MINES AND MINING ON PAPER. FAMILIAR SCENES.
SELLING A SILVER MINE.
Some years ago, it was my fortune to become infected with the silver mining fever. It was at a time when speculators from the far West and the Pacific coast were abundant, and their operations upon the credulous and unsophisticated natives of Manhattan Island were wonderful to behold, and became disagreeable to remember. What poor innocents we were! I had had some experience with gold mines, and other mines, and I knew, or ought to have known, that honesty did not abound among their manipulators to any alarming extent. Most of those who came to New York with mines for sale were men of pleasing, though rough exterior, and their tongues were as flexible as the hair-spring of a watch. They could talk the ears from a donkey without moving a muscle; and the strangest part of it was, that the donkey would, generally, lose his aural appendages without knowing it: he would listen, and would deliberate, and, like the woman who deliberates, he would be lost. His hand (on the supposition that a donkey possesses hands) would go down to his pockets, and he would place the money—whether honestly or dishonestly acquired nobody knew—into the hands of the beguiling speculator; and the speculator thereupon would retire to the fastnesses of his hotel, and waste the substance of the verdant New Yorker in riotous living.
I was introduced to one of these adventurers, who owned a silver mine of wonderful richness. Figures were exhibited, and a plan of the mine was spread before us: it was a gorgeous parchment. The mine, with its dips, and spurs, and angles, was carefully delineated.
There was a picture of a crushing mill in full operation, and there was all the machinery portrayed on that parchment for running a first-class mine. A dozen of us were invited to meet the speculator the next day in a cosy little office where we could see specimens from the mines.
The speculator was there at the appointed hour. We came, we saw, and he conquered: there was a fortune before us.
“Gentlemen,” said the speculator, “this is the finest mine within forty miles of Frogtown.” Frogtown was the name of the city nearest to the great mine; I believe he called it the Revenue mine—good name, that, to enterprising men who wanted to increase their revenue.
A GLITTERING BAIT.
“Gentlemen,” he continued, “before this mine was discovered a good many people around Frogtown talked of moving away, but as soon as it was opened nobody wanted to leave. The population has increased a thousand per cent. in three months, and it will continue to increase quite as fast; in a year from now we will have a population of fifty thousand, and we can employ three thousand men at least in and around the Revenue. I won’t sell the whole of it, gentlemen; you have not money enough in New York to buy the whole of this mine; but what I want is to raise money to develop it. There is a mine there worth a hundred millions of dollars, at the very least; but you see it may be worth millions of dollars, and at the same time it will want money to develop it.”
“I don’t exactly understand,” said I, “why you came all the way to New York to get money if the mine is so rich.”