Striking It Rich or Striking Out: Lessons from Mark Twain's Mining Ventures
An update on those holes in the ground
I will be at the Edinburgh Fringe from tomorrow with Shaping the Earth, a “lecture with funny bits” about the history of mining. I’m then taking the show to London on October 9th and 10th to the Museum of Comedy. Please come if you fancy a bit of “learning and laughter”. The Edinburgh link is here. And the London link is here.
ALSO
IMPORTANT: somebody has been impersonating me on here and asking readers to message them on WhatsApp. Obviously it is not me. Don’t engage. Stop engaging and block, if you have started. And DON’T send any money.
"A Gold Mine Is a Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top"
So said Mark Twain (apparently) after he lost all his money in failed mining ventures in the early 1860s. I was just reading about him for the Edinburgh show.
In early 1859, there was a spate of bonanza gold and silver finds at the Comstock Lode in Nevada, sparking a rush. Two years later, Twain (real name Samuel Clemens) paid $150—about a month’s wages—and boarded a stagecoach west in search of his fortune.
He was too late. By the time he arrived, the best prospects had long since been claimed. Amateur prospecting was no longer viable; the professionals were in charge.
He spent a year trying. The labour was “hard, long, and dismal,” as he put it in a letter home. He invested what little money he had in various ventures. One prospect was “a dead sure thing,” he said in another letter, before adding, “but then it’s the d—dest country for disappointments the world ever saw.”
Others were making their fortunes. Comstock Lode produced some of America’s first hundred millionaires. But Clemens would not be one of them.
After a year, he found himself penniless, drinking heavily, and shovelling tailings in a quartz mill to make a living. When he went into the bar where he drank, he would call out, “mark twain!”—a callback to his time on riverboats on the Mississippi where the cry meant the water was two fathoms deep and thus safe for passage. In the bars of the Comstock Lode, however, by “mark twain” he meant putting two marks against his name on the chalkboard for the two blasts of whiskey he was about to drink.
Before long, he was earning a living as a writer, editing the publication Enterprise. “They pay me six dollars a day,” Clemens wrote to his sister, “and I make 50 percent profit by only doing three dollars' worth of work.” Mark Twain became his pen name.
If Clemens had arrived at the Comstock Lode earlier in the mining cycle, when amateur prospecting was still viable, he might have made his fortune—and the world of wit and literature would be a much poorer place for it. If he had arrived a bit later, it would have been patently obvious that there was nothing doing, and he would have moved on to other things.
Instead, he got there just at the point when it still looked like there was opportunity, when in fact, there was not. He was not the first, nor will he be the last investor to fall foul of the mining cycle.
With that in mind, I want to briefly update you on the gold and silver miners, where they are in their own little cycle, and let you know how I propose to play it all.
On the ground, things are looking really good for our silver play. It is making huge strides forward, months ahead of schedule, and the market has really not picked up on it.
There are also some developments in the main gold stories.
Condor Gold (CNR.L/COG.TO)
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