How Men Dug the Comstock Lode 1,000 Feet Underground Without Electricity

In 1870, a man named Thomas Doyle dropped 900 feet into the Nevada earth in a steel cage no bigger than a closet. At the bottom, the rock walls were 112 degrees. He had four hours before the heat would kill him. Then he went back down. This is the story of the Comstock Lode — the richest silver deposit ever found in North America, the mine that built San Francisco, funded the transcontinental railroad, and made Nevada a state. Between 1859 and 1880, it produced $400 million in silver and gold. The men who dug it out of solid rock received $4 a day, a ration of bad air, and no protection against the disease that followed them home. I pulled these names from the Nevada State Archives, from burial registers and payroll ledgers and inquest records. Most of them never made it into any history book. This video is for them. Subscribe to Forgotten Labor for more stories about the men who built this country with their hands — the ones nobody wrote a book about. #CombstockLode #MiningHistory #AmericanHistory #ForgottenHistory #LaborHistory #Nevada #VirginiaCity #IrishAmericans #GlobalOldHistory #UntoldHistory