Mile-High Fever

Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode

Dennis Drabelle

St. Martin's Press

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In the rip-roaring, true saga of the Comstock Lode, Dennis Drabelle skillfully brings to life silver-mining in the late-nineteenth-century American West. The immense wealth extracted from the Lode spurred the growth of San Francisco, and Virginia City, the hell-raising town that sprang up above the mines, was the inspiration for the TV series “Bonanza.” Innovations in Comstock mining—the use of underground “cubes” to avoid cave-ins and of elevators to bring ore to the surface—was adapted to make possible the modern skyscraper. The boom also accentuated less positive themes in American history. The growth of Virginia City brought ruthless treatment of Native Americans. The risks and expenses of deep mining lent themselves to stock-market manipulations and fraud on a grand scale. To opportunists such as William M. Stewart, a mining lawyer and future U.S. Senator with a tenuous grasp of ethics, the Comstock experience meant that the West belonged to the crafty and the strong. Perhaps the boom’s most lasting legacy, however, was the education it gave to a great American writer: Mark Twain. In Virginia City, the young journalist learned the value of plain but salty Western speech and saw how he might use the vivid reality of the frontier in the great books of his future. Full of colorful characters and get-rich-quick schemes, Mile-High Fever brings to light one of the least-known but most pivotal episodes in American history.

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The Perfect Monster

The Comstock rush began as an outlet for the California gold fields, where too many prospectors were trying to strike it rich at the same time. In 1850, restless 49ers heard that gold had been discovered east of the Sierra Nevada, forty miles from Lake Tahoe, in a part of Utah Territory called Washoe after a local Native American tribe. On reconnoitering, they found deposits in Gold Canyon, a gulch in Sun Mountain (soon to be renamed Mt. Davidson), about five miles from the Carson River.

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Praise for Mile-High Fever

“We know of the Gold Rush, the hunt for El Dorado, even Hernando de Soto's wild search for a passage to China. But in Mile-High Fever, Dennis Drabelle brings us the little-known Silver Rush, told in full technicolor, seasoned with wisdom, and rendered with all history's shadows in tow."--Marie Arana, author of American Chica, Cellophane, and Lima Nights

“It's rare that you find so much shameless misbehavior between two covers! Fraud, larceny, downright theft, untrammeled greed, not to mention fancy women, gambling dens, demented journalists -- all adding up to incredible fun. The Comstock Lode is no longer with us, but you can still visit it in this wonderful, wacked-out book.”--Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life

Reviews from Goodreads

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Erica  rated it  
Mar 16, 2011
Overall a fairly good book. As I have read two books now dealing with the Comstock, I realize that there are many different renditions of events and key people's characters, too many to write a fair history. This book dealt primarily with the human aspect of the Comstock - all the key developers, in ...more
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Daniel  rated it  
Nov 12, 2011
Informative, but bland. ...more
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Carly  rated it  
Oct 8, 2011
Summary: Mile-High Fever traces the rise and fall of the Comstock Lode, a large deposit of silver ore in western Nevada. After the California Gold Rush, intrepid miners continued to seek out the next big gold strike. Prospectors struck silver, not gold, on the slopes of Mt. Davidson, in what was the ...more
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About the Author

Dennis Drabelle

DENNIS DRABELLE has written for The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Film Comment, Civilization, and Smithsonian. He is a contributing editor for The Washington Post Book World and won the National Book Critics Circle's Award (1996) for excellence in reviewing. He lives in Washington, DC.

Dennis Drabelle

Dennis Drabelle

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Available Formats and Book Details

Mile-High Fever
Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode
Dennis Drabelle

Hardcover

Hardcover
St. Martin's Press
July 2009
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780312379476
ISBN10: 0312379471
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 304 pages
$25.99
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