People/magnate, miner

John Mackay

John Mackay (1831–1902), magnate, miner, from Ireland. Linked to silver, gold.

The lucky break

Worked from common miner to partner in the Big Bonanza. The Kentuck mine alone yielded 3641062 dollars in three years.1,2

Legacy

Workers praised his daily visits underground in miner's clothes. Mackay School of Mines at Reno carries his name.1,2

Story cards

Drag to turn the globe

Where next

People

Partner ofJames FairFair followed a thin vein and found a bonanza worth over 60 million dollars.3

Mines

OwnedComstock LodeA Dublin-born miner who ended up among the richest people in the world.1

Sources

  1. John William Mackay Online Nevada Encyclopedia (Nevada Humanities)
  2. File pages and licence metadata for portraits (via the Commons imageinfo/extmetadata API) Wikimedia Commons
  3. Big Bonanza Online Nevada Encyclopedia

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Pictures: South Africa: a crowd of people gathered outside The Goldfields offices in Johannesburg. 1896., Unknown (Wellcome Collection) (Public Domain Mark 1.0); Falu gruva, Lundberg, Bengt A / Europeana (CC0 1.0); Gold prospectors constructing a long box with a filter for panning gold. Process print after H.M. Paget, 1899., Henry Marriott Paget (Public Domain Mark 1.0); Pangkalpinang. Mijn 3b. Een reeks koelies bezig met het transporteeren van grond, Europeana (Public Domain Mark 1.0).