If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a few.That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the "flush times." Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends without the asking.
Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted.Mr.Stewart (Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet of "Justis" stock if I would walk over to his office.It was worth five or ten dollars a foot.I asked him to make the offer good for next day, as I was just going to dinner.He said he would not be in town; so Irisked it and took my dinner instead of the stock.Within the week the price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty, but nothing could make that man yield.I suppose he sold that stock of mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket.[My revenge will be found in the accompanying portrait.] I met three friends one afternoon, who said they had been buying "Overman" stock at auction at eight dollars a foot.One said if I would come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same.But I was going after an inquest and could not stop.A few weeks afterward they sold all their "Overman" at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me.
These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the truth.Many a time friends gave us as much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a cigar.These were "flush times" indeed! I thought they were going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.
To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community, I will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins--and not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city;and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market.It was small matter who the cellar belonged to--the "ledge" belonged to the finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in Nevada--or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to work it.Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder! It has been often done in California.In the middle of one of the principal business streets of Virginia, a man "located" a mining claim and began a shaft on it.He gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue for damages.I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that "East India"stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely resembled one.
One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to "salt" a wild cat claim and sell out while the excitement was up.The process was simple.
The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon load of rich "Comstock" ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and piled the rest by its side, above ground.Then he showed the property to a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure.Of course the wagon load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase.
A most remarkable case of "salting" was that of the "North Ophir."It was claimed that this vein was a remote extension" of the original "Ophir," a valuable mine on the "Comstock." For a few days everybody was talking about the rich developments in the North Ophir.It was said that it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps.I went to the place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish, unpromising rock.One would as soon expect to find silver in a grindstone.We got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle, and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet-looking pellets of unimpeachable "native" silver.Nobody had ever heard of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer novelty.The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding interest and prepared to quit the stage once more--he was always doing that.And then it transpired that the mine had been "salted"--and not in any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and peculiarly original and outrageous fashion.On one of the lumps of "native" silver was discovered the minted legend, "TED STATES OF," and then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted half-dollars! The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in the bottom of the shaft.It is literally true.Of course the price of the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined.But for this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.