A RACE OF GAMBLERS
Prior to the birth of Rawhide I had for seven years catered to the speculative (gambling) instinct of the American public, chiefly in building mining camps and financing mining enterprises. I now realized that in order to make a success of the undertaking before me, namely, to put the new camp of Rawhide on the investment map, I must again appeal loudly to the country's gambling instinct.
Maybe you think, dear reader, that a man who caters to the gambling instinct of his fellow men, be his intentions honest or dishonest, is a highly immoral person. Is he?
Do you know that the gambling instinct is responsible for the wonderful growth of the mining industry in the United States? Would you believe that without the gambling instinct the development of the great natural resources of this country would be almost impossible?
With rare exceptions every successful mining enterprise in the United States has been financed in the past by appealing directly to the gambling instinct. In the decade antedating this year considerably more than a billion dollars was raised and invested in this way.
Conservative investors who are satisfied with from three to six per cent. on their money do not buy mines or mining stocks. Speculators (gamblers) who are willing to risk part of their fortune in the hope of gaining fivefold or more in a year or a few years—these are the kind who invest in mines and mining stocks.
There are legions of these. Not less than 500,000 men and women in the United States, according to the best statistical information obtainable, are stockholders of mining companies.
In fact, the gambling instinct finds employment in the mining industry long before a property has reached the stage where it can be classed as even a prospect worthy of exploration. The prospector who follows his burro into the mountain fastnesses or across the desert wastes often gambles his very life against the success of his search; those who grub-stake him gamble their money.
The gambling instinct seems bound to continue to play an important rôle in the mining industry for all time, or until either the fortune-hunting instincts of man are eradicated or all the treasures of the world shall have been mined.
Now, if the practice of catering to the gambling instinct is baneful, I'm a malefactor. So, too, would then be such lofty-pinnacled financiers as Messrs. Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, the Guggenheims and others. My own thought is that it is custom and the times which are responsible for the maintenance of the great game, and not individuals.
The truth is, we are a race of gamblers and we allow the captains of industry to deal the game for us.
Next to money and political power, publicity is recognized by all "doers" as the most powerful lever to accomplish big things. Not infrequently publicity will accomplish what neither money nor political power can. Generally, publicity can be secured and controlled by either money or political power.
When Rawhide was born I had neither money nor political power. The camp needed publicity. I had nothing to secure publicity with but my wit. I promptly requisitioned what wit I had, and used all of it.
There is an important difference between owning a series of excellent gold-mine prospects, which have tremendous speculative possibilities, and the public recognizing them to be such. It is one thing for a manufacturer to be himself assured that his article is a better product for the money than that of his competitor. It is another thing for the consumer to be convinced. Therein lies the value of organized publicity.
To focus the attention of the great American investing public on the camp of Rawhide was the proposition before me. How was this to be accomplished? Display advertising in the newspapers is costly and requires large capital; the purchase of reading notices in publications which accept that class of business, even more so.
One major fact stood out from my early experience as a publicity agent in Goldfield. Few news editors have the heart to consign good copy to the waste-paper basket, particularly if it contains nothing which might cause a come-back.
I resolved to "press-agent" the camp.
CHAPTER VIII
The Press Agent and the Public's Money
Probably the most scientifically press-agented camp in Nevada had been Bullfrog. Bullfrog was born two years after Goldfield. The Goldfield publicity bureau by this time had greatly improved its art and its efficiency.
When the Bullfrog boom was still young the late United States Senator Stewart, an octogenarian and out of a job, traveled from Washington, at the expiration of his term, to the Bullfrog camp. There he hung out his shingle as a practising lawyer. Immediately the press bureau secured a cabinet photo of the venerable lawmaker and composed a story about his fresh start in life on the desert. The yarn appealed so strongly to Sunday editors of the great city dailies throughout the country that Bullfrog secured for nothing scores of pages of priceless advertising in the news columns.
The Senator built a home, the story said, on a spot where, less than a year before, desert wayfarers had died of thirst and coyotes roamed. The interior of the house on the desert was minutely described. Olive-colored chintz curtains protected the bearded patriarch, while at work in his study, from the burning rays of the sun. Old Florentine cabinets, costly Byzantine vases, and matchless specimens of Sèvres, filled his living-rooms. Silk Persian rugs an inch thick decked the floors. Venetian-framed miniature paintings of former Presidents of the United States and champions of liberty of bygone days graced the walls. Costly bronzes and marble statuettes were strewn about in profusion. Visitors could not help deducing that the Senator thought nothing too good for his desert habitat. The name of Bullfrog exuded from every paragraph of the story; also the name of a mine at the approach to which this desert mansion was reared and in the exploitation of which the press-agent had a selfish interest.
The remarkable part of this tale, which was printed with pictures of the Senator in one metropolitan newspaper of great circulation and prestige to the extent of a full page on a Sunday and was syndicated by it to a score of others, was that the only truth contained in it happened to be the fact that the Senator had decided to make Bullfrog his home with a view to working up a law practise. But it was a good story from the Bullfrog press-agent's standpoint and from that of the Sunday editor, and even the Senator did not blink at it. He recognized it as camp "publicity" of the highest efficiency, as did other residents of Bullfrog.
During the Manhattan boom, which followed that of Bullfrog, the publicity bureau became more ambitious. It made a drive at the news columns of the metropolitan press on week days, and succeeded.
At that time the Sullivan Trust Company of Goldfield was promoting the Jumping Jack-Manhattan mining Company. James Hopper, the gifted magazinist, wrote a story in which the names "Jumping Jack" and "Sullivan Trust Company" appeared in almost every other line. It was forwarded by mail to a great daily newspaper of New York and promptly published as news. The yarn told how the man in charge of the gasoline engine at the mouth of the Jumping Jack shaft had gone stark mad while at work and how but for the quick intervention of the president of the Sullivan Trust Company, who happened to be on the ground, a tragedy might well have been the result.
The miner, the story said, stepped into the bucket at the head of the shaft and asked the man in the engine-house to lower him to a depth of 300 feet. Quick as a flash the bucket was let down. When the 200-foot point was reached there was a sudden stop. With a rattle and a roar the bucket was jerked back to within 50 feet of the surface. Thereupon it was again lowered and quickly raised again, and the operation constantly repeated until the poor miner became unconscious and fell in a jangled mass to the bottom of the bucket.
Hearing the miner's early cries, Mr. Sullivan had gone to the rescue. He knocked senseless the man in the engine-house and pinioned him. Then he brought up the bucket containing the almost inanimate form of the miner.
Turning to the demon in charge of the engine, who had now recovered consciousness, Mr. Sullivan cried,
"How dare you do a thing like this?"
The man responded, "His name is Jack, ain't it?"
"Well, what of it?" roared Mr. Sullivan.
"Oh, I was just jumping the jack!" chuckled the "madman."
This nursery tale was conspicuously printed in a high-class New York newspaper's columns as real news. Undoubtedly the reason why the editors allowed it to pass was that it was believed to be true, but above all was cleverly written.
I was too busy during the early part of the Rawhide boom to do any writing of consequence or even to suggest particular subjects for stories. It seemed to me that the exciting events of every-day occurrence during the progress of the mad rush would furnish the correspondents with enough matter to keep the news-pot constantly boiling. I assembled around me the shining lights of the Reno newspaper fraternity and put them on the pay-roll.
For weeks an average of at least one column of exciting Rawhide stampede news was published on the front pages of the big Coast dailies. The publicity campaign went merrily on. I kept close watch on the character of the news that was being sent out and was pleased in contemplating the fact that very little false coloring, if any, was resorted to. A boisterous mining-camp stampede, second only in intensity to the Klondike excitement of eleven years before, was in progress, and there was plenty of live news to chronicle almost every day.
After returning from one of my trips to Rawhide I became alarmed on reading on the front page of the leading San Francisco newspapers a harrowing two-column story about the manner in which Ed. Hoffman, mine superintendent of the Rawhide Coalition, had been waylaid the day before on a dark desert road and robbed of $10,000 in gold which he was carrying to the mines for the purpose of discharging the pay-roll.
I had just left Mr. Hoffman in Rawhide and he had not been waylaid.
I sent for the man who was responsible for the story.
"Say, Jim," I said, "you're crazy. There is a come-back to that yarn that will cost you your job as correspondent for your San Francisco paper. It is rough work. Cut it out!"
"Gee whillikins!" he replied. "How can I? Here's an order for a two-column follow-up and I have already filed it."
"What did you say in your second story?" I inquired.
"Well, I told how a posse, armed to the teeth, were chasing the robbers and explained that they're within three miles of Walker Lake in hot pursuit."
"You're a madman!" I protested. "Kill those robbers and be quick; do it to-night so that you choke off the demand for more copy, or you're a goner!"
Next day the correspondent wired to his string of newspapers that the posse had chased the robbers into Walker Lake, where they were drowned.
At the point in Walker Lake where the correspondent said the robbers had found a watery grave it was known to some Reno people that for three miles in both directions the lake was shallow and that the deepest water in that vicinity was less than four feet. This caused some snickering in Reno. Still there was no come-back. The newspapers never learned of the deception. The correspondent had been canny enough in sending the story to keep the local correspondents of all other out-of-town newspapers thoroughly informed. They had sent out practically the same story, and therefore did not give the snap away.
In the early days of the Rawhide boom a rumor reached the camp that Death Valley "Scotty," the illustrious personage who had been press-agented from one end of the land to the other as the owner of a secret Golconda, was about to start a stampede into some new diggings. The news bureau decided to kill off opposition. Newspapers of the land were queried as follows:
"Scotty's lair discovered in Death Valley. It is a cache containing a number of empty Wells-Fargo money-chests. Scotty has apparently been looting the loot of old-time stage robbers. How many words?"
The newspapers just ate this one up. Column upon column was telegraphed from Nevada. The source of Scotty's wealth being cleared up to the satisfaction of readers of the "yellow," Scotty's value as a mine promoter became seriously impaired.
When I chided the Reno correspondent for sending out the fake story regarding the robbery of Rawhide Coalition's mine manager, I recall that he argued he had made a blunder in one direction only. He said he should have seen to it that the mine manager was actually robbed! That, he said, would have eliminated the danger of a come-back.
Years ago in New York the public was startled by reading of an actress taking her bath in pure milk. A few weeks later newspaper readers were convulsed by stories of another star in the theatrical firmament performing her morning ablutions in a tub of champagne.
"If you don't believe it," said the lady press-agent to a lady newspaper reporter who was sent to cover the story, "I will give you a chance to see the lady in the act."
This was done and, of course, the newspapers were convinced that it was no idle press-agent's dream. Of course, neither of these women had been in the habit of bathing in milk or in champagne. A tub of milk costs less than $10 and a tub of champagne less than $200, but you could not have bought this kind of publicity for these performers at anything like such absurdly low figures if you used the display advertising columns of the newspapers. Nor would the advertising have been nearly so effective. The absurd milk story scored a "knockout" with newspaper readers and earned a great fortune for the actress.