If you don't think the character of the press-agent's work during the Rawhide boom was comparatively high class and harmless, dear reader, you really have another "think" coming. At a time when Goldfield Consolidated was wobbling in price on the New York Curb and the market needed support, just prior to the smash in the market price of the stock from $7 to around $3.50, the New York _Times_ printed in a conspicuous position on its financial page a news story to the effect that J. P. Morgan & Company were about to take over the control of that company. That's an example of a _harmful_ "fake," the coarse kind that Wall Street occasionally uses to catch suckers.
Thompson, Towle & Company, members of the New York Stock Exchange, issue a weekly newspaper called the _News Letter_. Much of its space is given over to a review of the copper situation, at the mines and in the share markets. W. B. Thompson, head of the firm, he of Nipissing market manipulation fame, is interested to the extent of millions in Inspiration, Utah Copper, Nevada Consolidated, Mason Valley and other copper-mining companies. On January 25, 1911, when both the copper metal and copper share markets were sick, and both the price of the metal and the shares were on the eve of a decline, which temporarily ensued, the _News Letter_, in an article headed "Copper," said:
Every outcrop in the country has been examined and it is not known where one can look for new properties.
The readers of the _News Letter_ were asked to believe that no more copper mines would be discovered in this country and that, because of this and other conditions which it mentioned, the supply of the metal must soon be exhausted and the price of the metal and of copper securities must advance.
The statement in the _News Letter_ that every outcrop in the country has been examined and that it is not known where one can look for new properties--well, if the whole population of North America agreed in a body to accept the job of prospecting the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada Mountains alone they could hardly perform the job in a lifetime.
The use of the automobile has undoubtedly been responsible in the past few years for an impetus to the discovery of mines which is calculated to double the mineral product of this country in the next two decades, and who shall say what the flying-machine will accomplish in this regard? Further, new smelting processes and improved reduction facilities generally are daily reducing the cost of treatment of ores and are making commercially valuable low-grade ore-bodies heretofore passed up as worthless.