By the 1880s, Virginia City, together with Gold Hill and Silver City, was a bustling industrial mining community of about 25,000 people built around the Comstock Lode, the gold and silver deposits discovered in the spring of 1859 at the head of what later became Gold Canyon and named for Henry T.P. Comstock, who claimed ownership of the discovery site. The strike drew California miners back over the Sierras and helped create a place known as the “Richest Place on Earth,” with schools, churches, saloons, restaurants, hotels, grocers, butchers, jewelers, gun dealers, lumber yards, hardware stores, undertakers, stock brokers, newspapers, clothiers, photographers, builders, masons, brothels, and a railroad, all sustained by the mines and mills. Mining was run as a corporate enterprise dominated by the Bank of California or the partnership of John McKay, James Fair, James Flood, and William O’Brien, and from 1860 through 1910 the mines produced well over $400 million in gold and silver, attracting investors from the United States and Europe through stock exchanges linked by telegraph to San Francisco and onward to New York. Daily life was harsh: miners worked underground 12-hour shifts in temperatures up to 120 degrees without protective equipment, earning up to $4.00 per day, while many single men rented boarding-house rooms by the shift, meals at small restaurants cost about .25 cents, and death came early from pneumonia, TB, cholera, and mining and industrial accidents despite the presence of two hospitals, many doctors, and many lawyers. The city was noisy, dirty, muddy, crowded with wagons, horses, people, and mules, and shaken by mill pounding and underground explosions, while food, clothing, hardware, furniture, alcohol, and other goods arrived first by freighting and stage lines and later by the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, completed in 1869 from Carson City to Virginia City and later extended to Reno and south to Minden. Connected with the Central Pacific in Reno, the railroad lowered ore-hauling costs, carried freight and passengers, linked the Comstock to the rest of the country, and helped move lumber, coal, machinery, and luxury goods into a district where mines, mills, homes, and businesses stood side by side. The mining system depended on vast amounts of timber, complex milling equipment, and large pumps removing millions of gallons of water from shafts as deep as 3,000 feet, and although Virginia City became the most important and productive mining camp in the world, its fortunes rose and fell with the mines as hundreds of companies operated or claimed to operate there and San Francisco investors held far more stock in Comstock mines than in California mines.