America's Secret Aristocracy by Birmingham Stephen;

Author:Birmingham, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

17

O Pioneers!

“Everyone knows,” says Mr. Gorham Knowles of San Francisco, “that Jimmy Flood’s grandfather was a bartender, and that his grandmother was a chambermaid. That doesn’t matter here. What matters today is that the Floods are ladies and gentlemen.”

In just three generations’ time, the Floods of California have become an aristocracy—of sorts. Like moneyed families in Chicago, Denver, Dallas, and Oklahoma City, this California aristocracy is not very old, not very secret (indeed, quite conspicuous), and has decided to turn what might elsewhere be considered a minus into a plus. San Francisco’s elite may, as they say here, all be “descended from prospectors and prostitutes.” But they can also take pride in the fact that the aristocracy that has evolved from this is older than that of either Los Angeles or San Diego.

The Floods of San Francisco are one of the city’s Irish Big Four families, otherwise known as the Silver Kings: James C. Flood, William S. O’Brien, James Graham Fair, and John William Mackay, four men who were not so much unscrupulous as plain lucky. Big Jim Flood, described by social historian Dixon Wector as a “poor gamin of the New York Streets,” came to San Francisco with the gold rush and found work as a bartender at the Auction Lunch Rooms, so called because the gold exchange was right around the corner. In the kitchen of this establishment worked Will O’Brien, who earned local renown for his Irish fish chowder, which he made extra thick with potatoes. Out in front, Jim Flood was known for serving generous slugs of whiskey, and the Auction Lunch Rooms became a popular watering hole for prospectors coming in from the fields. Neither Flood nor O’Brien knew anything about prospecting for precious metals, but, as drinks flowed—and tongues were loosened—Jim Flood kept his ears open. It wasn’t long before he had heard of a promising site in the Comstock area near Virginia City, Nevada. Recruiting two other Irishmen, John Mackay and Jim Fair, to provide additional financial backing for the trip, Flood and O’Brien set off for Virginia City to stake a claim.

The Comstock Lode was a unique event in mining history: a bonanza discovered by a prospector on his very first dig. What the boys unearthed was the biggest single pocket of silver ever found in the entire world, a long vein of shiny metal fully fifty feet wide. When it was discovered, the Comstock Lode was estimated to be worth $300 million. That estimate proved to be on the low side. From the time of its discovery in 1859 until the mine’s depletion ten years later, the Comstock poured some $500 million worth of silver into the pockets of the four original investors.

San Francisco’s other Big Four royalty, the so-called Railroad Kings of the Central Pacific, were Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. They were a truly unsavory quadrumvirate without redeeming social value who fit into the robber baron category of the era comfortably. It was Huntington

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