At that time the Sullivan Trust Company of Goldfield was promoting the
Jumping Jack-Manhattan mining Company. James Hopper, the gifted
magazinist, wrote a story in which the names "Jumping Jack" and
"Sullivan Trust Company" appeared in almost every other line. It was
forwarded by mail to a great daily newspaper of New York and promptly
published as news. The yarn told how the man in charge of the gasoline
engine at the mouth of the Jumping Jack shaft had gone stark mad while
at work and how but for the quick intervention of the president of the
Sullivan Trust Company, who happened to be on the ground, a tragedy
might well have been the result.
The miner, the story said, stepped into the bucket at the head of the
shaft and asked the man in the engine-house to lower him to a depth of
300 feet. Quick as a flash the bucket was let down. When the 200-foot
point was reached there was a sudden stop. With a rattle and a roar the
bucket was jerked back to within 50 feet of the surface. Thereupon it
was again lowered and quickly raised again, and the operation
constantly repeated until the poor miner became unconscious and fell in
a jangled mass to the bottom of the bucket.
Hearing the miner's early cries, Mr. Sullivan had gone to the rescue.
He knocked senseless the man in the engine-house and pinioned him. Then
he brought up the bucket containing the almost inanimate form of the
miner.
Turning to the demon in charge of the engine, who had now recovered
consciousness, Mr. Sullivan cried,
"How dare you do a thing like this?"
The man responded, "His name is Jack, ain't it?"
"Well, what of it?" roared Mr. Sullivan.
"Oh, I was just _jumping the jack_!" chuckled the "madman."
This nursery tale was conspicuously printed in a high-class New York
newspaper's columns as real news. Undoubtedly the reason why the
editors allowed it to pass was that it was believed to be true, but
above all was cleverly written.
I was too busy during the early part of the Rawhide boom to do any
writing of consequence or even to suggest particular subjects for
stories. It seemed to me that the exciting events of every-day
occurrence during the progress of the mad rush would furnish the
correspondents with enough matter to keep the news-pot constantly
boiling. I assembled around me the shining lights of the Reno newspaper
fraternity and put them on the pay-roll.
For weeks an average of at least one column of exciting Rawhide
stampede news was published on the front pages of the big Coast
dailies. The publicity campaign went merrily on. I kept close watch on
the character of the news that was being sent out and was pleased in
contemplating the fact that very little false coloring, if any, was
resorted to. A boisterous mining-camp stampede, second only in
intensity to the Klondike excitement of eleven years before, was in
progress, and there was plenty of live news to chronicle almost every
day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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