John Mackay: Silver King in the Gilded Age (review)

This book chronicles the life of John Mackay, one of the men who earned a fortune from Nevada's Comstock mines in the 1860s and 1870s. It is the second such biography undertaken by Michael Makley; four years ago he published a biography of the more controversial William Sharon (The Infamous King of the Comstock: William Sharon and the Gilded Age in the West), one of Mackay's contemporaries.

Mackay's story is a variant of the American epic. He was by all accounts a hard-working and decent man, someone little affected by the extraordinary experiences that made him one of the wealthiest persons in the United States, perhaps the world. Mackay's early life was far from promising, as a poor Irish immigrant kid in New York, ill-educated and speaking with a stutter. After rushing west for gold, Mackay ultimately struck it rich in Nevada. Like other Comstock millionaires, he went on to play a significant role in the growth of San Francisco, although he eventually relocated to New York. His wife—with whom he seems to have maintained a close and loving relationship—tried and failed to enter the inner circle of New York's rich and famous. Nonplussed, she relocated to Europe, where she was soon well-known and accepted. Mackay preferred to spend much of his time in the United States. In the early 1880s he was persuaded to challenge Jay Gould's monopoly of the cable business and embarked on an intriguing second career for a man whose adult life was intimately tied to the mining industry. He died in 1902, a multimillionaire whose passing was accompanied by a public chorus of praise.

Makley tells this story well, writing in accessible prose and grounding the narrative in an impressive amount of primary research. Despite its strengths, however, the book's usefulness to readers of this journal is questionable. Current research is notably absent from the notes and bibliography, and the one specific reference to recent historiography seems perfunctory (four sentences on the new western history). In addition, the narrow focus on Mackay's life and times means that too little attention is paid to context. This is particularly true of the account of Mackay's involvement in the cable industry, which omits some telling detail. For example, Mackay's company that laid the Pacific cable—not completed until after his death—was in fact not his at all, but controlled by British interests (see Daniel R. Headrick and Pascal Griset, "Submarine Telegraph Cables: Business and Politics, 1838–1939," Business History Review 75 [autumn 2001]: 543–78). Although several chapters describe in some detail Mackay's struggle with Jay Gould, Makley does not take advantage of the opportunity to engage with Maury Klein's revisionist account of Gould's life (in The Life and Legend of Jay Gould [1986]). More generally, the discussion of technology is somewhat superficial. The claim that "The art of industrial hard-rock mining was perfected on the Comstock and then carried to mines around the world" (p. 26) strikes me as questionable, but other than a brief description of square-set timbering Makley does little to substantiate this assertion.

The strength of the book lies in its careful description of Mackay's life. If one might have hoped for a more searching analysis of that life, a vivid portrait of Mackay does emerge from these pages. His was certainly a remarkable career, and, if the account is often uncritical, it does provide some telling detail. For example, Makley recounts how Mackay's companies were at one point losing money, prompting one of his managers to suggest rolling back wages 10 percent as a quick way to reduce costs. Mackay had always paid his workers good wages and responded to the idea with a suggestion of his own: "Mackay proposed cutting the supervisor's wage, and if at the end of the year the supervisor found it workable, they would institute...