RENO, Nev. — Brothers Hosea and Ethan Allen Grosh were jubilant after they discovered a “monster ledge” of silver in the parched mountains of present-day Nevada in the summer of 1857.
The sibling prospectors never prospered from the find, however.
In fact, both went to early graves without realizing they were on the verge of finding one of the world’s greatest bonanzas: a massive, underground pocket of silver and gold known as the Comstock Lode, about 20 miles southeast of Reno.
But their sad story has a new and brighter final chapter now.
Historians say the real treasure trove is more than 80 letters, recently acquired by the Nevada Historical Society, that the brothers wrote from Nevada and California mining camps from 1849 to 1857.
The letters are among the most important Gold Rush-era documents to surface in modern times because of their detail about life on the rough-and-tumble frontier, said Fred Holabird, president of Reno-based Holabird-Kagin Americana, one of the country’s largest sellers of Western Americana.
“In quality and content, those letters rank among the very best for telling what life was like back then. It wasn’t for the weak-hearted or the weak-bodied,” Holabird said.
A century and a half later, the correspondence also documents the tragedies of two devoted, hardworking brothers who experienced the worst luck.
The sons of a Universalist minister in Marietta, Pa., the Grosh brothers arrived by ship in San Francisco in 1849 to find a tent city “growing like a mushroom,” full of grog shops and gamblers.
But they faced problems from the start in the West, suffering from dysentery soon after arriving. Both were ill off and on until the end eight years later. Like most 19th-century prospectors, they endured hardship and continual setbacks and never struck it rich.
“We have done very — very — bad this winter. Bad luck is at our fingers’ end . . . The gold seems to vanish — it’s not ‘thar,’ ” Ethan Grosh wrote in 1855.
A year later the brothers expressed more optimism.
“By February we will probably have either our certain fortune, or make a complete failure. Things look very bright & promising,” they wrote.
But just when their hopes were highest, Hosea Grosh died in September 1857 of an infection after striking his foot with a pick near present-day Virginia City. That winter, his brother died near Auburn, Calif., of complications of frostbite after being caught in a Sierra Nevada snowstorm. Hosea Grosh was 31 and his brother 33.
Charles Wegman of Haskell, N.J., a great-great-great-grandson of the Groshes’ brother, Warren, stunned historians by disclosing the letters’ existence in 1997. In April, the Nevada Historical Society celebrated the end of a 10-year fundraising effort to purchase them, paying $210,000.
Kenneth Owens, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, Sacramento, said it’s extremely rare for historical documents to turn up after so long.
“I can’t think of a collection of letters from the Gold Rush era that large and detailed,” he said. “They are really exceptional.”
Historians think the Grosh brothers struck silver on a branch of the Comstock Lode, though their deaths prevented them from cashing in. Their find was a precursor of other discoveries that led to the main lode in 1859, said Guy Rocha, Nevada’s state archivist.
The Comstock Lode has yielded 9 million ounces of gold and 220 million ounces of silver, worth about $12 billion in today’s prices.
A detail in the report of Hosea Grosh’s final days gives the correspondence another significance.
The letter mentions the treatment of his infected foot with a “cow-dung poultice” — a compress using fresh manure that some doctors then thought would draw out poisons from a wound. The poultice represents the first known treatment by a doctor in Nevada, said Dr. Anton Sohn, founder of the history of medicine program at the University of Nevada Medical School.
“That episode alone was an incredible addition to our knowledge of how people were treated back then,” Sohn said, noting that bacteria’s role in disease was still unknown.
Wegman said he could have offered the letters to Eastern universities, but he wanted them to go “home” to make them more accessible to scholars. The Nevada Historical Society plans to publish them.
“This is my family’s legacy,” said Wegman, a graphic artist for a label printer. “These brothers worked so hard for so little return and to end up in such a Greek tragedy, it’s just absolutely amazing to me.”
