ADOLPH SUTRO.

 

            HE WAS a massive and masterful man physically. He must have been six feet and two inches in height and big every way. When I knew him best, he weighed perhaps two hundred and thirty-five pounds, but was as active as a boy and seemed ever driven on by an energy that never tired. He had a lion-like face and a brain that was always alert and strong.

            He was an early comer to San Francisco from some German state. It is said, and his after life was a confirmation of the story, that he brought with him several kegs of German coins, worth about seventeen cents each. It was most difficult in California at that time to get the small change needed in business. There were plenty of slugs (fifty dollar octagon pieces), twenty and ten and five dollar pieces, but small change was very scarce. So the German coins passed readily for twenty-five cent pieces and Mr. Sutro lost no money on them. He opened or purchased a modest cigar and tobacco store and attended to it carefully, but his brain was at work. He kept posted on everything that concerned business in the Golden State, watched, studied and waited.

            When the Comstock was discovered with its mixed gold and silver ores the values were 56 silver and 44 gold there was not a man in the United States who could reduce the ores in a practical way and give a fair percentage of the values, except by smelting them; there was no flux to do that, and the great body of ore was too low grade to bear shipping to where it could be smelted. It was clear that the reduction must be near the mines. Rude mills were erected, but the loss suffered by running the ores through them was enormous. The old Spanish Patio process was tried, but that was too slow and imperfect. In those days, about one man out of four had a process for working the ores, most of which were, of course, worthless.

            Colonel Brevoort had a little mill down at Silver City

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and made a small fortune running it, but all the time was at work in his laboratory and succeeded. With a few ounces of crushed ore he could draw all the precious metals they contained to one pole of his battery. He sold his mill, went east and exhausted the fortune he had made in trying to make his invention of practical value, but failed.

            Mr. Sutro must have invented a process, for he crossed the mountains and built a small mill at Dayton. Like the prudent man that he was, he had the mill insured. But it would not work the ores, and, after making several trials, he closed the mill down. Shortly after, one night the mill burned down. No one could ever account for the fire, but that it was an honest one there could be no doubt, for Mr. Sutro was at Virginia City that night and the keeper was burned to death in the mill.

            From the beginning much water was encountered in sinking on the Comstock and that it must be drained by tunnels was accepted as a fact. One or more short tunnels were run. After the burning of the mill, Sutro took up this scheme in earnest. He had surveys made, maps prepared and demonstrated that a tunnel about four miles long started on the banks of the Carson River, north of Dayton, and driven to the Comstock would tap the great lode some 1,650 feet below C street in Virginia City.

            He organized a company. He showed that the great ore channel could be drained and all the ores from the mine could be run out through the tunnel far cheaper than to transport them by wagon. Then it was most natural to expect that in its course the tunnel would encounter other paying veins, parallel to the great lode. The mining companies along the lode looked upon the scheme as practical and at first gave it full encouragement.

            Sutro knew nothing about running tunnels, but with his disposition to dominate everything he insisted not only upon acting as superintendent, but upon superintending the details of which he knew nothing. He bought shiploads, almost, of machinery which proved worthless, and ran the business in a way which was clear evidence of incapacity.

            In the meantime, some of the shrewdest and squarest in-

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dustrial chieftains ever seen in the West were opening the Comstock; they would not stand for Sutro's work, and when they told him what must be and he refused, there was a quarrel and they washed their hands of the enterprise.

            Then Sutro began his clamors against them. He designated them as the "bank ring," which, in his broken English, he pronounced "bankving," and for years his denunciations of the "bankving" were incessant, and the perfidy which he insisted had been practiced upon him was one of his chief arguments for selling the tunnel stock.

            Meanwhile the men at work on the great lode were doing more and more superb work. They installed more and more and larger and larger pumps, sank deeper and deeper until. by the time the tunnel reached the lode, the mine was opened 1,000 feet deeper than where the tunnel pierced it, and thus the great necessity of the tunnel was largely discounted. After years of trial, Sutro finally relinquished all but the general superintendency, leaving the driving of the tunnel to the capable men below ground.

            Then the political bee that had hived in Sutro's bonnet began to buzz. By 1872 he was prominent in politics. He was loud in his praises of the gentleman who, for the two previous years, had been Nevada's Democratic congressman, declaring that he was the only honest man that Nevada had sent to either House of Congress for years ; that he was one man who could not be corrupted.

            It transpired later that in some quiet way the Congress- man had reached an understanding with Sutro by which Sutro felt sure that he could depend upon the Congressman serving him in any way he might suggest. But he must have been mistaken, for within a brief half-year, Sutro was not only denouncing him as the biggest thief of the whole bunch, but, moreover, the most treacherous and ungrateful one.

            As a sample of Sutro's methods, as that election drew near, he employed all the men who made applications for work until he had within and about the tunnel fifteen hundred men. Then three days before the election he assembled them and made a speech, the burden of which was that if his

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friend, the Congressman, should be re-elected they could all depend upon permanent employment, but if he failed of election, he would be obliged to close down the entire works.

            His friend was elected and on the first payday after election they were all dropped except the regular force of about one hundred and forty men.

            In 1874 Sutro was a pronounced candidate for the United States Senate. He established a daily newspaper on the Comstock and employed that fine writer and man, Charles Sumner, of San Francisco, to manage and edit it. Charlie did his best and did great work, but we have a suspicion that for years thereafter he would have been willing to certify that the work was the toughest in his experience. Sutro himself rigged up a magic lantern and made an illuminating campaign of the state.

            There seemed to be sort of an affinity between him and the lantern. At Hamilton, in the midst of his speech, the lantern grew suddenly dim, the voice of Sutro began to falter ; then the lamp blazed up for a moment and the speech was resumed with energy, then the lamp dimmed again, and with a final sputter went out and just as suddenly the lecture closed.

            I was editor of the Virginia Enterprise at the time, and early in the campaign I promised Sutro, through the paper, that he should not have one vote for Senator in the Legislature. And he did not.

            His feelings were much lacerated by the result, but the people contemplated his sufferings with dry eyes.

            He sold the stock of the tunnel only, as he claimed, to get money to complete it. The men of his native country and of his race purchased the most of it, and it was with apparent great sorrow that he let any of it go ; it would, as he predicted, pay such princely dividends when completed.

            Shortly after the tunnel pierced the lode, Sutro resigned the superintendency, shook the sage-brush and the dust of Nevada from his brogans and removed to San Francisco.

            Then the stockholders discovered that despite his high estimation of the value of the stock, he had been persuaded to unload practically the whole of it upon his friends-; they had the stock and the experience ; Sutro had a good many millions

244 AS I REMEMBER THEM.

of dollars. This I have from one of his own race and one of the heaviest stockholders in the tunnel.

            I did not follow his career very closely in San Francisco. He transformed the spot now called "Sutro Heights" and presented it to the citv. How the s:ift affected the value of his other real estate in the neighborhood I never learned. He served a term as mayor, and I am informed made a good mayor. It seemed clear to some of us that he was still working for the position he had so long coveted a United States senatorship. His career was suddenly cut short by death.

            But no one must lose sight of the fact that he was a masterful man, physically and mentally, that with the absence of two or three traits which were inborn, he would have been a great and commanding man, that, as it was, the work he wrought through the long years in which the tunnel was building was a tremendous one, such an evidence of courage, faith and tenacity of purpose as few men have shown, and that the tunnel today is the splendid monument which he built to himself -- out of the sale of his stock.