in a community where nearly all of the goods and supplies were brought in from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

As the mine shafts got deeper—the deepest reached nearly ¾ of a mile down—the cost of operating the mines soared higher. At these depths, the mines were constantly at risk of flooding with scalding geothermally heated water. Giant, locomotive-sized water pumps had to be lowered into the shafts to get the water up and out of the mines; the largest of these pumps removed more than a million gallons of water per day. And yet even when the water was removed and cooler fresh air was pumped in from the surface, the temperatures at those depths remained so high that the miners
could only work for a few minutes at a stretch before retreating into “cooling-off rooms” to douse themselves with ice water.

But the biggest reason for the investors’ losing their shirts was the fact that the owners of the mines were more interested in manipulating stock prices than they were in running their companies responsibly. Time and again, when a fresh deposit of rich ore was discovered, the owners had it mined and processed into bullion as rapidly as possible, even at the expense of damaging the deposit and losing gold and silver through inefficient processing methods. The owners did this to generate as much hype over new discoveries as possible, causing share prices to soar in a speculative bubble.

Then, when the prices peaked, the owners would unload shares on the market and reap a fortune, and then earn even more money when the price began to drop, through a process known as
short selling
. During one run-up of prices in 1872, the share price of the Belcher mine rose from $300 to $1,575 before crashing back to $108, all in the span of eight months.

Ordinary investors often lost the most money when the mines were the most productive, as speculative mania drove prices so high that no amount of gold or silver recovered could have justified the absurd prices paid for shares. Even when the investors were lucky enough to receive dividends from their shares, many used the money to buy more stock, setting themselves up for even bigger losses when the stock tanked.

So why did investors continue to buy shares in the mines year after year? For the same reason that people buy lottery tickets—even if most people are losing, the fortunes made by the handful of winners were so tantalizing that people gladly took the risk. Besides, money can be made in a rising stock market even if the shares aren’t worth what people pay for them. So what if a $1,400 share in a mine is really only worth $140? As long as the investor can find someone willing to pay $1,500 for it, the $100 profit is just as real as if the seller had pulled $100 worth of silver and gold out of the mine. Nobody really minded that the shares weren’t worth their asking prices, at least not as long as prices kept rising.

The cycles of boom and bust continued for nearly 20 years, thanks to the fact that whenever one deposit of valuable ore seemed about to peter out, a new one would be discovered and the process would repeat itself. Sixteen different major discoveries were made over the years—the last one, called the Consolidated Virginia Bonanza, was uncovered at the 1,200-foot level in 1873. At the peak of its output in 1876, the Consolidated Virginia paid out $1,080,000 in dividends per month. But the good times didn’t last for long: When the Consolidated Virginia was excavated down to the 1,650-foot level in 1877, the ore suddenly ran out.

Eighteen years and $320 million worth of silver and gold after the first discovery, no one was ready to believe that the Consolidated Virginia might be the end of the Comstock Lode—there had to be another rich deposit of ore somewhere, didn’t there? Over the next decade, the mining companies spent another $40 million dollars sinking shafts as deep as 4,000 feet in search of new strikes. At first the companies paid these expenses by withholding dividends from shareholders. Then they levied “assessments” on shareholders, which were the opposite of dividends: If a shareholder wanted to hang onto his stock, he had to cough up a sum of money for every share he owned. If he refused, his shares reverted back to the company and could be sold to new investors.

The assessment system worked while new—but smaller—deposits were being found on a fairly regular basis, but as the years passed with no new discoveries, investors began to give up hope. Instead of paying their assessments, they surrendered their shares to the mining companies, who had trouble selling them even for the price of the unpaid assessments. Between 1875 and 1881, the total value of all the mining company shares on the Comstock Lode dropped from $300 million to less than $7 million.

By 1884 shares that had once sold for $1,500 or more were trading for a nickel apiece; even at that price, it was difficult to find buyers. By then the mining companies were so broke that they had trouble raising enough cash to operate the giant water pumps that kept the mines from flooding. One by one they were shut off, and
when the last one was shut down in October 1886, the deepest levels of the lode disappeared under the water forever. Some mining companies managed to eke out small profits for another decade by mining low-grade ore close to the surface, but by 1895 even these were played out and the Comstock era came to a close.

As the mine went, so too went Virginia City. When the mining jobs dried up, the miners left town in search of work elsewhere, and the businesses that had served them for so many years began to close their doors. The newspapers shut down; so did the hospital, the orphanages, and eventually even the schools. As passenger and freight traffic declined to nothing, the railroads ripped up their tracks and used the steel to lay tracks to newer mining towns. Private homes that could not be sold were boarded up and abandoned. In the years to come, it became a common practice for those few residents who stayed behind to buy neighboring homes for back taxes and tear them down for the firewood.

Although the Comstock Lode gave up its last high-grade ore more than 130 years ago, the riches it produced encouraged speculators to look for similar riches in other parts of the state. Many discoveries (none of them as impressive as the Comstock Lode) were made, and mining remained an important sector of the Nevada economy into the 1920s. But when the Great Depression sent both the mining and ranching sectors into steep decline, in 1931 the state of Nevada came up with another way to keep money flowing into state coffers: In 1931 they legalized gambling.

At the time, many people thought the measure would be temporary and that gambling would be outlawed again as soon as the economy improved. That wasn’t the case, of course. Today Las Vegas, founded in 1905 on land auctioned by a railroad company, is one of the largest gambling destinations in the world. There are plenty of casinos in Reno, too. (And if you get tired of gambling, Virginia City, which has found new life as a tourist attraction, is only 17 miles away. It receives two million visitors a year.) So if you’ve ever struck it big or lost your shirt in Las Vegas, or Reno, or anyplace else in Nevada, remember: It all started with the Comstock Lode.

A few facts about the toxin that has the power to kill you
and
to eliminate your wrinkles
.

1.
Botulism is a rare and serious disease caused by the toxin
botulin
, which is produced by a bacterium called
Clostridium botulinum
. The Center for Disease Control says that about 145 cases are reported in the United States each year, although modern medicine makes deaths rare.

2.
Symptoms of botulinum poisoning can begin between six hours and two weeks after eating. They include: double vision, blurred vision, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, and muscle weakness that starts in the upper body, descends down the arms, down the torso, and then down the legs. Breathing muscles can become paralyzed, and death can occur if emergency medical treatment is not given.

3.
C. botulinum
occurs naturally in soils around the world. Its main activity is the consumption of dead organic material—and the toxin is its “poop.” The bacteria and their waste can also contaminate plants, and from there, or from the soil itself, can contaminate birds, fish, and mammals.

4.
Bacteria are single-celled organisms and some of the most primitive life forms on Earth.
C. botulinum
has probably been making animals and humans sick for as long as it’s existed—and by doing so, it’s helped shape their eating habits.

5.
In times of stress (such as very cold or very hot weather that causes food shortages),
C. botulinum
, like some other bacteria species, can produce an
endospore
—a protective structure in which it can survive in a dormant state until conditions improve. How long can it stay in that state? Microbiologists have found dormant bacterial spores that were
hundreds of millions of years old
. These ancient spores were able to “wake up” and start eating again.