This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,

and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts

to sports and from business to history and everything in between, including your stories.

Send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites.

In the annals of American capitalism, there is probably no crazier, wilder, more chaotic boom

to bust and back-again phenomenon than

the Comstock load in the 1860s. The richest couple of square miles on earth. This small

section of dirt changed the destiny of the United States. Here to tell this rags to Rich's

frontier tale is Old West historian Roger McGrath. Here's Roger.

If ever there were real-life figures who could have been characters in a Horatio Alger novel,

it was the Silver Kings. John Mackey, James Fair, William O'Brien, and James Flood

epitomized the rags to riches American dream.

John McEugh is the engineering genius of the Silver Kings.

Born in Ireland in 1831, immigrates with his family to New York in 1840.

He reaches the California Goldfields in 1851. He enjoys hard physical work and mining camp life.

He has almost no formal education and had stuttered badly when young, but he is blessed with extraordinary intelligence.

James Fier is a mine superintendent without peer and a shrewd financier.

Born in Ireland in 1831, he immigrates with his family to Illinois during the early 1840s.

He has enormous energy, a trenchant mind, and a natural aptitude for all things mechanical.

He joins the gold rush to California in 1849.

William O'Brien is born in Ireland in 1826 and brought to New York as a small child.

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