Companies issued ornate stock certificates whose value now as collectibles far exceeds the value they ever had as stock. Mining companies and brokers promoted the vast potential of still unexplored and undeveloped mines in slick prospectuses with photos and reports from mining engineers identifying rich veins waiting to be tapped. National newspapers boomed the region for its business and economic prospects. Stocks were bought and sold in frenzied trading in the local stock market in the town, where men watched the rising and falling prices being chalked on a board, scenes played on a larger scale in San Francisco and New York.Ĭertificate of Stock for the Manhattan Mining CompanyĬreating the excitement that would attract an investor looking for a quick and easy profit was called "booming." Local newspapers boomed the towns by running headline stories on the latest strikes, stories sometimes fueled by little more than rumor or high hopes. The brokers and speculators also played another game having little to do with digging rock out of the ground: selling stock. To a poor prospector, a few thousand dollars for a small hole or outcropping was windfall enough. Prospectors often quickly sold their claims for the first offer made. Mining camps were flooded by lawyers, brokers, and bankers. All this required investment capital, raised on the issuance of stocks and bonds, and secured by the potential value of the ore and profits realized after shipping and processing. Engineers were hired to appraise, map, and inspect the mines, and to design and build equipment and machinery buildings and smelters were built labor and managers hired lawyers and stock brokers retained. Machinery and equipment had to be purchased, shipped, installed, and maintained. After ore was discovered, money was required to mine, transport, and process it. It is no fluke of historical survival that what remains of most mining companies was the paper they printed on, because many of these companies existed only (or mostly) on paper.
ART OF WAR 3 PURPOSE OF THE 3 MINES PROFESSIONAL
The successive mining camps attracted the same groups of inveterate prospectors, engineers, transients, fortune hunters, and speculators, but also hardened professional miners and big business, who clashed violently in this period of unregulated industrialization and monopoly, nascent socialism, and labor organization. Then gold was discovered in the Yukon and the great Alaskan gold rush followed in 1897. The influx of silver bullion into the economy, with its inevitable speculation and inflation, brought about another financial panic and recession in 1893 and the collapse of the price of silver. These opportunities presented themselves in enormously rich deposits of copper discovered in Montana in 1873, gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1874, and silver in Cripple Creek Colorado in 1891. The great Comstock rush was over as the mines played out or the companies went bankrupt, and the population left for opportunities elsewhere. Then an unprecedented national economic panic in 1873 caused by over speculation in stocks, in which mining and railroads played a major role, brought on a general contraction in the economy and a tightening of the capital necessary for the development and sustaining of mining operations. Although gold was discovered in Southern Nevada in Eldorado Canyon on the Colorado River in 1863, and silver in Pioche in 1872, these camps were remote and isolated from other population centers and from any rail lines, so these southern mining districts never experienced the rush of people that northern mining camps did.
The Comstock bonanza of 1858 populated Northern Nevada and further enriched San Francisco stock brokers and financial institutions.
The great California gold rush of 1849 boomed California and turned San Francisco into a major financial center. While mining continues as a major industry in the West, the gold and silver rushes with their booming mining camps were a thing of the past by World War I. The gold and silver strikes in Tonopah and Goldfield at the turn of the century were the last of the great bonanza strikes in the United States.
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