clock … watching time, the only true currency

Oscar Lewis’s popular history of the Comstock Lode foursome, Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Flood and O’Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode was published in 1947, and then republished in 1986 by the University of Nevada Press. All of which is to say… I couldn’t find a great place to link to.

Living in San Francisco, where much of the money plucked from the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains was spent, you can still see the legacy of this foursome. Silver Kings points out some of the obvious landmarks (Pacific Union Club, Fairmont Hotel), but it’s not an urban history of San Francisco. Rather, this book dwells on Mackay and Fair, breezes through O’Brien, and doesn’t show much love for Flood. The telling part is how little was known about the early lives of these men, and how much yellow journalism colored the tales of even their very public lives during the late 1860s and onwards, as their wealth influenced most of the West Coast. This was mostly an enjoyable read… by popular history, I meant that Lewis never misses a chance for an anecdote, even when he admits it’s probably mythical. There is a short bibliography, but I’ll look elsewhere for a more complete tale of the history of San Francisco between Gold Rush and 1906 quake. That’s an era which I’d like to know more about, so suggestions welcome.