The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft
on it, bought a wagon load of rich “Comstock”
ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and piled
the rest by its side, above ground. Then he showed
the property to a simpleton and sold it to him at
a high figure. Of course the wagon load of rich
ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase.
A most remarkable case of “salting” was
that of the “North Ophir.” It was
claimed that this vein was a “remote extension”
of the original “Ophir,” a valuable mine
on the “Comstock.” For a few days
everybody was talking about the rich developments
in the North Ophir. It was said that it yielded
perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps.
I went to the place with the owners, and found a shaft
six or eight feet deep, in the bottom of which was
a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish, unpromising
rock. One would as soon expect to find silver
in a grindstone. We got out a pan of the rubbish
and washed it in a puddle, and sure enough, among
the sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet-looking
pellets of unimpeachable “native” silver.
Nobody had ever heard of such a thing before; science
could not account for such a queer novelty.
The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at
this figure the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan,
bought a commanding interest and prepared to quit
the stage once more—he was always doing
that. And then it transpired that the mine had
been “salted”—and not in any
hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced
and peculiarly original and outrageous fashion.
On one of the lumps of “native” silver
was discovered the minted legend, “Ted states
of,” and then it was plainly apparent that
the mine had been “salted” with melted
half-dollars! The lumps thus obtained had been
blackened till they resembled native silver, and were
then mixed with the shattered rock in the bottom of
the shaft. It is literally true. Of course
the price of the stock at once fell to nothing, and
the tragedian was ruined. But for this calamity
we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.
The “flush times” held bravely on.
Something over two years before, Mr.
Goodman and
another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars
and set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes
in the new city of Virginia. They found the
Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken weekly
journal, gasping for breath and likely to die.
They bought it, type, fixtures, good-will and all,
for a thousand dollars, on long time. The editorial
sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office,
bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed
into one apartment and it was a small one, too.
The editors and printers slept on the floor, a Chinaman
did their cooking, and the “imposing-stone”
was the general dinner table. But now things
were changed. The paper was a great daily, printed
