‘Things look very bright & promising’

Brothers Hosea and Ethan Allen Grosh were the sons of a Universalist minister in Marietta, Pa. Like many other young men of that era, they left home in 1849, hoping to strike it rich in the California gold diggings.

Arriving in San Francisco by ship, they found a tent city "growing like a mushroom," full of taverns and gambling dens.

Like most 19th century prospectors, they endured hardship and never struck it rich. "We have done very -- very -- bad this winter," Ethan Grosh wrote home in 1855. "Bad luck is at our fingers' end ... The gold seems to vanish -- it's not 'thar.' " Oh, they came close. They even made it through the vital paradigm shift required of most prospectors working their way east into what is now Northern Nevada. In 1856, they wrote home that, "By February we will probably have either our certain fortune, or make a complete failure. Things look very bright & promising."

They had found their way to the mountains 20 miles southeast of Reno, where they were jubilant to discover, in the summer of 1857, not gold, but a "monster ledge" of silver.

Then tragedy struck.

Hosea Grosh, 31, died in September 1857 of an infection after striking his foot with a pick near present-day Virginia City.

"I take up my pen with a heavy heart, for I have sad news to send you," Ethan Allen Grosh wrote to his father on Sept. 7, 1857. "God has seen fit in his perfect wisdom & goodness to call Hosea, the patient, the good, the gentle to join his Mother in another & a better world."

That winter, Ethan himself died near Auburn, Calif., of complications of frostbite after being caught in a Sierra Nevada snowstorm. Hosea Grosh had been 31; Ethan was 33.

The brothers never survived to hear the silver ledge they'd discovered named part of "the Comstock Lode" -- one of the greatest bonanzas in history.

The Grosh brothers never sent any ore to a smelter. Their efforts went for naught. They died, leaving future generations of their family nothing of value ...

Or did they?

There was another Grosh brother, Warren. He kept their letters, which remained in the family, passed from generation to generation. The letters survived two structure fires, a century apart. Though they were protected in metal boxes, the heat singed portions of most letters and destroyed a few lines in some.

Finally, in 1997, Charles Wegman of Haskell, N.J. -- a great-great-great grandson of the Groshes' brother, Warren -- stunned historians by disclosing the letters' existence.

And that cache of more than 80 letters, it turns out, was the brothers' real treasure trove.

"I can't think of a collection of letters from the Gold Rush era that large and detailed," comments Kenneth Owens, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, Sacramento. "They are really exceptional."

The letters are among the most important Gold Rush-era documents to surface in modern times because of their rich detail about life on the rough-and-tumble frontier, explains Fred Holabird, owner of Reno-based Holabird-Kagin Americana, one of the country's largest auction houses of Western Americana.

Their silver find was a precursor of other discoveries that led to the main lode in 1859, Guy Rocha, Nevada's state archivist, told The Associated Press.

"Their discovery suggested that perhaps there was even more mineral riches than anyone had thought in the area. They alerted other miners that there was more than gold in the area."

But more important is the wealth of detail about living conditions and even medical practices in the pre-Civil War West.

The letter collection was appraised in 1998 with a value of $228,000.

Mr. Wegman said he wanted them to go "home" to an institution that would make them more accessible to scholars. The Nevada Historical Society began a 10-year fundraising effort, finally purchasing the letters in April of this year for $210,000 -- somewhat below their appraised value. The society plans to publish them.

The Historical Society can be rightly proud that their patient fundraising efforts have paid off. The Grosh brothers' legacy has indeed "come home" to the land they helped pioneer, a fitting legacy not just for them but for all the other hearty souls who quite literally risked life and limb to open up this wild and arid country.