is taken out.
`That’s the business I’m in, Mo. Not in mining. I get paid for telling people not to
mine. To cut their losses and run. They often don’t believe me, which is why I must
insist on being paid in advance.
`But once in a while I have had the happy privilege of telling someone, “Go ahead,
do it! It will cost you this big wad of money… but you should get it all back and
more.”
`And that is where the second option comes in, the one I really prefer. Under the
second option I gamble with the client. I lower my per diem and instead take some
points on the net, if and when. I won’t take more than five points at most, and I
won’t do a held survey for less than expenses plus a per diem of fifteen dollars a
day, minimum. That bracket leaves room to dicker.
Now-Can you write a model letter for me, explaining the tariff schedule? How they
can have our best work, at our standard fee. Or we’ll gamble with them at a much
lower fee, and they will still have our best work.’
‘I’ll try, Mister Boss Man, sir.’
It paid. It made us rich. But I did not suspect how well it paid until forty years
later when circumstances caused my husband and me to count up all our assets and
figure their worth. But that is forty years later and this account may not go on
that long.
It paid especially well through an oddity of human psychology… or an oddity of
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persons seized by the mining mania, which may not be the same thing. Like this…
The compulsive gamblers, the sort who try to beat lotteries or slot machines or
other house games, almost always were betting on striking it rich on some caim that
could not be worked at a profit. Each of these saw himself as another Cowboy
Womack… and did not want to share his lucky star with some hireling, even at only
five points. So, if he could scrape it up, he paid the full fee, grumbling.
After a survey (when I was my husband’s secretary) I would prepare a letter along
these lines, telling this optimist that his best vein was:
– surrounded by country rock that has to be dug out to get at the high grade. The
mine can not be worked successfully without drifting a new tunnel out to the north
to the highway, through a right of way still to be negotiated via the third level of
the claim to the north of yours.
In addition, your claim requires a blacksmith, a tool repair shop, a new pumping
system, new ties and rails for approximately two hundred yards of track, etc., etc.
– plus wages for eighty shifts per month as required by the bond-and-lease for an
estimated three years before appreciable pay tonnage could be taken to the mill,
etc., etc., see enclosures A, B, and C.
In view of the state of the claim and the capital investment required to work it, we
regret to have to report that we recommend against attempting to work this claim.
We agree with your arithmetic as to the effect on the commercial feasibility of
processing low-grade ore if the new Congress does in fact pass legislation requiring
free and unlimited coinage of silver at sixteen to one. But we are not as sanguine
as you are that such legislation will indeed pass.
We are forced to recommend that you sell your bond-and-lease for whatever it will
bring. Or cut your losses and surrender it.
We remain, sincerely at your service,
Brian Smith Associates
By
Brian Smith, President
This report was typical for an old claim being reopened by a new optimist – the
commonest situation in mining. (The West is pocked with holes where some prospector
ran out of money and luck.)
I wrote many letters like that one. They hardly ever believed unfavourable reports.
They frequently demanded their money back. Then a client often took the bit in his
teeth and went ahead anyhow… and went broke trying to satisfy a bond-and-lease on