Comstock Lode Collection

This collection contains 898 items. The material is chiefly related to the economic and social history of late 19th century Virginia City, Nevada; some materials show economic connections between Virginia City and San Francisco as well as inter-state relations between Nevada and California. The collection is 90% legal documents. These documents are related to specific court cases (most filed with the First Judicial District State of Nevada). They are grouped case by case and contained in Boxes 1-11. Other types of legal documents, including deeds, indentures, and agreements, are housed in Box 12. Finally, miscellaneous legal documents share Box 13 with non-legal documents, a letter, and ephemera. The items in each series are in chronological order.

Although the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company and California Mining Company are prominent in the collection, the collection includes documents related to more than 50 other mining companies (too numerous to list here). The documents comes from a variety of different law suits including: mining companies suing one another over the uses of resources such as water, building material, railroads, roads and tunnels; and employees suing their employers for wages or injury compensation.

Whereas the collection includes plenty of sources related to the mining industry, it also provides a good opportunity to look into people's lives in Virginia City in the late 19th century. There are legal documents regarding divorces, conflicts over bills, rent, and property; several of the court cases involve Chinese citizens of Virginia City. There are also several documents related to the commitments of mentally ill people.

Moreover, the fact that some corporations and dealers located in California, including Belcher Silver Mining Company, Occidental Consolidated Mining Company, Holbrook, Merrill & Co, and Shea, Bocqueraz, and McKee, show up in the court cases, whether as plaintiffs or defendants, suggests that there were economic connections through the movements of capital and goods between San Francisco and Virginia City. In this point, this collection is invaluable to the study of the ways in which the regional economy of the Southwest developed through the movement of capital, goods, mining products, etc.

Finally, the brief guide of Comstock Lode and the map of the Comstock and Brunswick Lodes placed in the Ephemera folder give some general and quick information of the trajectory of the mining industry and location of the mining claims, although they were printed in the early 20th century, later than the period in which most documents in this collection were created.