Mackay’s first great success occurred when he and three partners purchased the majority stake in an obscure mine called the Kentuck. He invested every penny of his meticulous savings from the previous seven years of hard labor. After six months of mining the Kentuck with no luck and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, he and his workforce on New Year’s Day 1866, “hacked into a ten-foot wide mass of sugary, gold-and-silver-infused quartz at the bottom of the Kentuck’s mineshaft, 250 feet below the surface. Over the next two years, Mackay mined more than $1.6 million worth of gold and silver from the tiny Kentuck (a sum that in those days had an emotional impact roughly equivalent to $375 million modern dollars). During that time the Kentuck paid $592 to its stockholders, a 37% yield – a substantial portion of which went straight into Mackay’s pocket.”
With continued financial success from the Kentuck, Mackay’s appetite for mining did not wane. His most massive mining successes happened in 1874 and 1875 when he and his three partners scored what became known as, “the Big Bonanza,” a strike more than 1,500 feet below the surface in two mines in the Comstock’s neighboring Consolidated Virginia and California mines. According to the article in Smithsonian, “That ore body still holds the record as the most concentrated in history and it made John Mackay one of the wealthiest men in the world. His share of profits ran between $20 and $25 million, around $50 billion when measured as a share of the GDP of the modern United States.”
The only people in the world at that time with a monthly income anywhere near that of Mackay were his three junior partners in the company they appropriately named The Bonanza Firm. Their company had a cash income of between $1.2 and $1.5 million per month. At the time, the Spirit of the Times declared that The Bonanza Firm was, “the wealthiest firm in America and prospectively the richest in the world.”
Throughout his hard work as a youngster to his seven unsuccessful years of hard labor in the mines and then in his immense success in his adulthood, John Mackay refused to let his
stuttering define him. It was obvious to all who knew him at the various stages in his life that he was most definitely not going to let stuttering stand in the way of his ambitions.
In his 2018 biography The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West, author Gregory Crouch addresses Mackay’s stuttering several times. He wrote, “Mackay found the pleasure in hardship. He didn’t say much, and when he did, he spoke slowly fighting a childhood stutter. Mackay was proud, touchy and quick with his fists. He would share his last morsel of food with a friend, but nobody ever took anything from John Mackay without a fight.”
When discussing how Mackay rose from day laborer to one of the world’s richest men, Crouch wrote, “A taciturn lad who spoke slowly and awkwardly, fighting a stutter, he’d regret his lack of formal education for the rest of his life.”
“Although a socially reticent man embarrassed by his struggles to overcome his stutter, Mackay showed no reluctance to push himself forward through sustained physical effort…. Mackay didn’t talk much, and when he did, he spoke in methodical measured tones, still fighting his embarrassing stutter, his uniquely American argot a mix of New York, California mining slang, and ‘rich Irish burr’.”
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