178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the year of greatest output was 1853, when almost $65,000,000^ were 

 produced. After 1859 the production fell off greatly, partly from the 

 exhaustion of the richer placers, and partly because thousands of Cali- 

 fornia miners left for the Comstock lode. In 1889 it had fallen to a 

 little over $11,000,000,* but in more recent years it has risen again, 

 and has ranged from about $16,000,000 to over $31,000,000 annually. 

 The total production of gold in California from 1848 to 1910 has been 

 over $1,500,000,000, or almost half of the total production of the 

 United States to date. 



Period from 1859-1890 



While these events were going on in California, gold and silver were 

 being discovered in many places in the Eocky Mountains and in the 

 desert country between them and the Sierra Nevada, known as the 

 Great Basin. Though these regions are nearer the eastern states than 

 California, their mining resources were not developed until long after 

 those of the latter. This was due to several causes: The mines of 

 California had already been discovered while those of the interior were 

 as yet unknown; many California pioneers came by sea and knew 

 nothing of the interior, while those who came by the emigrant trail 

 found the difficulties and dangers such that they felt fortunate when 

 they crossed the Sierra Nevada and entered the fertile valleys and 

 salubrious climate of the coast. They tarried, therefore, as little as 

 possible in the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin, but hurried on to 

 where they knew gold existed and where they would be safe from 

 dangers which had already lined the emigrant trail with the bones of 

 thousands of people. Hence it was not until over ten years after the 

 discovery of gold in California that important mining began to the 

 eastward. 



After the California placers had been shorn of their richest treas- 

 ures, many men left them to seek new discoveries, spreading north and 

 south along the coast, and eastward beyond the Sierra Nevada. The 

 result was that many mines which have since become noted were found 

 during that time. Among them the most celebrated was the Comstock 

 lode, which was destined to produce more gold and silver than any 

 other one lode that history had recorded, and the development of which 

 was accompanied by the most sensational and dramatic series of events 

 ever recorded in a mining camp. 



The Comstock lode is situated on the slope of Mt. Davidson, just 

 east of the main range of the Sierra Nevada, some twenty miles beyond 

 the California border, in what is now Nevada, but what was then a part 



»Eeport of the Director of the Mint, 1910. 



* Charles G. Yale, California State Mining Bureau, Eeport State Mineralo- 

 gist, 1896, p. 64. 



