Читать книгу My Adventures with Your Money - George Graham Rice - Страница 29

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At this juncture the new mining camp of Bullfrog, 65 miles south of Goldfield, was born. My publicity facilities were sought by owners of properties in Bullfrog "to put the camp on the map."

C. H. Elliott, a Goldfield pioneer, put an automobile at the disposal of myself and my stenographer, and we departed for Bullfrog. Elliott and his associates had staked out a townsite which they called Rhyolite. I was presented with seven corner lots on my arrival, to help along my enthusiasm.

There, on the saloon floor of a gambling house, which was the chief place of resort in the camp, I met for the first time George Wingfield, then the principal owner of the Tonopah Club at Tonopah, a gambling house which had lifted him from the impecunious tin-horn gambler class to the millionaire division; United States Senator George S. Nixon,[1] his partner; T. L. Oddie, later elected Governor of Nevada; Sherwood Aldrich, now one of the principal owners of the Chino and Ray Consolidated mines, and worth millions, and others who have since accumulated great riches.

They were on the ground and buying properties. Mr. Aldrich purchased the controlling interest in the Tramps Consolidated for about $150,000. It was incorporated for 2,000,000 shares of a par value of $1 each, a year later boomed to $3 a share on the New York Curb, and is now selling at 3 cents, without ever having paid a dividend.

Mr. Elliott had a large stock interest in the Amethyst mine and the National Bank mine, which were capitalized for 1,000,000 shares respectively, and he presented me with 10,000 shares of stock in each. He and his partner sold the control of the Amethyst to Malcolm Macdonald of Tonopah. Later, when Amethyst's neighbor, Montgomery-Shoshone, was selling at $20 per share, the market price of Amethyst was pushed up to above $1 a share on the San Francisco Stock Exchange, and I took my profit. The Amethyst has since turned out to be a rank mining failure, as has practically every other property in the camp, not one ever having earned a dividend.

The Bullfrog National Bank stock, representing another property that looked for a while as if it would make good, I disposed of on the San Francisco Stock Exchange at 40 cents a share, and I sold the town lots at figures which netted me, in all, in excess of $20,000 for my one day's trip to Bullfrog.

During my stay in Bullfrog I became very much impressed with the Montgomery-Shoshone mine. This property, in fact, was the powerful magnet which attracted everybody to the camp.

I was escorted through a tunnel seventy feet long. On each side as I walked were walls of talc. I was told these assayed in places anywhere from $200 to $2,000 a ton. Information was also forthcoming that the width of the ore-body was more than seventy feet. (It afterward turned out that the tunnel had been run along the ore-body and not across it, and that the ore-body was about 10 feet wide.) Some specimen ore was given me to assay, and the returns were staggering, running all the way from $500 to $2,500 a ton.

In my enthusiasm I wrote stories about the property for publication which must have induced the reader to believe that when all the riches of that great treasure-house were mined, gold would be demonetized. As a matter of fact, the stories from my news bureau, picturing the riches of that Golconda, are said to have been indirectly responsible for the purchase of control of the property by Charles M. Schwab and his associates.

The history of the Montgomery-Shoshone is mournful but highly instructive. For purposes of exposition of pitfalls in mining-stock speculation it possesses striking qualifications. Here are the facts:

Malcolm Macdonald, mining engineer, acquired a half interest in the mine from Tom Edwards, a Tonopah merchant, for $100,000, on time payments. On the strength of the showing in the 70-foot tunnel an effort was made to sell the control to the Tonopah Mining Company at a profit. It did not succeed. Oscar Adams Turner, of New York and Baltimore, the promoter of the highly successful Tonopah Mining Company, which to date has paid back to the original stockholders $16 for every $1 invested, examined the Montgomery-Shoshone, and turned it down because the property did not show him any well-defined veins or other marks of permanency, and the ore-body appeared to him to be only a superficial deposit of no great extent.

Many a good "prospect" has been condemned by mining men of the highest standing, and has afterwards made good, particularly in Nevada. Mr. Turner's turn-down did not daunt the owners.