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ab a 201 b By virtue of prospecting in the western Great Basin, the story of the Grosh brothers became entangled with one of the greatest episodes in the history of mining, namely the discovery and extraction of the Comstock Lode. As mentioned in the preface, the ensuing legal contest about the validity of a Grosh claim to the Comstock likely played a role in the preservation of the letters.1 That beneficial legacy of an assertion of Comstock ownership aside, it is appropriate to offer some evaluation of the idea that the Grosh family had a defensible claim to some of the proceeds from the businesses that mined in the district. Because the story of litigation involving the discoveries of the Grosh brothers postdates their letters and deaths, it is ancillary to the central theme of this book. There are, however, documents on file in the Grosh Collection at the Nevada Historical Society dealing with the legal aftermath following the deaths of the brothers, and these warrant a brief discussion. The story of the brothers did not end with the burials of Hosea Ballou and Ethan Allen Grosh. Normally, Allen would have opened probate for his brother’s estate in the court at Genoa. But Judge Orson Hyde had suffered severe frostbite during the previous winter, and after a long convalescence he returned to Salt Lake City. There were no probate filings in the Carson County Probate Court between June 1856 and September 1859.2 In the August 1857 letter before Hosea’s death, Allen discussed their plan to return to California for the winter. That trip cost Allen his life. There is no record of probate being opened for Allen’s estate in Placer County, California , where he died, and as a result of this, neither of the brothers’ estates was resolved through the legal system. The Comstock Mining District was founded in 1859, less than two years after the brothers died. During the following twenty years the mines produced hundreds of millions of dollars in silver and gold. There was ample evidence that the Grosh brothers had identified the existence of silver in the region before the strikes of 1859, so it was easy for potential heirs to imagine that some wrong had been done. In gathering every scrap of legal evidence, a p p e n d i x c Financial Matters and the Subsequent Lawsuit 202 a appendix c the family assembled the letters from the brothers and saved them together with other documents and relevant recollections. The material related to the legal turmoil that followed their deaths now comprises the Grosh Collection archived at the Nevada Historical Society in Reno.3 There were two issues related to a legal challenge to the ownership of the Comstock Mining District. The first concerned whether the brothers had discovered the ore body that was producing the profits or they were merely some of the first to realize silver deposits existed in the region. Second, there was a question as to whether any sort of ownership of any ore body could remain valid after two years of neglect. After all, whatever they found was at most only preliminarily developed and then abandoned by virtue of their deaths. Eliot Lord, in his definitive history, Comstock Mining and Miners (1883), placed the Grosh challenge to establish ownership of the Comstock with other frivolous examples of litigation. Beginning in 1863, the Grosche [sic] Gold and Silver Mining Company began the process of suing the Gould and Curry and the Ophir mining companies in the Twelfth District Court in California. As Lord pointed out, “Whether the Grosh brothers ever made a location on the side of Mt. Davidson is immaterial. It is certain that they developed no ledge and that all their record notices were lost. To found a claim to 3,750 feet of the Comstock ledge upon their vague discoveries was simply preposterous; yet the Grosche Gold and Silver Mining Company was incorporated in 1863 with a nominal capital of $5,000,000, afterward increased to $10,000,000, in order to maintain this claim, which embraced the richest portion of the ledge.”4 Lord further noted that the Gould and Curry alone spent $12,933.30 defending against the legal contest, which was not dismissed until March 9, 1865: the company “had been forced to assemble witnesses from all parts of the country, and fortify their title against an assault which was a clear case of black-mail.”5...

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