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.