Every outcrop in the country has been examined and it is not known where one can look for new properties.
The readers of the News Letter were asked to believe that no more copper mines would be discovered in this country and that, because of this and other conditions which it mentioned, the supply of the metal must soon be exhausted and the price of the metal and of copper securities must advance.
The statement in the News Letter that every outcrop in the country has been examined and that it is not known where one can look for new properties—well, if the whole population of North America agreed in a body to accept the job of prospecting the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada Mountains alone they could hardly perform the job in a lifetime.
The use of the automobile has undoubtedly been responsible in the past few years for an impetus to the discovery of mines which is calculated to double the mineral product of this country in the next two decades, and who shall say what the flying-machine will accomplish in this regard? Further, new smelting processes and improved reduction facilities generally are daily reducing the cost of treatment of ores and are making commercially valuable low-grade ore-bodies heretofore passed up as worthless.
The best opinion of mining men in this country is that our mineral resources have not yet been "skimmed" and that the mining ground of the Western country has not yet been well "scratched."
Therefore, the statement made in a newspaper which is supposedly devoted to the interests of investors, that it need not be expected that more copper mines are going to be discovered, is a snare calculated to trap the unwary.
The foregoing is an example of a very harmful but comparatively crude fake, employed by some promoters in Wall Street of the multimillionaire class when their stocks need market support.
Here is a specimen of the insidious brand of get-rich-quick fake. On March 7, 1911, the New York Sun printed in the second column of its front page the following dispatch:
Tacoma, Wash., March 6.—F. Augustus Heinze has struck it rich again; this time it's a fortune in the Porcupine gold fields in Canada.
Charles E. Herron, a Nome mining man, who has just returned from the new gold fields, is authority for the statement that Heinze is "inside the big money." He has bought the Foster group of claims, adjoining the celebrated Dome mine, from which it is estimated that $25,000,000 will be gleaned this year and for the development of which a railroad is now under construction.