Between 1859 and 1926, the Comstock Lode in western Nevada gave up close to 200 million ounces of silver and 8 million ounces of gold. It was America’s first great silver strike — the bonanza that launched the nation’s silver industry, helped build San Francisco, and carried Nevada to statehood in 1864. The veins ran absurdly rich: around 35 grams of gold and more than 700 grams of silver to the tonne, among the highest grades the United States has ever mined.
Almost all of it came out in the 1800s. Men sank shafts and chased the veins by candlelight, pulling one of the great fortunes in American history out of the ground with no drilling and none of the tools a modern geologist would call standard.
Then the district went quiet — and stayed that way. Not for lack of promise, in Nevada, the most-drilled gold address on earth. It stayed off-limits to modern explorers for a duller reason: you couldn’t buy it.
The Comstock was staked before the mining laws of 1872, and it splintered into hundreds of tiny claims spread across dozens of owners — estates, feuding heirs, holdouts. You can’t explore a vein system that big one postage-stamp claim at a time, because you never know which way the ore runs.
That’s the puzzle MacKay Gold & Silver (TSXV: MACK, OTCQB: MKGSF) spent roughly a year quietly solving — buying the ground up, deal by deal, mostly while still private. The company doesn’t hold a few good claims in the district; it controls the district. With about US$62 million in the bank and a 20,000-metre program starting in mid-June, MacKay is about to send modern drills into ground the old-timers could only reach by candlelight.
All of which it carried into the latest Doug Casey Experts Roundtable. This is a great story with excellent management, lots of capital, and a mining address investors crave.
Brent Cook has built a career out of finding the fatal flaw in mining stories. So when he opened his questions for MacKay Gold & Silver’s CEO at the latest Doug Casey Experts Roundtable, his admission was telling: “I’d love to pick this apart, but I’m having a hard time. I wish I could pick it apart, but right now I can’t.”
That set the tone for the whole table. Doug Casey called it a “great presentation” and announced he was a buyer — “as I look at the chart as a potential buyer, which I am, it looks like it’s attractively priced.” Ed Bugos ran the company through his five-point screen — capital, people, structure, story, value — and reported that it passed every one. Lawrence Roulston, who tried to assemble this exact ground himself back in the 1980s and couldn’t, praised “the remarkable job you’ve done in putting that much ground together” and added that “people really believe in what you’re doing.” Both Brien Lundin and Dominic Frisby disclosed they were already shareholders.
When a panel this seasoned and this allergic to hype spends an hour mostly nodding, it’s worth understanding why.
A district nobody could buy — until now
MacKay (TSXV: MACK, OTCQB: MKGSF) is named for John Mackay, the dirt-poor Irish immigrant who sold newspapers as a boy, walked over the Sierras into the silver rush, and became one of the richest men in America on the back of the Comstock. The University of Nevada’s Mackay School of Mines carries his name. The company is betting his old ground still has a great deal left to give.
The district was staked before the mining laws of 1872, leaving hundreds of tiny claims scattered across dozens of owners — grandfathers’ estates, feuding cousins, holdouts convinced they owned a piece of the richest square mile on the planet.
MacKay spent roughly a year, mostly while still private, doing the unglamorous work of buying it up — deal by deal, relationship by relationship. CEO Darwin Green’s line is that the company doesn’t merely hold a district-scale position; it controls a district. That distinction is the whole thesis.
Where the first holes go
The near-term focus isn’t even the famous main lode. It’s the parallel Occidental–Brunswick structure running alongside it — same orientation, same length, but sitting higher up in the system. In these epithermal deposits (the kind formed by hot mineral-rich fluids near surface), the rich pay zone tends to sit at a particular depth. The chemistry on the Occidental — more calcite, a lower gold-to-silver ratio — suggests MacKay is looking at the top of the system, with the bonanza zone that defined the Comstock still sitting below, untested.
How untested? No hole on the Occidental’s length has ever gone deeper than about 300 feet. The single deep data point is a drainage tunnel the old-timers drove in the 1870s, which happened to cut the vein some 1,500 feet down and found it more than 100 feet wide and still alive. Green says he almost doesn’t care what grade that interval ran. The point is the structure is robust at depth, and no one has drilled it.
Chen Lin summarized the setup as cleanly as anyone: “They’re fully capitalized, they just need to drill and hit, and especially they’ve already seen the structure in the tunnel, so drilling should be relatively low risk.”
A fully funded 20,000-metre program kicks off in mid-June. The bulk of it is faster, cheaper reverse-circulation drilling on shallow, high-grade oxide gold near surface, where existing holes have already returned widths like 25 metres of about 13.5 grams. A core rig follows in mid-summer to test the deep Occidental near that old tunnel cut. Green’s near-term marker — explicitly not the end game — is the possibility of outlining one to two million ounces over the next year. The end game he’ll actually say out loud is bigger: the kind of multi-million-ounce district a Newmont or an AngloGold writes a large check for.
“A feeding frenzy”
Here’s the part that genuinely surprised the room. MacKay came to market in March looking for thirty to forty million dollars. It got more than a hundred million in interest and settled on a US$60 million raise at C$1.40 — and still cut most participants back by about half.
Brien Lundin, who has watched financings for decades, didn’t hedge: “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that much demand for a new financing or a new company coming online. It was really remarkable.” Later he put it more plainly — “it was really a feeding frenzy.” Ed Bugos echoed it: “That financing is huge. I wonder if I’ve ever seen anything like that coming out of the gate. Investors will look at it as quite an endorsement.”
The result is a balance sheet most explorers can only dream about: roughly US$62 million in the bank, about 85 million shares out, essentially no warrants, and no four-month lock-up wall waiting to dump stock into the market. Green says he doesn’t expect to go back to investors until MacKay is a five-dollar stock. With that treasury, he can drill, see results, drill again, and keep consolidating ground without rattling the cup.
The people spending it have done this before. Green built and sold HighGold Mining and founded Onyx Gold, where a new discovery is taking shape. His first two hires were among the best Nevada explorers going — Jeff Pontius, of Corvus Gold (sold to AngloGold), and Moira Smith, of the Long Canyon discovery (sold to Newmont). As Lundin noted, Green “has told a lot of good stories over the years, and all those stories have been good.” Frisby’s read on him as a communicator: “very articulate, very personable, very charming — and there’s a whole district there, and Nevada’s about as good as it gets.”
The catch worth keeping in mind
This is an exploration bet, and the central question is the one Chen Lin named: is the Occidental a one-to-two gram story, or a four-to-five gram story? Nobody knows until the assays come back. The Occidental, the focus of initial drilling, has no resource on it yet. The historical production and the century-old estimate on the main lode are exactly that — historical, not bankable ounces. Not yet.
What the panel clearly liked was the asymmetry. The downside is well-capitalized and patient; the upside is a genuinely rare thing — a consolidated, proven district in the best jurisdiction in the country, run by people who’ve sold companies before, and drilling in Comstock for the first time with modern tools.
The stock has drifted lower since its launch, into what Cook expects to be a soft summer for the sector. His parting line doubled as the table’s quiet consensus: “It’s a good time to pick some up. It’s a great exploration play.”
First assays are expected around late summer. After that, the drilling does the talking.
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Disclaimer: The company has paid a fee for the opportunity to sit in the ‘hot seat’ and present their story to our panel of experts; however, the opinions, analysis, and verdicts expressed by the expert panel are entirely their own, independent, and unfiltered. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Investing in junior mining stocks is speculative and carries a high degree of risk. Please conduct your own due diligence and consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
