I was not long in discovering that my first deductions, made at the
inception of the Rawhide boom, namely, that the country was in no
financial mood to consider favorably the claims to recognition of a new
mining camp, were right, and that it would have been better had the
birth of Rawhide been delayed for a period or until the country could
catch its financial breath again. Crowds came to Rawhide, but few with
money. Flattering as was the extent of the inrush, it was easy to see
that if the publicity campaign had been suppressed for a while, the
result in harvest would have been immeasurably greater. Had financial
conditions been right, the effort to give the camp "scientific"
publicity would undoubtedly have been crowded with results for "the
inside" of a character that would have meant much larger sums of money
in the bank.
Nat. C. Goodwin & Company recognized, too, that they had been working
at a great disadvantage by attempting to finance a great mining
enterprise at so great a distance from Eastern financial centers as
Reno. We were hardly a match for the Eastern promoter who, because of
the handy location of his offices, was enabled to keep in close
personal contact with his following.
The usual happening in mining took place at Rawhide. The extraordinary
rich surface deposits opened up into vast bodies of medium and
low-grade ore at depth. Rawhide's one requirement appeared to be a
railroad, and a milling plant of 500 or 600 tons a day capacity. It was
decided that I should come East and attempt to finance the company for
deep mine development, mill and railroad construction, and also to go
through with the deal made with the vendors of the controlling
interest. The time period for payments had been extended for Nat. C.
Goodwin & Company, and the option to purchase was now valued by the
Goodwin company at a fortune.
In New York, over the signature of Nat. C. Goodwin the firm for a
while, under my direction, conducted a display advertisement newspaper
campaign in favor of the issue, which was now listed on the New York
Curb. Hayden, Stone & Company, bankers, of Boston and New York, who
have since successfully financed the Ray Consolidated and Chino copper
companies, undertook to send their engineer to Rawhide to make an
examination of the property with a view to financing the company for
railroad and milling equipment amounting to upward of a million
dollars. Under the impetus of this news and the Nat. C. Goodwin
advertising campaign the market price of the shares shot up to $1.46,
or a valuation in excess of four million dollars for the property.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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