an extraordinary lecturing campaign, in which he attacked and denounced the Bank of California crowd and, with bitter and unsparing invective, exposed what he called their monopoly of nearly everything of value in Nevada; their indiscriminate destruction of the forests that left nothing green in the country; their zigzag railroad, which however was no more crooked than their management of it; their extortionate water company, and their grasping avarice in everything, small as well as large, that attracted their insatiate greed. And with all this, he contrasted his own project, which he claimed to be a beneficent boon to the mining population; calculated to make the Comstock lode dry in all its length, breadth and depth; remove its foul air and noxious vapors; mitigate its almost intolerable heat; ameliorate its dangers in case of fire or accident, and with its increased productiveness furnish remunerative employment for an unlimited number of laborers in the future. He called attention to the fact that his enemies were attempting to crush him; that he was only one man against a rich and powerful combination; that he was perhaps the only man that had dared to stand up against them; that he was not acting out of mere bravado; that his circumstances and the time and money he had put into the enterprise compelled him to take the position he did; and he asked the public to see that he had fair play in the struggle thus forced upon him. He charged that his adversaries were not only his enemies but the enemies of the people of Nevada, who were almost helpless in their hands. He said they had bribed the judges, packed the juries, hired false witnesses, purchased the legislatures, elected representatives to suit their own sordid purposes, and dared any one to expose their villainies or oppose their iniquities. He did not mean to counsel violence against them; but he did want to see the people, whose cause was the same as his own, join him in his fight against the common enemy, by helping him to build the tunnel that would be as much to their interest as it would be to his own.

It was very easy for his adversaries to cry "demagogue" and “madman;” but it did no good. Those that he influenced were not the excitable classes only; but the soberer portions of the community were also attracted by his vigor, force and untiring activity. In a short time he produced such an effect that his

enemies began to find they had provoked a power that was stronger than their own. Sutro himself was too wise to permit any violence; but he stirred up a feeling that might have taken that direction, if he had not had the ability to guide it solely to the support of his project. The miners of Nevada-that is, the men who worked in the mines-almost as a body joined together in raising money, some fifty thousand dollars, and purchased a sufficient quantity of his stock to enable him to make a start; and he commenced upon the tunnel on October 19, 1869. He then carried his oratorical campaign into California, to the eastern states and to Europe; obtained recognition everywhere and subscriptions in many different quarters-some of which failed but upon others of which he realized. In 1871 English capitalists put into the enterprise nearly a million and a half of dollars; and this was soon increased in the eastern states by half a million Several hundred laborers were at once employed at different points, and the work progressed rapidly. It had been the intention, for the purpose of hastening the labor, to sink four construction shafts from the surface, so that from the bottom of each of them two sections of the tunnel proper could be driven at the same time; but, on account of the excessive heat in the lower depths and the inflow of water which the pumps could not remove with sufficient rapidity, only the two nearest the mouth of the bore could be made available. Where work could be done, however, it was vigorously pushed, and particularly after the invention and introduction about that time of various American improvements in drilling apparatus which greatly facilitated the labor of the men employed. Before the use of the new drills, boring could not be carried on at any point at a greater speed than about one hundred feet per month; but afterwards this speed was trebled; and during the years 1875 and 1876 it advanced at the unprecedented average rate of three hundred and eight feet per month.

Meanwhile more money came in and more zeal, if that were possible, was put into the work. The drills went night and day, Sundays and holidays, without cessation; carpenters followed with their props and timber work; the rails of the tunnel tracks were extended; the loose rocks blasted out in front were pitched

36 VOL. IV.

with willing hands into the iron cars, long trains of which drawn by lines of mules were continually going in with timber and supplies or coming out with débris. And nearly all the time he could spare from other labor, Sutro was personally present, urging speed and representing that every ton of ore taken from the Comstock lode before the tunnel should be completed would be a loss to it of two dollars and in the aggregate, on account of the manner in which the bonanza mines were crowding their output, of very large sums of solid money. As a pusher of tunnel construction, he was something like Charles Crocker as a driver of railroad building; he threw off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and took right hold, wherever he could help, encourage or hasten the work. He did not hesitate to strip and go to the front. Flying dirt and smoke, heat and foul air, dripping slush overhead and sticky mud underfoot, had no terrors for him. went in with the grimy, half-naked miners; and, while he was with them, he was one of them—a man of immense will power, of extraordinary executive ability, the right sort of a man for the place and the labor while it lasted.

The chief difficulty in driving the tunnel was the heat, which steadily increased as the work progressed. In 1873 the underground temperature at the end of the bore was about 72° Fahrenheit; in 1874 it rose to about 83°; in 1876 to 90°; in 1877 to 96°; in April, 1878, to 109° and in May to 114°. Only a few hours of labor at a time could be performed by anybody under such circumstances. The lamps burned dimly, and strong men fainted at their work and had to be hurriedly carried out for recovery. The end of the tunnel was by that time advanced two miles from the nearest ventilation shaft; and, notwithstanding the use of the most powerful blowers to force fresh air into the bore, the heat was almost stifling. It was next to impossible to force the mules far enough in to connect with the last-filled cars; and it became evident that endurance had almost reached its limit. But the Comstock lode was now but a short distance off. By the end of June, the miners at the bottom of the Savage shaft began to hear the blasts of the approaching tunnel and in a few days afterwards the blows of the power drills. On July 8, 1878, when it was known that but a few feet remained to be

excavated, Sutro himself again pushed to the front; and, when a well-placed blast opened the first jagged hole into the Savage shaft, he was the first man to crawl through the opening. It was said that he was "overcome with excitement;" but it was rather with the heat and bad atmosphere, which, when the opening was made, rushed into the Savage shaft and shot upwards to the surface. The connection thus made at once established a natural current of ventilation; and thenceforth the temperature of the tunnel, as well as that of the Savage drifts, became much more tolerable.

No compromise had as yet been made with the recalcitrant managers of the chief Comstock mines; but in 1879 one of their main pumps broke down, and the accumulating water began to get the better of them and flood their lower levels. To avoid serious disaster, they turned the water into the tunnel, and the flow temporarily drove Sutro's men out. He at once commenced to construct a water-tight bulkhead to stop the current, force it back upon the mines and prevent any further ingress into the tunnel. This brought matters to a settlement; the mine owners knew their own interest sufficiently well to understand that they would have to yield; it was much cheaper to drain through the tunnel than to pump, and in a comparatively short time satisfactory arrangements were completed with all the companies on the lode. Laborers were then immediately put to work increasing the width and depth of the drain between Sutro's car tracks so as to carry off the water; and in a few years the annual flow through it rose to billions of gallons, and the Comstock mines were kept comparatively clear. Sutro had now attained his main purpose; he had accomplished the principal part of his great task, and his victory was assured. Subsequently the lateral tunnels under the chief mines of the lode, as originally contemplated, were completed-making the total length of the main bore and laterals thirty-three thousand three hundred and fifteen feet or about six and a third miles. The cost of the main tunnel had been about three and a half millions of dollars, or with the laterals about five millions.' But Sutro, in the meanwhile,

See on the subject of the Sutro Tunnel, besides newspaper accounts and pamphlets of the time, "The Story of the Mine," by Charles H. Shinn, New York, 1896, 194–208.

finding that the necessary costs of construction had compelled him to dispose of more than a controlling interest in his corporation and that the management was likely to pass into other hands, in whom he could not have as thorough confidence as in himself, made up his mind to sell out his stock-which he accordingly did, and at a good figure. He then returned to San Francisco with his millions; invested the greater part of them in city property, particularly outside lands; became the owner in a few years of at least one-tenth in area of the city and county territory, and one of the most public-spirited and widely-known men in California. Among other things he purchased the largest portion of the bare hills of the San Miguel rancho, which he named Mount Parnassus and planted into a magnificent forest. He also purchased the Cliff House property and laid out a charming garden known as Sutro Heights, which he threw open to the public. And in the course of time he constructed, in the cove near the Cliff House and opposite Seal Rocks, a bathing establishment. with immense tanks of pure and continually-changing ocean water, tempered to suit bathers and surrounded with almost numberless dressing rooms and tiers of seats, rising in rows one above the other, for many thousands of spectators. Between these tiers of seats, he built grand staircases flanked by terraces of the rarest and most beautiful plants; and on the sides he arranged long galleries of pictures, sculptures, tapestries, cabinets and objects of art of almost every description-presenting to the eye a panorama of great beauty; and the whole he covered in by a high and airy framework of steel and rounded roof of tinted glass, through which the sunlight penetrates and suffuses the interior scene with an exquisitely tempered glow It is perhaps the completest establishment of the kind the world has ever seen and in many respects outshines the imperial baths of ancient Rome.

In addition to the above mentioned and various other enterprises, a number of which have been given to the public, Sutro has been for years collecting in Europe and America an immense library, now amounting to upwards of two hundred thousand volumes and almost innumerable manuscripts, prints and papers, which it is understood will also in time, with a magnificent build