“Games, Sports and What-Not”: Regulation of Leisure and the Production of Social Identities in Nineteenth Century America

At age 49, Adolph Sutro returned to his adopted home of San Francisco, astride a wave of popular and economic success. A Jewish-Prussian immigrant in 1850, Sutro had used his powerful rhetorical skills, and European background as a mechanical engineer, to convince the US Congressional Mines and Mining Committee to underwrite his company's construction of a drainage and ventilation tunnel under the famed Comstock Lode of the Nevada silver fields. As the Sutro Tunnel Act of 1866 required all mines along the Comstock to pay improvement royalties to the tunnel owner, Sutro rapidly found himself in the heroic role of the self-made minefield millionaire.