January 2011

George Horatio Derby, who doubtless looked very little like the caricature of him at right, was a humorist of Mark Twain’s ilk, though his death in 1861 at the age of thirty-eight limits comparison. Under the pen name of John Phoenix, he contributed satirical sketches to the San Diego Herald in the 1850’s; among them was one (sampled on the following two pages) in which he used a set of ordinary printer’s stock cuts—available in any newspaper pressroom—together with highly inappropriate captions, to make fun of the more pretentious illustrated newspapers of the day. “There!” he concluded. “This is but a specimen of what we can do if liberally sustained.”

Not long before he died, Walt Disney was asked to name the most rewarding experience of his life. The response was blunt and brief: “The whole damn thing. The fact that I was able to build an organization and hold it.” His words may seem surprising. To the public at large he was an avuncular Horatio Alger character, a spinner of sweet tales for children, a man whose taste and morality comfortably reflected those of the middle-class American majority. This image was carefully nurtured by a corps of press agents and sycophants as competent and energetic as any in Hollywood—men as skillful in turning aside questions and questioners that might damage that image as they were in propagating it. In fact, however, Walt Disney was a grouchy, inarticulate, withdrawn man. Intellectually and emotionally he remained a child, but he was anything but childlike when it came to managing and directing the only thing he greatly cared about—his business or, to use the phrase favored by his publicity department, his “magic kingdom.”

A classic western aphorism commonly attributed to Mark Twain defines a gold or silver mine as a hole in the ground with a liar on top. Generally, the misrepresentations were a standard form of mining-camp bragging—but not always. Luxurious rewards awaited the bunco artist who could make gold seem to appear in a hole where no gold actually existed, or the con man who could produce, for suspicious examining engineers, specimens of silver that assayed higher (as the gulled buyer discovered too late) than the ore body from which they supposedly came.

Small investments could produce grand returns. By dishonestly increasing the apparent per-ton worth by a mere twenty-five cents, a seller could unload a hundred-thousand-ton mine for $25,000 above its value. Microscopic amounts of metal were enough to create such inflation. Dusting a ton of ore with one eightieth of an ounce of gold, at its price of $20.67 per ounce, would add twenty-five cents to the value per ton—as would less than one quarter of an ounce of silver.

There is, as everyone knows, more than one kind of fish in the sea. And, as some bunco artists will tell some poor fish, there is more than fish in sea water.

Near the turn of the present century, Prescott Ford Jernegan, a respected Baptist minister from Edgartown, Massachusetts, claimed that a dream had revealed to him the way to extract gold from the ocean. The process involved passing an electrical current through a submerged, zinc-lined wooden box (an “accumulator”) containing chemically treated quicksilver. The gold was supposedly absorbed by the mercury.

A pair of wealthy parishioners, A. B. Ryan and A. N. Pierson, had a box constructed to Jernegan’s specifications. Jernegan hired Charles Fisher, a deepsea diver who later became his partner, to submerge and connect the device for preliminary testing. Then, on a cold February night in 1897, Ryan and Pierson themselves lowered the box into Narragansett Bay. After a full running of the tide they hauled it up. Government assayers found five dollars’ worth of pure gold—not sensational but promising, promising.

The yacht America was a well-travelled twenty-two-year-old when, in June of 1873, Ben Butler bought her for a mere $5,000. (He was the only bidder at an auction kindly arranged by cronies in the Navy Department.