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Comstock Lode Contained No Silver Lining For Finders

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The Associated Press

Published: June 7, 2008

RENO, Nev. - Brothers Hosea and Ethan Allen Grosh were jubilant after they discovered a "monster ledge" of silver in the parched mountains of present-day Nevada in the summer of 1857.

The sibling prospectors never prospered from the find, however. Both went to early graves without realizing they were on the verge of locating one of the world's greatest bonanzas: a massive, underground pocket of silver and gold known as the Comstock Lode, about 20 miles southeast of Reno.

Historians say the real treasure trove is more than 80 letters, recently acquired by the Nevada Historical Society, that the brothers wrote from Nevada and California mining camps from 1849 to 1857.

The sons of a Universalist minister in Marietta, Pa., the Grosh brothers arrived by ship in San Francisco in 1849 to find a tent city "growing like a mushroom," full of grog shops and gamblers.

But they faced problems from the start in the West, suffering from dysentery soon after arriving, and both were ill off and on until the end eight years later. Like most 19th century prospectors, they endured hardship and continual setbacks and never struck it rich.

"We have done very - very - bad this winter. Bad luck is at our fingers' end... The gold seems to vanish - it's not 'thar,'" Ethan Grosh wrote in 1855.

A year later the brothers expressed more optimism.

"By February we will probably have either our certain fortune, or make a complete failure. Things look very bright & promising," they wrote.

Just when their hopes were highest, however, Hosea Grosh died in September 1857 of an infection after striking his foot with a pick near present-day Virginia City. That winter, his brother died near Auburn, Calif., of complications of frostbite after being caught in a Sierra Nevada snowstorm. Hosea Grosh was 31 and his brother 33.

The poignant letters about the brothers' deaths read like a Hollywood script.

"I take up my pen with a heavy heart, for I have sad news to send you," Ethan Grosh wrote to his father, A.B. Grosh, in a Sept. 7, 1857, letter. "God has seen fit in his perfect wisdom & goodness to call Hosea, the patient, the good, the gentle to join his Mother in another & a better world.

"I thought it most hard that he should be called away, just as we had fair hopes of realizing what we had labored for so hard for so many years," he added.

Tragically, just two months later, Ethan Grosh would be dead after he and a companion, Maurice R. Bucke, spent about two weeks trapped in the snowbound Sierra.

In a letter from Last Chance, Calif., that is also part of the collection, Bucke wrote of their ordeal, saying they buried themselves in snow to keep from freezing.

"I said to Allen that we might as well lay there until we died, but he said that as long as he could crawl he would not give up... On the 10th Dec. 10, 1857 the miners from Last Chance came up and hauled us down on sleighs to this place... The doctor did not get here until the 19th it was then too late poor Allen died a little while after he got here..."

Historians think the Grosh brothers struck silver on a branch of the Comstock Lode, though their deaths prevented them from cashing in. Their find was a precursor of other discoveries that led to the main lode in 1859, said Guy Rocha, Nevada's state archivist.

"Their discovery suggested that perhaps there was even more mineral riches than anyone had thought in the area," Rocha said.

The Comstock Lode has yielded 9 million ounces of gold and 220 million ounces of silver, worth about $12 billion in today's prices.

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