Thompson, Towle & Company, members of the New York Stock Exchange,
issue a weekly newspaper called the _News Letter_. Much of its space
is given over to a review of the copper situation, at the mines and in
the share markets. W. B. Thompson, head of the firm, he of Nipissing
market manipulation fame, is interested to the extent of millions in
Inspiration, Utah Copper, Nevada Consolidated, Mason Valley and other
copper-mining companies. On January 25, 1911, when both the copper
metal and copper share markets were sick, and both the price of the
metal and the shares were on the eve of a decline, which temporarily
ensued, the _News Letter_, in an article headed "Copper," said:
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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