The Mark Inside by Amy Reading

Author:Amy Reading [Reading, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95761-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

They began with Seventeenth Street, aiming to turn it into a more comfortable home for eastern capital. Already, a prime triangle of land at Tremont Place on which a single cow had expensively grazed was being transformed into the lavish Brown Palace Hotel. Just across the street was the Denver Club, a private men’s club that expressed Denver’s financial ambitions in red sandstone Romanesque arches and turrets on a manicured lawn. No bandit barbers for the members of this club. Each morning, the “17th Streeters,” the dozen leaders of the club, would take turns settling into the chair of the club barber, Fred Basford, and without needing to say a word, they would receive his meticulous attention to their hair and beards. Nor did these men need the entertainments that Soapy and Chase offered. Each evening, they’d stop back in again at the club for dinner at the central table of the imposing dining room, sipping the city’s best champagne and discussing their entwined business interests. Men like David H. Moffat, Jerome B. Chaffee, Horace Tabor, and Eben Smith didn’t need to compete against each other at faro, because they collaborated with each other in the far more intoxicating game of mining speculation.

One visitor to Denver was astonished to discover that everyone at his hotel, from the owner to the desk clerk, porter, and chambermaid, held claims to mines up in the mountains. The question was how to extract profit from those promising pieces of paper. Moffat, Chaffee, Tabor, and Smith could simply sit in their downtown lairs, receive a steady stream of prospectors and engineers from the mountains who spieled about the invisible richness of their properties, and decide whom to buy out and enfold into their ongoing mining operations. But most entrepreneurs looking to finance the exploration and extraction of gold or silver formed joint-stock companies, hired promoters, and sent them to New York and Boston to chase down the money where it lived.

The promoter would arrive in an eastern city with a prospectus carefully worded to appeal directly to the heart of the second-tier businessman, someone who admired the market manipulations of Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt in the newspapers but could not himself command enough capital to replicate those feats of enterprise and greed. Western mining, the prospectus would implicitly promise, afforded the proper scope for someone of modest capital and outsize daring. In the 1870s and 1880s, the conservative New York Stock Exchange did not list mining stocks. The chance that any given patch of mountain soil would open up to yield gold or silver was unbelievably slim, and even if it did, the capital required to ship, assemble, and maintain the equipment to work the lode deposits and mill the ore was so steep as to halt the enterprise before it could begin. And then there was the rampant fraud. Promoters named their worthless claims after the famous producers, or salted Colorado mines with Utah gold. Even the 17th Streeters were caught up in

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