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Author: Ferol Egan Publisher: University of Nevada Press ISBN: 0874178495 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
Much of the wealth from the great mining bonanzas of the nineteenth century American West flowed into San Francisco and made possible the growth of the city and some fabulous personal fortunes. Among the wealthiest and most powerful of the Bonanza Kings were William Bowers Bourn I and his son and successor, William Bowers Bourn II. Their wealth came from rich mines in Nevada’s Comstock Lode and Treasure Hill and California’s Sierra foothills, as well as astute business ventures in the booming port city of San Francisco. Last Bonanza Kings tells their story with all the colorful detail and sweeping sense of epic drama that the characters and their times demand, setting them into the turbulent context of an age of rampant financial and civic growth, major technological advances in mining, lavish philanthropy, and opulent personal lifestyles.
Author: Ferol Egan Publisher: University of Nevada Press ISBN: 0874178495 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
Much of the wealth from the great mining bonanzas of the nineteenth century American West flowed into San Francisco and made possible the growth of the city and some fabulous personal fortunes. Among the wealthiest and most powerful of the Bonanza Kings were William Bowers Bourn I and his son and successor, William Bowers Bourn II. Their wealth came from rich mines in Nevada’s Comstock Lode and Treasure Hill and California’s Sierra foothills, as well as astute business ventures in the booming port city of San Francisco. Last Bonanza Kings tells their story with all the colorful detail and sweeping sense of epic drama that the characters and their times demand, setting them into the turbulent context of an age of rampant financial and civic growth, major technological advances in mining, lavish philanthropy, and opulent personal lifestyles.
Author: Gregory Crouch Publisher: Scribner ISBN: 1501108204 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 480
Book Description
“A monumentally researched biography of one of the nineteenth century’s wealthiest self-made Americans…Well-written and worthwhile” (The Wall Street Journal) it’s the rags-to-riches frontier tale of an Irish immigrant who outwits, outworks, and outmaneuvers thousands of rivals to take control of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Born in 1831, John W. Mackay was a penniless Irish immigrant who came of age in New York City, went to California during the Gold Rush, and mined without much luck for eight years. When he heard of riches found on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1859, Mackay abandoned his claim and walked a hundred miles to the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Over the course of the next dozen years, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, thwarting the pernicious “Bank Ring” monopoly to seize control of the most concentrated cache of precious metals ever found on earth, the legendary “Big Bonanza,” a stupendously rich body of gold and silver ore discovered 1,500 feet beneath the streets of Virginia City, the ultimate Old West boomtown. But for the ore to be worth anything it had to be found, claimed, and successfully extracted, each step requiring enormous risk and the creation of an entirely new industry. Now Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s amazing story—how he extracted the ore from deep underground and used his vast mining fortune to crush the transatlantic telegraph monopoly of the notorious Jay Gould. “No one does a better job than Crouch when he explores the subject of mining, and no one does a better job than he when he describes the hardscrabble lives of miners” (San Francisco Chronicle). Featuring great period photographs and maps, The Bonanza King is a dazzling tour de force, a riveting history of Virginia City, Nevada, the Comstock Lode, and America itself.
Author: Oscar Lewis Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 0307828042 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
Thousands of readers remember with pleasure Oscar Lewis’s fine book on the Western railroad robber barons, The Big Four. Silver Kings is a companion piece, dealing as it does with the big four of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the greatest of all silver mines. These were really fabulous men who led strangely fascinating lives. John W. Mackay (the father of Clarence Mackay), best known of the four, built up the Postal Telegraph and Commercial Cable systems. His wife, Marie Hungerford, for years after her marriage saw little of America, but kept the society of Paris and London agog. James G. Fair was a master mechanic and one of the shrewdest of financiers—of all the Comstock’s conspicuous figures easily the least admired, a fact of which he was aware and which he regarded with complete indifference. He became a United State Senator and his elder daughter, Tessie, married Herman Oelrichs, then a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor and member of the prominent New York and Newport family. James Clair Flood’s great mansion atop Nob Hill in San Francisco is now the Pacific Union Club. William S. O’Brien, Flood’s partner, was the most shadowy of the quartet. It’s a rich field that Mr. Lewis has mined, and his story, which never lags, is set against the stunning background of the Virginia City of the seventies as well as the San Francisco of that era. The result is a really magnificent piece of authentic Americana.
Author: Tyler Green Publisher: University of California Press ISBN: 0520377532 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 594
Book Description
"[A] fascinating and indispensable book."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2018—The Guardian Gold Medal for Contribution to Publishing, 2018 California Book Awards Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) is widely considered the greatest American photographer of the nineteenth century and arguably the most influential artist of his era. He is best known for his pictures of Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. Watkins made his first trip to Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove in 1861 just as the Civil War was beginning. His photographs of Yosemite were exhibited in New York for the first time in 1862, as news of the Union’s disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was landing in newspapers and while the Matthew Brady Studio’s horrific photographs of Antietam were on view. Watkins’s work tied the West to Northern cultural traditions and played a key role in pledging the once-wavering West to Union. Motivated by Watkins’s pictures, Congress would pass legislation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that preserved Yosemite as the prototypical “national park,” the first such act of landscape preservation in the world. Carleton Watkins: Making the West American includes the first history of the birth of the national park concept since pioneering environmental historian Hans Huth’s landmark 1948 “Yosemite: The Story of an Idea.” Watkins’s photographs helped shape America’s idea of the West, and helped make the West a full participant in the nation. His pictures of California, Oregon, and Nevada, as well as modern-day Washington, Utah, and Arizona, not only introduced entire landscapes to America but were important to the development of American business, finance, agriculture, government policy, and science. Watkins’s clients, customers, and friends were a veritable “who’s who” of America’s Gilded Age, and his connections with notable figures such as Collis P. Huntington, John and Jessie Benton Frémont, Eadweard Muybridge, Frederick Billings, John Muir, Albert Bierstadt, and Asa Gray reveal how the Gilded Age helped make today’s America. Drawing on recent scholarship and fresh archival discoveries, Tyler Green reveals how an artist didn’t just reflect his time, but acted as an agent of influence. This telling of Watkins’s story will fascinate anyone interested in American history; the West; and how art and artists impacted the development of American ideas, industry, landscape, conservation, and politics.
Author: Thomas F. Prendergast Publisher: The Minerva Group, Inc. ISBN: 0898753902 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
This is a comprehensive look at the Irish in Northern California from 1835 to 1900. Filled with anecdotes and insider history - this book is a unique piece of California history. The title, Forgotten Pioneers, embodies only half a truth in its application to the subject --- those early settlers in the wilderness of California, men of Irish birth or ancestry who contributed lavishly toward laying the foundations of a new commonwealth on the Pacific. It is the purpose of this book to reinstate in the rank where they belong, some, at least, of these overlooked men "whose character and achievement entitle them to the highest place in the respect and esteem of the people."
Author: Ferol Egan
Author: Ferol Egan
Author: Gregory Crouch
Author: Richard H. Peterson
Author: 
Author: Richard H. Peterson
Author: Squire Pierce Dewey
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Author: Oscar Lewis
Author: Tyler Green
Author: Thomas F. Prendergast