Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (8 page)

Arnold, who it appeared was the primary talker of the two, scratched his stubbled chin, pooched his lips, and drawled that they might be interested in something like that, yes. Just didn't know what that might be, now did they?

Ralston offered a hundred thousand in cash in return for a nominal percentage of the venture. But Arnold called his bluff, and after a slow quiet talk with his cohort, Slack, he said they'd need that money up front. Right then and there.

Ralston once again pulled in quick breath. “That amount of money, my friends, will require that we, that is to say I and the men I have talked with . . .”

Arnold nodded, having already covered the ground concerning the fact that Ralston had admitted, not but an hour before, the fact that he'd blabbed to a handful of people. It was exactly what Arnold wanted, of course, so he didn't push his belligerence act too hard.

“That is to say we'll need to take a look at the property.”

The men conferred, not looking too worried. “We'll take two men, your choice, but you understand,” said Arnold. “We're going to have to blindfold them for much of the trip. Safety, you know. We got to be careful.”

“Of course, of course,” said Ralston, relieved that there didn't seem to be any real impediments.

Weeks later, when Ralston's two men returned from this secretive trek, they bore smiles, nods of affirmation, and diamonds—and rubies—in their pockets. Along about this time, when Ralston was fit to burst, the two hillbillies seemed more wide open than ever to making a deal, allowing more of their find to be divvied up. And within days, Harpending landed and strode ashore onto the docks of San Francisco.

Soon, Arnold and Slack showed up, once again exhausted and trembling with fatigue, and holding their latest estimable haul—a sack brimming with a fortune in uncut gems. And then they told their rapidly growing circle of “trusted” potential investors—by now a handful of wealthy men whose eyes were wide and lips were wet—that while exploring their diamond field, they had discovered an even larger parcel glistening with bigger diamonds.

But the bag they brought back, at peril of death through raw territory brimming with all manner of banditti, had lost a goodly portion when crossing a swollen river. Still, it took Ralston, Harpending, and their giddy cohorts much persuasion before Slack and Arnold would deign to show them the fruits of their latest diamond-field endeavors. They spread the jewels out on a billiard table and stood back, basking in the gasps of the big-money men. There on the table were not only diamonds but emeralds and sapphires.

If there were doubts before then as to the verity of the two yokels or their find, all that doubt was wiped away. The money men pressed Arnold and Slack and finally struck a deal, signing an agreement that gave them $600,000, for which they gave up three-fourths of their diamond field to their new partners.

Their investors, now armed with what they felt was a deal that gave them a significant advantage over the two hillbillies from Kentucky, set up a corporation with stock of $10 million. They also allowed a few close friends, including Horace Greeley and Baron von Rothschild, the opportunity to get in on the action. One of the men happened to know Charles Tiffany, and they wasted no time, somewhat glowing and puffed with their wondrous new success, in asking his professional estimation.

Harpending later wrote what Tiffany said as he held up the uncut gems to the light: “Gentlemen, these are beyond question precious stones of enormous value. But before I give you an exact appraisement, I must submit them to my lapidary.”

And his trusted gem examiner proceeded to agree with Tiffany. The gems were real, indeed.

Next they hired a mining expert, Henry Janin, a professional with a long track record in the business, to trek to the diamond field and provide an assessment. Arnold at this time began kicking up a bit of a fuss. He had yet to receive the significant payment they'd agreed upon. The investors insisted he lead a group of their representatives, among them mine examiner Janin, to the diamond field. At this point, it would be natural to assume that Arnold and Slack would balk, hit the trail, and vamoose with the small sum they'd already been given.

Nonetheless, in an effort to emphasize their legitimacy, Arnold agreed to show Janin and a few select others to the diamond field. Then, he said, he wanted cash to seal the deal. And so, Arnold and Slack led the group to Rawlins Spring, Wyoming, where the party rented pack mules and mounts and trekked into a bold landscape.

For several days of rough travel, they ventured deeper into the mountains. And then without ceremony on the sixth day, Arnold halted the party and pointed. “There, you see that basin yonder?”

His extended arm directed their gaze to a broad scoop in the mountain-side, a boulder field strewn with rubble and bisected by a stream. He and Slack looked unconcerned, for all the world as men with no worries and certainly with nothing to hide.

Janin and his men dismounted, set to work with picks and shovels, and within minutes the first shout bubbled up, quickly followed by others. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires—it was too good to be true! And the man, Janin, who should have known better, was not overly suspicious, so entranced was he by the sight of all that potential fortune. He should have wondered how it was at all possible.

Harpending was there, too, and rummaged along the hillside, quivering with excitement. Janin was more reserved, engaged as he was with his examinations. His team required three days, digging feverishly, examining their finds, performing tests, and scouting the surrounding countryside for more wondrous gems. Finally, he and his men, marveling at their luck, went away with smiles on their faces.

He was charging the consortium top dollar for his skills. But he was known to be among the best in the world at assessing the viability of mines. Janin had roughly six hundred past mines successfully examined to his credit, after all. But of this odd discovery, he emerged from the hills convinced of its legitimacy. And so it was that they all headed for civilization, giddy with the possibilities that newfound wealth brings.

How did Arnold—for he was the brains of the two-man outfit—do it? Simple, really. He resorted to the age-old and time-tested method of making a bad claim into a natural wonder: He salted it. It is estimated he used $40,000 worth of real uncut gems. And how could he fool a noted expert such as Henry Janin? Simply because Janin, while a noted mining engineer and expert in assessing gold and silver mines, was not an expert in assessing the worth of gems, especially in the rough. Not many people were, in fact.

Arnold and Slack were paid the last $300,000, a far cry from the $40,000 they had invested, plus their time and effort, naturally. And then they simply disappeared.

But it seems no one noticed or cared . . . yet. Harpending wasted no time in letting his friends know that his man Janin was “wildly enthusiastic” about the prospect of the field being a force to be reckoned with. He also said that the diamond field “would certainly control the gem market of the world.”

And that's what started the global head swinging. So grand and promising was it that big-money folks the world over were thrusting cash at Harpending and his small group just to get in on the deal. Investors clamored for entry into the scheme and paid $200,000 cash for a share and a promise of 20 percent of Harpending and Ralston's parent company.

Fanciful newspaper articles told the world of the wonders of this great new find. And though they were grossly misinformed, that didn't stop the reporters from spinning tales out of whole cloth about the diamond fields. The
New York Sun
placed the locale in southeastern Arizona and made the bold, amazing claim that there was found one gem alone “larger than a pigeon's egg, of matchless purity of color, worth at a low estimate $500,000.”

And while this massive ego balloon filled, a famous engineer and geologist named Clarence King, a geologist for the US government, paid a visit to the field, heading his own expedition. He and his team spent days examining the entire region. And on November 11, 1872, he wired Harpending with the news that the claim was, beyond all doubt, a well-salted hoax.

King wrote that the stones they found “bore the plain marks of the lapidary's art.” In other words, he saw what others had failed to note, or admit—even Tiffany's lapidary—that the gems were rough-split stones purchased from a lapidary. Which is exactly what Arnold had done, of course.

King went on to explain that he and his team had found holes poked in the ground with a stick, into which diamonds had been jammed. They had found diamonds and rubies stuffed into the crevices of rocks. There were spots where it was quite obvious to anyone who knew much of anything about geology that the stones would in no way have been formed there naturally.

By the end of the month, the world knew of the fraud. The diamonds that had been found, to add insult to such severe injury, were low-grade rocks from South African diamond fields. Arnold had bought them from someone who normally sold them for industrial purposes, so low was their value.

To his credit, Harpending later wrote a biography in which he detailed the entire affair, naming names in his hard criticism. In
The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending
, he writes, “That diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires were found associated together—gems found elsewhere in the world under widely different geological conditions—was a fact that ought to have made a goat do some responsible thinking. But it seems to have been entirely overlooked by Tiffany, by Janin, by the House of Rothschild, to say nothing of Ralston, Sam Barlow, General McClellan, General Butler, William M. Lent, General Dodge, and the twenty-five hard-headed business men of San Francisco.” Oddly enough, he didn't add his own name to the list.

And of Philip Arnold and John Slack? Which prison did they serve their time in? None, as it turns out. The enraged investors hired detectives to dog them and found Arnold comfortably holed up in Kentucky. They put liens on his property, and Arnold, acting shocked and stunned by this rough treatment, defended the $550,000 in his bank account, plus his home and various other real estate investments, saying they were the result of hard work and nothing but.

When pressed about the obviously salted diamond field, he feigned astonishment, said if that land had been tampered with and salted, it had to have happened after he and Slack last saw it. As proof and supporting materials, he offered his copies of the initial report from Tiffany, as well as Janin's assessment. Clever man to the last, he turned the deal on its head and blamed the blamers. And then he took up an occupation he seemed perfectly suited to: He became a banker. Eventually he was wounded in a shootout, and in his weakened state succumbed to a bout of pneumonia that killed him.

It seems poor John Slack did not end up with much of the money, after all. He moved to White Oaks, New Mexico, and became a casket maker and undertaker before dying at age seventy-six in 1896.

Despite the fact that the entire affair was proven an indisputable hoax, the peak in Wyoming directly behind the once well-salted butte is still known as Diamond Peak. To date no one has found a native rare gem, or anything resembling one, on or around its slopes.

I
f someone walked up to you on a shaded sidewalk outside a bank, held out what looked to be a genuine brick of solid gold, and said, “Just a moment, my good man. . . .” Wouldn't you halt, even for a moment, your curiosity piqued? Yep. And apparently so did a whole lot of folks in Denver back in the early 1880s. And to a person, they ended up wishing they'd just kept on walking. Because they'd just had a run-in with the singularly slippery Charles L. “Doc” Baggs, also known as King of the Confidence Men. Though in Baggs's case, the only confiding people did was in unwittingly divulging the contents of their wallets.

In addition to being known as King Con, Doc Baggs earned the epithet “Father of the Big Store,” an elaborate con reserved for high rollers willing to risk a big chunk of change on a too-good-to-be-true scheme. These were his preferred marks, or targets, though his word for them was invariably “suckers.”

Baggs reserved a special sneer for swindlers such as Soapy Smith, with whom he shared a town but in his estimation little else. In sharp contrast to Soapy's small-time shenanigans, Doc Baggs felt it took no more effort to fleece a single wealthy mark than one hundred poor working stiffs. Doc was much more interested in making a great pile from one wealthy sucker who, he felt, deserved to be fleeced.

Baggs famously went to great lengths perfecting big, elaborately staged cons, all with the potential for large payoffs. And that brings us back to one of Doc's favorite and most remembered scams, the gold brick con. . . .

“Señor?”

The well-dressed man stopped on the sidewalk, glanced down at the plainly impoverished man who had dared to tug his sleeve. “Yes? What do you want?”

The tugger didn't respond. He wore a look of alarm on his dark face, and he glanced about as if someone might leap out at him from the shadows at any second. A thin man of average height, he was dressed in togs that once may have been a natural white but now bore sweat stains and begrimed creases.