The prospectors who located Goldfield were without means. George
Wingfield, the man who is now president of the merged Goldfield
Consolidated, came into the mining camps with only $150. No funds of
consequence were available from home sources. The money that later made
Goldfield the "greatest gold camp on earth" came from the outside, and
the news bureau secured it by focusing the attention of the American
public on the great speculative possibilities of investments in the
mining securities and leases of the camp. One of the leases, known as
the Hayes-Monnette, operated with Chicago money, afterward opened up
the great Mohawk ore deposit at a period when there was no money in the
treasury of the Mohawk Mining Company to do its own development work.
And there are scores of other instances which bear me out.
I was head of the news bureau, and the news bureau was Nevada's
publicity agent. I have always considered my work in this direction in
the light of an achievement. No one contributed a dollar to the news
bureau except myself.
HAIR-RAISING STORIES FOR DISTANT READERS
That news bureau, with its headquarters on the desert, at a time when
water was commanding $4 a barrel in Goldfield and coal could not be
obtained in the camp for love or money, was operated with as much
calculating judgment as it could have been were it subsidized by the
most powerful interests in America. Human-interest stories that were
written around the camp, its mines and its men, were turned out every
day by competent newspaper men. These were forwarded to the daily
newspapers in the big cities of the East and West for publication in
the news columns.
Most of the stories were accepted and published. Whenever hesitancy was
observed, publishers were tempted by the news bureau with large
advertising copy to continue to give the camp publicity.
Of such great assistance in arousing public interest did I find this
work that noted magazinists like James Hopper were imported to camp and
pressed into service by the news bureau to write readable stories. At
times, when public interest appeared to lag, the wires were used by the
camp's newspaper correspondents to obtain publicity for all kinds of
sensational happenings that were common on the desert. Reports of gold
discoveries, high play at gambling-tables, shooting affrays, gamblers'
feuds, stampedes, hold-ups, narrow escapes, murders, and so forth, were
used to rouse the public's attention to the fact that a mining camp
called Goldfield was on the horizon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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