hubert howe bancroft - Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History ...

680 MINING AND MINING STOCKS.
The exhaustion of the old ore bodies and the discovery
of others have, of course, been attended with
extreme changes in the price of stocks. It may be
stated approximately that from a total value of more
than $300,000,000 in January 1875, the market price
of shares in the Comstock mines, over 6,000,000 in
number, sank to $2,000,000 or less in the spring of
1885, rose in the autumn of the same year to $60,-
000,000 or $70,000,000, and in April 1890 had declined
to $6,000,000 or $7,000,000. There are still
those who hold shares in mines which they believe to
be in bonanza, but which neither pay dividends nor do
anything to put money into the hands of stockholders.
This class of traders are anxious for a lively market,
no matter how produced, in order to sell above what
their shares have cost them. We have only to glance
over the columns of the daily journals, where whole
pages are filled with notices of mining meetings, assessments,
and sales of forfeited shares, to obtain some
estimate of the amount of capital furnished by the
community for the support of mining companies, few
of which make any return."
the theory that they have gained a right by prescription to do wrong.
Almost every mining corporation has a credit mobilier for milling ores or furnishing
supplies at prices fixed at little regard to the interests of stockholders,
it is within the experience of almost every citizen of this Btate,
that in the purchase of mining shares he takes a greater risk upon the honesty
and efficiency of the management of the corporations than he does upon
the product and profit of the mines. Indeed, it is notorious that most of
them are manipulated more with a view to making money out of the public
than out of the mines. Mines that were reasonably worth a few hundred
thousand dollars have been sold at the stock-boards for millions. After
the stock has been thus floated, assessments have been levied, month after
month, and year after year, ostensibly to develop the mines. In this way
the mining corporations formed under the laws of this state have collected
within the last three years assessments as follows: 1875, $11,880,000; 1876,
$11,608,000; 1877, $11,598,000=$36,086,000, '—nearly a million a month, or
more than all the taxes raised in the state during the same time for state,
county, and city governments.
M In my History qf Nevada will be found brief biographies of the bonanza
quartet—J. C. Flood, W. S. O'Brien, J. G. Fair, and J. W. Mackay—also of
W. Sharon, J. P. Jones, P. Deide&heimer, and others, whose career is more
or less associated with the history of the Comstock lode. The following are
a few of the more prominent men who are or have been connected with mining,
mining companies, and mining stock-boards, though from want of space
the names of many, such as W. M. Lent, R. Sherwood, and the late W. B.
Bourne, have been omitted from this chapter: