Eilley, Queen of the Comstock

A twelve-episode limited historical drama

Based on the true life of Eilley Orrum Bowers.

We meet Eilley at fifteen, on a hill above Forfar, Scotland. Below her is the farm where her mother and her mother's mother spent their whole lives. If she stays, it will be her life too.

Then missionaries arrive from America, talking about a new world where your past doesn't decide your future. Eilley sees an opportunity. That is Eilley's gift. She sees opportunity where other people don't.

Four movements

1. The Want

   Episodes 1–2

   A crofter's daughter, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, crosses an ocean and joins the migration west. When her husband brings two young wives into their home, she refuses the life being prescribed for her.

2. The Build

   Episodes 3–8

   A wash pot by the creek in a mining camp. Claims taken in place of rent due, worthless paper to everyone but Eilley. One neighbors Sandy Bowers' claim, and together their ground is one of the richest shallow silver claims. Their mansion rises. The Grand Tour to Europe. New world, new money, and the doors of society stay closed.

3. The Loss

   Episodes 9–10

   Two babies buried. Sandy. The mine. Persia. Then the mansion.

4. The Standing

   Episodes 11–12

   The woman with second sight becomes the Seeress of Washoe. Late in her life, a fifteen-year-old girl sits down across from Eilley and asks the question whose answer Eilley knows all too well.

Two rooms

In one room, cigar smoke and whiskey. George Hearst, William Sharon and the Bonanza Kings lean over the maps, carving up the mines, the land and the water. Deals made on a handshake, broken on a mortgage. Sandy has a chair at that table.

In the other room, the women. Teacups, gossip, who was received and who was not. That is where Eilley is expected to stay. The door between the rooms stays shut.

Then Sandy dies.

Now the men are in her hall, hats in hand, waiting to claim what she worked for and fought for.

To keep it, Eilley has to walk into their room alone.

Second sight

She sees value in discarded things. She sees silver in rock other people throw away. She reads people.

But she cannot see herself.

The West has been mythologized through the men who built fortunes there. This is the story of one of the women who built it, and what building it made of her.

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