Virginia City became the first industrial city in the West when, in 1859, Peter O'Reilly and Patrick McLaughlin discovered gold in Six-Mile Canyon. HTP Comstock cut himself in on the deal claiming the discovery was made on his property. After the discovery was made public in 1859, prospectors rushed to the area, and mining camps in the vicinity, including Virginia City. Miner James Finney is said to have christened the newly-found tent-and-dugout town on the slopes of Mt. Davidson "Old Virginny Town," in honor of himself and his birthplace. One of the biggest problems in this new "tent town" was the sticky, blue-gray mud that clung to picks and shovels. But when the pesky mud was assayed, it proved to be silver ore worth over $2,000 a ton in 1859 dollars! The rich deposits of gold and high-quality silver ore turned Virginny Town to Virginia City, the most important settlement between Denver and San Francisco. They also prompted President Abe Lincoln to make Nevada a state in 1864. Although it did not contain enough people to constitutionally authorize statehood he needed the Comstock to secure enough electoral votes to win the 1864 election. With the gold and silver boom came the building of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, which ran from Reno to Carson City to Virginia City, and later to Minden. Investments made in mining on the Comstock from the 1860s through the 1880s financed the building of San Francisco, 200 miles west. William Ralston and William Sharon, founders of the Bank of California, made their first fortunes in Virginia City as did the likes of George Hearst, John Mackay and William Flood. At the peak of its glory, Virginia City was a raucous town with something going on 24 hours a day both above and below ground for its nearly 30,000 residents. There were visiting celebrities, Shakespearean theater, opium dens, 2 newspapers, competing fire companies, fraternal organizations, at least five police precincts, a thriving red light district, and the first Miner's Union in the U.S. The International Hotel was six stories high and boasted the West's first elevator, called the "rising room." Among the notable residents were Mark Twain and Dan DeQuille, who both wrote for the Territorial Enterprise, Nevada's first newspaper. A devastating fire nearly obliterated Virginia City in 1875, destroying over 2,000 structures, but the town rebuilt itself in just a year. Many of the buildings standing today date back to that time. The Comstock Lode yielded more than $400 million in gold and silver and remains the richest known U.S. silver deposit. After 1878 the mines eventually played out and the last of the great Cornish pumps ceased to operate in October of 1886. The mines quickly flooded and most operations ceased.