Twelve Feet from Fortune
The most told Plaskett story of all: the Nevada silver tunnel sold twelve feet short of the Comstock Lode.
It is the most told Plaskett story of all — the one every branch of the family knows.
William Lucas Plaskett and his partner were working a silver claim in Nevada. The tunneling grew hard; the rock showed no color; nothing was in sight but more mountain. Discouraged, the partners sold out and came home to California.
A short time later they learned the truth: they had stopped digging just twelve feet from the Comstock Lode — one of the richest silver strikes in American history. The Comstock would go on to yield more than $400 million in silver and gold, billions in today’s money. Had the pick swung a few more days, the Plasketts might have been among the wealthiest families in California.
Instead, William Lucas turned to the Big Sur coast, claimed a valley between the mountains and the sea, and built the life this whole site remembers. The family record says he never spoke bitterly about it. The frontier had taught him that fortune was fickle — and that a man made his own luck with work, not with twelve more feet of tunnel.
Whether the measurement was ever really taken, or whether twelve feet is simply the exact distance at which a family legend hurts the most, is a question best left to the storytellers. It has been twelve feet for a hundred and fifty years, and twelve feet it will remain.