Show highlights on a stock boom that wrecked nevada mine promotion and threw undeserved odium on honest effort to open new mines by letson balliet mining engineer tonopah To promoters of mining propositions find that wherever they go somebody throws the divide boom in their face it make any difference whether the mine is meritorious or not somebody is sure to mention the divide hoax and a hoax is just what it was but the great damage that was done by the divide boom lies in the fact that there are arc a lot of busted promoters lying around the mining camps who think they can start another one they are simply waiting for every little showing to be made then they rush out and locate miles and miles of ground that is good for nothing ta in the world but sagebrush culture after that is done they organize C a lot of stock companies and send out a lot of literature but most of them do not succeed in selling 1000 worth of stock in one or two cases they have been able tia ta appeal to their friends for a few thousand dollars dollar 5 but the public bite and then they wonder why A few months later they try to start another boorn boom in some soffie other place and that one has to have new names in it if it gets a start the same people that were prominent in one boom camp do not seem to be prominent in the next one probably they are broke and have used up all their friends so that they cant get into the next one whenever sees one of the old divide companies bein being reorganized the comment is made another bunch of stockholders going to catch HELL with assessments it is either a shake out or more money to spend the one part particular icolar reason that these old divide companies are reorganized organized re is because their charters were obtained and they were listed upon the california stock exchange before the blue sky law was in effect A new company to be organized today would have to go through 11 1 1 a lot of red tape and meet with and comply with a lot of requirements before it could be listed in california the blue sky law was not retroactive and that is the reason that you see the companies that were in divide scattered in arizona california montana and canada these divide names would all be dropped and new clean corporations formed except that they get into the california stock exchanges for divide was a hoax promoted from california with the scenes laid in nevada it has been less than seven years since the bursting of the divide boom that bubble that so many reached tor for only to find it vanishing into thin air the wild speculation in the stock market quotations that had few w counterparts in the worlds history is now but a memy and those who were left with their purchases have either ther taken their losses and forgotten the incident or are aly vainly seeking for a market for their stocks that will com mand nd a higher price than that which is offered by the ragman agman nevada has learned its lesson or perhaps it would be better to say that those who rushed after the gilded prom ses aises of the brokers and promoters have been taught a lesson trough through bitter experience however little if any of the blame could be attached 0 nevada for after all it wa was s the oust iders who were responsible for the hoax the nevada prospector even eve look at such ground as most of that which was in eluded eded in in the divide boom if the poor nevada prospector 90 j out and staked such worthless ground he would not have jve had money to have kept him in grub while doing to tn the assessment work he would have had nothing pvn show w that could have interested a buyer he had no typewriters on which to prepare literature he had no money ney with which to buy postage stamps or pay for print 19 lie ile had no blackboard to write chalk marks on and if he had prepared an article for the press the newspapers would have considered it advertising newspapers would not accept the description of a legitimate prospect as a news item but would publish whole columns of gush that emina ted from the manipulators of the chalk marks upon the stock exchange divide boom not a nevada promotion the divide boom was promoted by outsiders and not by the poor desert rats of nevada it was promoted by those who had the blackboards of the stock exchange at their command and entree to the columns of the metropolitan papers the scene of their alleged operations was cunningly located midway between the famous mining cam camps p s of tonopah and goldfield two mining b districts whose production was known the world around only one mine in in the district known as the divide mine ever made any ore showings of consequence the country was located for six miles square the only virtue that most of the locations had was the fact that they were on the map or within a mile or two of some other extensively advertised promotion the divide boom might just as well have been located in the middle of the sahara desert so far as any productive value could be given to the purchaser of stock tt had no value as a mining district from the start many of the companies did nothing at all some of them put up head frames and hoists in order that they could be photographed for prospectus purposes others contented themselves by taking photographs of neighboring promotions the divide boom was a psychological boom it oc cured in 1919 just after the close of the war for two years the united states had been insistently urging its citizens t to 0 buy liberty and victory bonds most people thought they would not be patriotic if they buy liberty bonds and thus a majority of the citizens had been induced to save and invest in liberty bonds against their habits and inclinations the minute that the war was over they felt justified in iii selling their bonds and they rushed to the markets with them this heavy selling of bonds dropped their market value in some cases below on oil the 1 a condition which made many people who knew nothing about finance anxious to get their money out the divide boom was calculated to pick the pockets of the public of their liberty bond money and that is just what it did do it was a pickpocket pick pocket boom and could be compared only to I 1 the t he cardiff giant and keeley motor hoaxes what followed the boom bubble deflation the divide boorn boom flattened out some forty or fifty out of stock companies that were organized still maintained their corporate existence their charters have been sold and a nd new directorates direct orates have been elected with the av avowed owed intention of getting another property that has merit for the the companies have been changed in cases com company p any many to assessable companies in in order ord er to either collect more money from the stockholders who tossed their liberty bond money away at the divide fiasco or to shake the stockholder out who refused to come through with more money if the new property which is put into the company should turn out valuable the stockholder who refuses to the assessment is the loser and if it should turn out pay who vl does the assessment is is the loser worthless the one N I 1 0 pay As the reports which have hav e been circulated have all been written either by or for the promoters it is impossible to give any intelligent prediction as to what will happen in the future for the stockholder it is possible that a few of them may be successful in obtaining properties of merit be it said for and in behalf of nevada that the majority of the divide promotions originated in california their transfer offices and their listing was mainly performed in the neighboring state and in many instances not a dime of the money that stockholders invested ever crossed the state line to be spent on the property real opportunities handled differently now nevada has been purged but its real opportunities are most quietly handled now the mines of real merit fall into hands of people who do not wish to be identified with such fiascos riascos as the divide boom and yet it hurts even the most meritorious property promotion has to face some mention of the divide boom several attempts have been made to duplicate the divide boom always there has been some little showing or some merit in a few of the properties as groundwork but they never get very far and only after the bubble apparently collapses do the real meritorious ones get the necessary backing for development and then they quietly go ahead and make real mines out of them but the stock promotions on a five mile radius can seldom come back for a second wind unless they have real underground merit everyone knows that mines are not found in the same way that agricultural homesteads are found there are always two or three or several mines of merit possible in any district but when the pro promoters motors bring stock corporations po rations on ground that has no mineral showing at all simply because it is within mapping distance of the district it is time that people figure their odds as to how many out of have a chance |