February 18, 2020 • 34 mins
The California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s did more than just move hundreds of thousands of people across the continent -- it also convinced these people that they, too, could strike it rich. This optimism attracted con artists and scamsters like moths to the proverbial flame. Philip Arnold and John Slack were no different -- but when these two men started the diamond hoax, they had no idea just how far it would go. Tune in for part one of this special two-part episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:31):
to Ridiculous History. Thanks for tuning in, Ridiculous Historians. I
am Ben. I have found our legendary and legendarily obnoxious
uh sound making machine. Ben, I'm Noel. If you if
you think the batteries have ever been replaced on that,
do you think it's slowly like dying? And that's why
it's just that that that super tin e quality. I
(00:52):
think Okay, first off, I think we definitely cut corners
when whomever purchased this purchased it. The batteries had to
be replaced at some point because this is a p
O J piece of junk. Can you give us some
other samples? Shot them from the repertoire? Sure, but they all,
I want to worry, they all go on a little
too long. Here. I'll do one. I'll pass it to
you so we can share in the things. Yeah, okay, um,
(01:16):
oh of course, Uh. There there's some classic hits here.
But let's go with something a little bit, a little
bit out of the normal. Let's go with Poco stick.
See how they see how they said they go on
too long? Here you go knock one out. And also
(01:37):
it sounds. I don't know. Never mind. I was gonna
say it sounds like a clown masturbating. But that's not
that's not okay, this is accurate. You know what, Maybe
we leave it is, keep it in. I feel like
that's articulate. Let's see, do you do you think there's
a diamonds and pearls sound cue. Um, there's definitely a
couple of disaster sounds. You think we'll get suited for this?
(01:59):
I I will give you diamonds and emper And that
didn't go long enough. I was trying to do a
siren diamonds and pearls mash up remix thing. I say
diamonds and pros because they were talking about only one
of those two things. It's diamonds and about pearls in
today's episode. Well, uh, there have been counterfeit pearls of
plenty we do. I shouldn't have handed this to you.
(02:23):
I almost I thought, let's just do it once, we'll go,
but but we do have to shout out the inspiration
behind the perfect sound cue. Of course that's our super producer,
Casey Pegrum. No. You know I'm interested because you said
diamonds right. Uh diamonds in a way because this is
(02:44):
also a bit of a crime story. It's a bit
of a con right, you know they say diamonds are
a girl's best friend. Uh was that a song or
did that come from the de Beers company? It was
a Liz Taylor thing, right, It's all de Beers, the
de Beers family and the way. In the same way
that Edward Burns made bacon a thing with the Beer's
family basically made diamonds a thing. And while they might
(03:05):
be a girl's best friend, um, they certainly aren't a
friend of of the working class or the folks in
uh third world countries that are you know, subjected to
horrible conditions to mind them from the earth. For the
privileged classes of countries, they'll never set fun in. Yeah,
this has been a personal hobby horse of mind since
(03:28):
that at times several years ago when I got married
and I had to go diamond shopping and I found
out about the whole racket. We have a great episode
about that on Stuff they Don't Want you to Know,
with our very own Lauren Vogel Bombs, who was the
first guest on Ridiculous History. You're right, she was, wasn't
she Yeah, what are we talking about with her? She
was the fact Genie. Yeah, the fact Genie, which we had. Okay,
(03:50):
this is funny. We will get to an episode today,
but you might enjoy this, folks. Collaboratively, we were all
pitching these ideas of segments. I'm a very big believer inside.
I think they're cool for shows. Uh. And we had
we had a time that never made it off the list. Uh,
maybe we'll dig that up, but we digress. Diamonds, Yes,
as you said, an old diamonds do have a dark side,
(04:12):
and they've been super popular for years and years. Travel
with us back to California, back to the West in
the eighteen hundreds, you know, we're we're all familiar with
the California gold rush, right. That's the reason the San
Francisco forty Niners are named the San Francisco forty Niners.
People thought you could make a fortune hunting gold or
(04:33):
or mining silver maybe in Nevada, and so everybody was
kind of speculating and like, what's the next big thing, right,
is it gonna be like, I don't know, platinum, Is
it gonna be copper, Is it going to be diamonds?
Possibly scorpion filled paperweights. Yeah, I was gonna hold my
likey scorpion until next next episode, but I think we're
(04:54):
just doing the one today, I think. So it's a
very beautiful talisman you've got there. Yeah, check this out.
So this is a glass encased preserved scorpion of no
small size from my last trip out to uh to Arizona. Actually, hey,
that's just the part of the country that we're talking about. See,
I had I had to like a loose theme, man.
(05:16):
Uh So people are all trying to strike it rich.
And you know, whenever there's the speculative market. We see
this now, even even with stocks day, whenever there's a
speculative market, people will tell you, well, the thing that
just became a boom, you know, the time for you
to enter that is past. You've got to look for
the next thing, right, And people didn't have the benefit
(05:36):
of communication technology, or at least not at the time
we have today. So you had to trust people and
you had to you know, you had to stake a
lot on somebody's character, right. That's why so many people
rode the rails and traveled across the continent to seek
(05:58):
their fortune in the West, and in eighteen seventy. San
Francisco had already swelled to a city with a population
of like a hundred and fifty thousand people. And that's
where we meet one of the main characters of our story.
You're talking about Arnold and Slack. Oh yeah, Philip Arnold, right, right,
(06:19):
But what a great name for a for a duo
of huckster's right, Arnold and Slack. So Philip Arnold. It
was from Kentucky. He was He didn't have the best
formal education. He had a job as an apprentice to
a haberdasher. He was a veteran of the Mexican War.
He had gone, like so many souls, to the gold
(06:40):
rush in forty nine, and he had spent By the
time of our story takes place, he had spent about
twenty years working in mining operations in the West, and
he did okay. He eventually made enough money they could
go back to Kentucky. He got a farm, he got married,
had some kids, and historians think he made a little
(07:01):
bit of money, sure, but you know, he didn't want
to rest on his laurels. He got a little squirrel
in a on eighteen seventy he had a gig working
as a bookkeeper for a company called the Diamond Drill
Company in San Francisco. It was a drill manufacturer that
used those famous diamond headed tips for their drill bits, right. Um,
(07:22):
So while he was keeping the books, he became pretty
fascinated in these these drill bits, um that were you know,
so widely used here. And he even like really did
his homework and started like researching how the material worked,
the whole trade of drilling, drill making, I don't know.
(07:43):
And uh in November he had amassed himself a small
cash of uncut diamonds. You know, I love it, man,
It's like the billionaires go bag. Just there's a few
things as sketchy as a bag at loose diamond I
love especially, so when you call him loose diamonds, that's right, um.
And you know, the idea is that he probably uh
(08:06):
pilfred these throughout the years from his boss. And he
had some other uncut gems mixed in there as well.
He had some sapphires and some rubies and some garnets
and it's pretty likely that he bought those in Arizona
from some of the Indian tribes there. Yeah, and he
also at this time got a partner, and that's the
(08:29):
guy who mentioned earlier black John Slack and Smithsonian magazine
and their article on this subject has a great description
of John Slack. They say that he is the listless,
taciturn foil to the voluble and cunning Arnold. Slack was
a cousin of Arnold's and he was also a veteran
(08:51):
for the Mexican War. He had gone chasing Golden forty nine,
but he was going to be the kind of the
assistant to Arnold in there too and con because you see,
they decided to commit hoax. They saw everybody in San
Francisco in the area going mad with greed and speculation
because of the gold rush. Like the gold rush literally
(09:13):
did make some people's fortunes, right, because you even had
like the Comstock load in Nevada, which was this massive,
massive pocket of silver underneath this mountain peak that was
just churning out silver just by the boatload, right, And
it really contributed to this speculation gone wild kind of
mentality because you did have some people that were absolutely
(09:36):
getting rich overnight. If you've ever seen the TV series Deadwood,
you get a sense of that. Um there's a few
characters that strike it rich and I think one of
them Ellsworth. You know, he goes from kind of being
just sort of this like pretty working class, kind of
like ruffian around town to essentially having to figure out
what it means to be like a gentleman and uh
(09:57):
and all that stuff. And it's actually pretty funny the
way they portray He's a great character. Um, but yeah,
you kind of see it from the ground up there,
and that was very real, Yeah it was. And people
were so convinced that they would be able to take
advantage of this bubble like any other bubble, like that
thing with the tulips over in Europe, like uh, Beanie
(10:18):
babies podcasts, my podcast. Oh it hurts you wound me,
but I don't think you're too far wrong, like any bubble.
People were convinced that, you know, uh, these other folks
might be rubes, but I'm the smart guy, you know,
I'm the captain smarty pants who was gonna it was
gonna profit here. And that led to a situation where
some of these businessmen in San Francisco, where shall we say,
(10:41):
over confidence and you know, people would pitch them these
wild ideas and as soon as they heard the m
word mining. Then they were on board. They would be like,
shut up, shut your pie hole. I've heard enough to
take my money. Take my money, don't care where where, where,
where where, even in South Africa. It's fine. Give it
to me, take it to to one of those places
(11:02):
you just described, and then come back with gems. And
so here's how they instituted their scam. So Slack and
Arnold kind of dressed up as prospectors, you know, like
I'm rough. They've been sleeping, uh in like a situation
that Tom Waits was sleeping in that excellent what was
that Netflix film? Oh buster scrugs, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom
(11:25):
Waits as the old prospector was I think the best
one in that anthology series. I really liked that moment
where James Franco asked the guy if it's his first
time being hanged? Also great, there were a lot of
greater I just thought that Tom Waits one was really moving.
So picture Tom Waits and then film that's what they
look like when they go to, uh, the office of
(11:46):
a businessman named George Roberts, and their clutching a leather satchel.
So uh, they announced this businessman George Roberts that this
buckskin pouch they're carrying was full of pretty valuable loot
and they were hoping to deposit it in a bank
if it if it wasn't so late. So instead they
(12:07):
decided to you know, they saw this place. This guy
was around, I guess, you know, closing up or like
doing some book work or whatever, and they were hoping
that he helped them out because it was you know, oh,
there's rough diamonds in your Oops, i've said too much,
said too much, good sir. Yeah, that's exactly how it works, right,
You get you hook people with that because you make
(12:30):
them feel like you've now entered into a bond of
privileged information or trust. So the way Arnold recalls this
was that the businessman Roberts was pretty impressed by this
discovery and he said, Okay, you guys, you can trust me.
(12:54):
I will keep your secret. You go explore this area
further and fig route what we're working with here. And
then Arnold knew that the best way to get this
word to spread was to get this businessman they didn't
know from mccanna paint to promise that he would be
quiet about it. Apparently, Roberts was cartoonishly bad at keeping
(13:18):
his promise. As soon as the guys were done, I mean,
thank god he didn't have a cell phone. As soon
as the guys twitter account right, right, Roberts is riding
around town. He finds one of the most important businessmen
in San Francisco, guy named William Ralston, who also owns
the Bank of California. And you could kind of picture
Robert's motivation, right, He's trying to get a big He's
(13:40):
trying to curry some favor, you know, and he wants
a piece of the diamond pie. Uh. Ralston gets worried
of this, and you know, you can picture the like
Morse code montage going on here with dits and dashes
and dots. Uh. And he sends a telegram to another businessman.
He knows. This guy has the best name you're talking about,
(14:00):
Ashbury Harpending. Yes, he's described multiple times as somewhat shady. Yeah,
I mean, I don't know, but with it with a
name like that, you've got the air of respectability about you,
so you're allowed to kind of, you know, have some
secret shady dealings. Who. Yeah, he had actually been accused
of high treason though, um eight years prior to that.
(14:22):
When he attempted to sail out of San Francisco Bay
with a ship that he was going to use as
a Confederate raider um along the coast of California. Pretty weird, right, Yeah,
what does that even mean? Ben? What do you mean
he was gonna go a raiding, a rapin and a
pilage in. Yeah, it's like pillage ade harrying the Union
(14:44):
forces on the West coast. I guess was his idea
or yeah, you know, he clearly he hadn't thought it
through all the way. But we we want to show
you how the web is spreading the web of this misinformation.
While this is happening concurrently, Arnold and Slack are returning
(15:05):
to Roberts and they say, okay, we wanted to keep
our word. We want to update you. We're pretty excited
by what we found. Yeah. Yeah, they came back with
more loot. Yeah they they you know, valued off the
top of their heads at about six hundred thousand dollars,
which is just that is an absolute fortune in those days. Right. Yeah,
(15:27):
let's do an inflation calculator just to give you a
sense of how much money that was. Drumroll, please, six
hundred thousand dollars in eighteen seventy was equal to about
eleven point eight million dollars today. So they walked up
(15:49):
to this guy and they said, hey, you seem cool,
thanks for keeping our secret. We have come back with
like almost twelve million dollar is worth of gems and
that's just the sixty pounds we could carry. Yeah, that's right, um.
And so they were kind of trying to just pull
(16:11):
him in deeper, and they could see those dollar signs
in his eyes just starting to flash like something like
a cartoon character. And so Robert's bit completely, he totally
took debit and started pulling in other businessmen, um, saying, look,
this is really real. Now. These guys are like they've
got a spot they're going to and bringing me these
diamonds from. We gotta figure out where it is, right yeah, yeah,
(16:33):
and yeah the jewels authenticated as well. So these were
not like fake jewels. I mean, this was they were
They were sort of I guess what you consider low
quality diamonds, right right, right, they were diamonds. Yeah, they
were definitely diamonds. That's the thing that we're real diamonds.
And they had had a jeweler say that and confirm it.
But remember we said these businessmen were overconfident. One common
(16:57):
thing about all great cons, all great scams, is that
they depend upon the human failings of people, in this case,
greed and over confidence. Because Roberts goes back to the
guy Ralston who owns the Bank of California, goes back
to that shady would be Confederate sailor Harpenden. And then
(17:19):
they also get to San Francisco miners who have already
made it. Two entrepreneurs named William Lent and a guy
named General George S. Dodge, and together these five men say, look,
we know the deal. Let's take these two yokels, these
two dumb dumbs from Kentucky, and let's buy them out.
Let's cut them out of the picture, and let's make
(17:39):
some serious scratch. And so they say, Okay, the easiest
way to do this is we'll buy out their interests
or their their right to mind in this land, yeah
wherever that might be right, Because they still didn't know,
and honestly, I mean, that's what they're that's what they're
angling for too. It's like they're willing to go out
of pocket on good faith, just in the hopes that
(18:00):
that will you know, be led to this magical trope
because they're picturing a like comstock load, but the diamond version,
you know, like they can just constantly pull precious stones
from the earth and be uh just gazillionaires. Yeah. Yeah,
and they know how to tease the money out. So
the five big shots go to the prospectors and they say,
(18:23):
all right, hey, we're gonna we just want to buy
your share. And then at first the prospectors say, uh,
you know, I need to think about it. I don't
I don't feel too too good about making a decision
right now. So they turn up the pressure and they
start offering them more money, and eventually Slack, who is
(18:43):
kind of the at least the less outgoing of the two, says, uh,
you know, I will, I'll sell, but I'll solve for
a hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, fifty now and fifty after
we come back and bring you a third haul, right
from from this secret mind. Um oh. Once he gets
the first half of the hundred grand, he and his
(19:04):
buddy head back off to England to take that money
and buy more uncut gems. Right. Uh. And this is
July of eighteen seventy one. They're using fake names. Uh,
they didn't deviate too far, at least Arnold didn't. Arnold
became on doll and Uh Slack used his middle name,
which was bircham Um. They bought twenty grand worth of
(19:25):
rough diamonds and rubies, spent many thousands of dollars on
other diamonds and rubies. Um all told. They had several
thousand stones that they were bringing back because they had
to have that wow factor. You know, this is the
third the third haul. They needed to show that this
was a producing mine and that it was worth what
they were being paid for it to keep the Cohn alive, right,
(19:47):
exactly exactly, So there's still thirty grand up right, thirty
more than they had. And there's a there's an interesting
thing that the guy in London they buy the diamonds
from is a man named lee A Pold Keller. Leopold
remembers thinking there was something weird about this, because he says,
I asked them where they were going to have the
(20:08):
diamonds cut, and they don't say anything, because of course
they have no plan to cut these. They want to
come up with another bag of loose stones and show
these Uh, businessmen in San Francisco that they have. They
just keep finding stuff. So they get back there it's
seventy one and they say, look, we'll make one more
(20:30):
trip to the diamond field. Will come back with a
couple of million dollars worth of stones, and then you
can hold that as a guarantee on your investment. So
they left and instead of mining the fields, they apparently
a salted them. And then that guy Harpending, who in
(20:50):
my mind is always the would be Confederate, Right, Harpending
meets their train in the town called Lathrop, California, which
is east of San Francisco. And he had as a
description of them when he sees them, right, he sure does.
He referred to them as both travel stained and weather beaten,
not the most flattering of descriptions. Um, and he referred
(21:13):
to their general appearance having gone through much hardship and privation.
Good good, good turns of phrase. There. Uh Slack was
sleeping at the time, um and Arnold was awake, and
he was sort of keeping watch almost right. He had
like his rifle, UM and that same buckskin satchel. Right, yep,
(21:34):
that's correct. And they say, you know, they look like
they've been mining and sleeping rough and they say, we
have found this spot, and we do have that two
million dollars worth of diamonds we talked about. We divided
it into two packs. But here's the thing. We're crossing
the river. We built a raft, but we're miners, were
not boat rights shipwrights, and so we lost one in
(21:54):
the packs. I know it's bummer, so we just have
this one pack. Uh, that's probably around a million. And
then they hand this package to Harpending and he gives
them a receipt for it, which is weird, but I
guess that's kind of like their deposit totally. So he
gives them the receipt and then he takes it into
a ferry and he goes back across the bay to
(22:16):
San Francisco. There's actually a memoir called The Great Diamond
Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Ashbury Harpending.
That is Harpending's memoir. It's a great, convolutedly long title.
I love it. Here's an exerpt from that. We're gonna
read um entirely. UM arrived at San Francisco. My carriage
(22:38):
was waiting and drove me swiftly to my home where
the other investors were waiting. This is when they were
waiting for proof. We did not waste time on ceremonies.
A sheet I don't know, he's not British, but whatever,
a sheet was spread on my billiard table. I cut
the elaborate fastenings of the sack, and holding the lower corners,
dumped the contents. It seemed like a death many colored
(23:01):
cataractive lights. Yeah, it's impressive, right, and they say, wow,
this looks great. This is literally a sack of precious gems.
But despite their very high opinions of their own intelligence,
they were not complete jabrones. They said, Okay, before we
get any deeper in this, we're gonna take a little
(23:23):
bit of a little bit of the loot, random sampling,
right exactly, let's say about ten percent of it, and
we're gonna carry it to uh, some jewelers. Actually, let's
find Charles Lewis Tiffany over in New York City, the
famous one from the salsa commercials, and uh, let's have
(23:43):
him a praise this random sample from this bag. And
then let's also hire a mining engineer, an actual expert,
to check out this diamond field. Let's also let some
of these stones be on display in a local San
Francisco jewelers store, and you know, kind of kind of
stoked the fires, what the appetite, uh, you know, make
(24:05):
the city start to desire diamonds. Yeah, So in October
of eights e anyone they met at this gentleman's house,
but them of Barlow was The address was twenty three
Street and Madison Avenue for this appraisal. And so Harpending
presents the diamonds and Tiffany took a look, likely through
his jeweler's loop. Um, and he was kind of storing
(24:28):
them into different piles. We had the sapphires, the emeralds,
the rubies, and of course the diamonds. Uh. He was
described as having viewed them gravely in Harpending's memoir and
he really gave them a serious looking over, it, didn't he? Yeah,
and uh, he got it wrong. Here's the Yeah, he
(24:50):
does the inspection and he says, jan driben abiond question
precious stone drivinrm's value. And he can't tell them how
much these are worth exactly until he has you know,
some of his boys take a look. And so two
days later he comes back and he says that these
this sample of stones, just the ones he looked at,
(25:12):
were worth a hundred and fifty grand Harpingdean does a
little math and he says, well, that sack they told
me was worth about a million dollars must actually be
worth one point five million. Here's where the scam gets
really interesting, because it starts like they are really benefiting
from some kind of random occurrences, like the best jeweler
(25:34):
in the world essentially are like one of the most
well known, well regarded jewelers totally borks it, you know,
and just just really like makes the wrong call. That
is something that that are are huckster boys could not
have predicted, right, and that would have been a sign
for a smart scams to to get out, you know, uh,
light out for the territories as Mark Twain. Which but
(25:55):
instead of course that they let it ride. And they
let it ride, so they knew that they lucked out.
They were they were beside themselves with joy and they
were flushed with they were flushed with good fortune. But
let's for us not forget they the investors still have
(26:15):
not seen this miraculous you know diamond field, right, right,
So at some point they are going to have to
see this field before they give them any more money.
So Arnold goes back to England, presumably under a pseudonym.
He buys more uncut gems, and then he and Slack
(26:37):
go to a little piece of nowhere on the border
of Colorado and Wyoming and they literally sprinkle these gems
that they bought just kind of on the ground. Realized
that's not how diamond mining works. Don't you have to
like hack it out of like a rock wall. You know.
I guess they were like the closest they got to
actually mining was maybe an East drag hunt. Yeah, that's wild.
(26:59):
Just sprinkling it in the dirt, that's fantastic. Um. Yeah,
So they take him to this this is in Wyoming,
by the way, and um they bring the investors there finally,
you know, it long last. It takes four days to
get there on horseback. Uh. They even go so far
as pretend that they're lost and make it real to
do to get here. You know, these guys are gonna
(27:20):
be like exhausted and annoyed by the time they get there,
So maybe they'll be a little distracted, I'm thinking, is
what their calculus was yeah, yeah, exactly. And more importantly,
they won't have an accurate memory of the true path
to this, this legendary diamond mine. So Harpending again, we're
using his memoir as a source here. Harpending notes that
(27:43):
eventually people got tired of it. They were kind of
sick of being in the saddle. They were crossed. They
started arguing with each other, and then finally on the
afternoon of June seventy two, they reach the Mesa and
they start looking for diamonds. Apparently Arnold was very much
like an adult at one of those Easter egg things,
(28:05):
and he was, you know, giving them hints. He's like,
I don't know, maybe maybe maybe go by that rock. WHOA,
look at you. Who's my big boy, it's you, Mr
Harbin Harbender, Harpender, Harpender. I like like, I like thinking
of it as being at War two where it's harp
and Ender Um. So yeah, they were pretty pleased. They
(28:31):
I guess we're not fully aware of how the mechanics.
I mean, I guess you can't find in the way
you find gold in a stream. Maybe you can find
little diamonds and the dirt, and I don't know about that.
That seems wrong. I mean, people luck out all the time. Yeah,
that's true, that's true. I guess some could have gotten
knocked loose or whatever through erosion or something. Yeah, But
I I maintain, though, I think you're right. The majority
(28:55):
of diamonds, because of the enormous pressure they have to
be under to transform from coal, enormity of diamonds are
probably on your ground. That's why they're called diamond minds, right,
not diamond fields. Yeah, it's like a diamond sandbox at
this point, which work into it at all um So
at this point they're relatively satisfied. Uh, they found he said,
(29:17):
you know Harpening. Harpening wrote in his memoir it was
a diamond fast enough. Any fool could see that much.
Then we began to have all kinds of luck. For
more than an hour, diamonds were being found in profusion,
together with occasional rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Why a few
pearls were whoa see? Why a few pearls weren't thrown
(29:38):
in for good luck? I have never yet been able
to tell. Probably it wasn't oversight. That's cute. I thought,
for a minute, I thought we were going to get
some pearls now. No, but everybody gets convinced, even people
you should know better. Jan And the mining engineer, was
paid at two thousand, five hundred dollar feet, and he
had also been guaranteed the right should he choose to
(30:01):
purchase one thousand shares of stock in this new diamond
venture at ten dollars a share, and Harpending later notes
he was wildly enthusiastic. You know, you can only watch
so many people just pick gems up off of the
ground before you think you have a good a good
shot at getting some of yourself. And he said to himself,
you know, based on my experience as a mining engineer,
(30:22):
the surrounding land has a pretty good chance of having
gems as well. So he stakes out three thousand acres,
even though the area where Slack and Arnold were perpetrating
their hopes was only an acre itself. He buys three
thousand acres around it, and then he says, these one
(30:44):
thousand shares of stock or easily worth forty dollars each,
and then he later sells his shares at that price,
so he makes in addition to his engineering fee, he
makes thirty thousand dollars and he is the only So
now people who are not the con artists are making
money off of the con. That's how lucky these hoaxters were.
(31:06):
This guy had nothing to do with it. He fell
for it, hook line and sinker, and he still made
thirty grand. Unbelievable. Yeah, you got to appreciate the hutzpah
of these two fellows, and just that they were able
to kind of like Bob and weave and go with
the flow to keep it going, you know. And so
everybody else finishes up their Easter egg hunt and they say, okay,
(31:29):
we gotta leave some people behind the guard the site.
They leave one of the con artists, Slack. They need
to leave another fellow Rubery and they're supposed to guard
the site, but they don't get along with each other,
so in a couple of days they Scedattle as well.
We never learned what happened to Slack. He disappears from
the historical record, but his family legacy carried on when
(31:52):
they invented a very popular messaging system. Yeah, yeah, it's true.
That is a direct result of the Diamond hoax of
eighteen seventy two. Way, who whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, whoa,
I know what's happening. Yes, I know what's happening. Here
are you feeling it? I think the listeners are probably
feeling it. Yeah, where there's no way we're going to
(32:13):
get this done in one episode. Yeah, we probably could,
since podcast is a is sort of a time you know,
there's no time restrictions on podcast. It's all we impose
upon it ourselves. Yeah. But like Dan Carlin Hardcore History,
which is a fantastic show that guy goes on for
like hours, that's a good point. You gotta you gotta
have standards, You gotta set boundaries, and by golly, we're
(32:35):
gonna do that today by making this one another two parter.
Please don't be upset. Um, we wanted to take President's
day off. Is that that? Come on? You can't hold
that against well. Also, we wanted to tell the whole story,
and I'm sorry it's mainly about that. It would be
it would be an hour plus long episode. But we
want to thank you so much as always for tuning in.
(32:57):
This concludes part one of the Great die In Hoax
of eighteen seventy two. Stay tuned for part two. Uh.
In the meantime, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
We especially recommend Ridiculous Historians, where you can meet our
favorite part of the show, your fellow listeners. You know, Ben,
I would say anything with great in the title deserves
the two partner. There we go. Yeah, huge, Thanks to
(33:18):
Casey Pegram, super producer, Exhordan Are, Alex Williams who composed
our theme, Christopher Haciotis, Jonathan Strickland, everyone, God, Bill Murray.
Um Uh tupac tupac was cool. Uh, let's see, I'm
thinking fran Dresser, you love friend Dresser. I've yeah, oh
(33:38):
man doing a new thing. I heard one time years
ago she uh, she tried to pay for dinner at
a fancy restaurant with autograph pictures of herself. I don't
think that currency holds up. I don't know. Man. If
I had been working at the restaurant, I would have
been like, thank you, this is amazing. What's the conversion
rate of fran Dresser autograph pick to dollar? I'd what
(34:00):
what price can you put on joy? Really is what? Uh? No,
Uh they do have an I think she has a
new show out. But yeah, thanks you friend Drescher. We
squashed the beef with Cheryl Crowe, So thank you to you,
Mrs Crowe. Uh. Leonard Nimoy, he's cool. I'm just naming people.
The Golden Girls Leonard Leonard Cohen, great one. Yeah uh.
(34:20):
And thanks to you, Noel Hey. Thanks to you Bett.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:31):
to Ridiculous History. Thanks for tuning in, Ridiculous Historians. I
am Ben. I have found our legendary and legendarily obnoxious
uh sound making machine. Ben, I'm Noel. If you if
you think the batteries have ever been replaced on that,
do you think it's slowly like dying? And that's why
it's just that that that super tin e quality. I
(00:52):
think Okay, first off, I think we definitely cut corners
when whomever purchased this purchased it. The batteries had to
be replaced at some point because this is a p
O J piece of junk. Can you give us some
other samples? Shot them from the repertoire? Sure, but they all,
I want to worry, they all go on a little
too long. Here. I'll do one. I'll pass it to
you so we can share in the things. Yeah, okay, um,
(01:16):
oh of course, Uh. There there's some classic hits here.
But let's go with something a little bit, a little
bit out of the normal. Let's go with Poco stick.
See how they see how they said they go on
too long? Here you go knock one out. And also
(01:37):
it sounds. I don't know. Never mind. I was gonna
say it sounds like a clown masturbating. But that's not
that's not okay, this is accurate. You know what, Maybe
we leave it is, keep it in. I feel like
that's articulate. Let's see, do you do you think there's
a diamonds and pearls sound cue. Um, there's definitely a
couple of disaster sounds. You think we'll get suited for this?
(01:59):
I I will give you diamonds and emper And that
didn't go long enough. I was trying to do a
siren diamonds and pearls mash up remix thing. I say
diamonds and pros because they were talking about only one
of those two things. It's diamonds and about pearls in
today's episode. Well, uh, there have been counterfeit pearls of
plenty we do. I shouldn't have handed this to you.
(02:23):
I almost I thought, let's just do it once, we'll go,
but but we do have to shout out the inspiration
behind the perfect sound cue. Of course that's our super producer,
Casey Pegrum. No. You know I'm interested because you said
diamonds right. Uh diamonds in a way because this is
(02:44):
also a bit of a crime story. It's a bit
of a con right, you know they say diamonds are
a girl's best friend. Uh was that a song or
did that come from the de Beers company? It was
a Liz Taylor thing, right, It's all de Beers, the
de Beers family and the way. In the same way
that Edward Burns made bacon a thing with the Beer's
family basically made diamonds a thing. And while they might
(03:05):
be a girl's best friend, um, they certainly aren't a
friend of of the working class or the folks in
uh third world countries that are you know, subjected to
horrible conditions to mind them from the earth. For the
privileged classes of countries, they'll never set fun in. Yeah,
this has been a personal hobby horse of mind since
(03:28):
that at times several years ago when I got married
and I had to go diamond shopping and I found
out about the whole racket. We have a great episode
about that on Stuff they Don't Want you to Know,
with our very own Lauren Vogel Bombs, who was the
first guest on Ridiculous History. You're right, she was, wasn't
she Yeah, what are we talking about with her? She
was the fact Genie. Yeah, the fact Genie, which we had. Okay,
(03:50):
this is funny. We will get to an episode today,
but you might enjoy this, folks. Collaboratively, we were all
pitching these ideas of segments. I'm a very big believer inside.
I think they're cool for shows. Uh. And we had
we had a time that never made it off the list. Uh,
maybe we'll dig that up, but we digress. Diamonds, Yes,
as you said, an old diamonds do have a dark side,
(04:12):
and they've been super popular for years and years. Travel
with us back to California, back to the West in
the eighteen hundreds, you know, we're we're all familiar with
the California gold rush, right. That's the reason the San
Francisco forty Niners are named the San Francisco forty Niners.
People thought you could make a fortune hunting gold or
(04:33):
or mining silver maybe in Nevada, and so everybody was
kind of speculating and like, what's the next big thing, right,
is it gonna be like, I don't know, platinum, Is
it gonna be copper, Is it going to be diamonds?
Possibly scorpion filled paperweights. Yeah, I was gonna hold my
likey scorpion until next next episode, but I think we're
(04:54):
just doing the one today, I think. So it's a
very beautiful talisman you've got there. Yeah, check this out.
So this is a glass encased preserved scorpion of no
small size from my last trip out to uh to Arizona. Actually, hey,
that's just the part of the country that we're talking about. See,
I had I had to like a loose theme, man.
(05:16):
Uh So people are all trying to strike it rich.
And you know, whenever there's the speculative market. We see
this now, even even with stocks day, whenever there's a
speculative market, people will tell you, well, the thing that
just became a boom, you know, the time for you
to enter that is past. You've got to look for
the next thing, right, And people didn't have the benefit
(05:36):
of communication technology, or at least not at the time
we have today. So you had to trust people and
you had to you know, you had to stake a
lot on somebody's character, right. That's why so many people
rode the rails and traveled across the continent to seek
(05:58):
their fortune in the West, and in eighteen seventy. San
Francisco had already swelled to a city with a population
of like a hundred and fifty thousand people. And that's
where we meet one of the main characters of our story.
You're talking about Arnold and Slack. Oh yeah, Philip Arnold, right, right,
(06:19):
But what a great name for a for a duo
of huckster's right, Arnold and Slack. So Philip Arnold. It
was from Kentucky. He was He didn't have the best
formal education. He had a job as an apprentice to
a haberdasher. He was a veteran of the Mexican War.
He had gone, like so many souls, to the gold
(06:40):
rush in forty nine, and he had spent By the
time of our story takes place, he had spent about
twenty years working in mining operations in the West, and
he did okay. He eventually made enough money they could
go back to Kentucky. He got a farm, he got married,
had some kids, and historians think he made a little
(07:01):
bit of money, sure, but you know, he didn't want
to rest on his laurels. He got a little squirrel
in a on eighteen seventy he had a gig working
as a bookkeeper for a company called the Diamond Drill
Company in San Francisco. It was a drill manufacturer that
used those famous diamond headed tips for their drill bits, right. Um,
(07:22):
So while he was keeping the books, he became pretty
fascinated in these these drill bits, um that were you know,
so widely used here. And he even like really did
his homework and started like researching how the material worked,
the whole trade of drilling, drill making, I don't know.
(07:43):
And uh in November he had amassed himself a small
cash of uncut diamonds. You know, I love it, man,
It's like the billionaires go bag. Just there's a few
things as sketchy as a bag at loose diamond I
love especially, so when you call him loose diamonds, that's right, um.
And you know, the idea is that he probably uh
(08:06):
pilfred these throughout the years from his boss. And he
had some other uncut gems mixed in there as well.
He had some sapphires and some rubies and some garnets
and it's pretty likely that he bought those in Arizona
from some of the Indian tribes there. Yeah, and he
also at this time got a partner, and that's the
(08:29):
guy who mentioned earlier black John Slack and Smithsonian magazine
and their article on this subject has a great description
of John Slack. They say that he is the listless,
taciturn foil to the voluble and cunning Arnold. Slack was
a cousin of Arnold's and he was also a veteran
(08:51):
for the Mexican War. He had gone chasing Golden forty nine,
but he was going to be the kind of the
assistant to Arnold in there too and con because you see,
they decided to commit hoax. They saw everybody in San
Francisco in the area going mad with greed and speculation
because of the gold rush. Like the gold rush literally
(09:13):
did make some people's fortunes, right, because you even had
like the Comstock load in Nevada, which was this massive,
massive pocket of silver underneath this mountain peak that was
just churning out silver just by the boatload, right, And
it really contributed to this speculation gone wild kind of
mentality because you did have some people that were absolutely
(09:36):
getting rich overnight. If you've ever seen the TV series Deadwood,
you get a sense of that. Um there's a few
characters that strike it rich and I think one of
them Ellsworth. You know, he goes from kind of being
just sort of this like pretty working class, kind of
like ruffian around town to essentially having to figure out
what it means to be like a gentleman and uh
(09:57):
and all that stuff. And it's actually pretty funny the
way they portray He's a great character. Um, but yeah,
you kind of see it from the ground up there,
and that was very real, Yeah it was. And people
were so convinced that they would be able to take
advantage of this bubble like any other bubble, like that
thing with the tulips over in Europe, like uh, Beanie
(10:18):
babies podcasts, my podcast. Oh it hurts you wound me,
but I don't think you're too far wrong, like any bubble.
People were convinced that, you know, uh, these other folks
might be rubes, but I'm the smart guy, you know,
I'm the captain smarty pants who was gonna it was
gonna profit here. And that led to a situation where
some of these businessmen in San Francisco, where shall we say,
(10:41):
over confidence and you know, people would pitch them these
wild ideas and as soon as they heard the m
word mining. Then they were on board. They would be like,
shut up, shut your pie hole. I've heard enough to
take my money. Take my money, don't care where where, where,
where where, even in South Africa. It's fine. Give it
to me, take it to to one of those places
(11:02):
you just described, and then come back with gems. And
so here's how they instituted their scam. So Slack and
Arnold kind of dressed up as prospectors, you know, like
I'm rough. They've been sleeping, uh in like a situation
that Tom Waits was sleeping in that excellent what was
that Netflix film? Oh buster scrugs, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom
(11:25):
Waits as the old prospector was I think the best
one in that anthology series. I really liked that moment
where James Franco asked the guy if it's his first
time being hanged? Also great, there were a lot of
greater I just thought that Tom Waits one was really moving.
So picture Tom Waits and then film that's what they
look like when they go to, uh, the office of
(11:46):
a businessman named George Roberts, and their clutching a leather satchel.
So uh, they announced this businessman George Roberts that this
buckskin pouch they're carrying was full of pretty valuable loot
and they were hoping to deposit it in a bank
if it if it wasn't so late. So instead they
(12:07):
decided to you know, they saw this place. This guy
was around, I guess, you know, closing up or like
doing some book work or whatever, and they were hoping
that he helped them out because it was you know, oh,
there's rough diamonds in your Oops, i've said too much,
said too much, good sir. Yeah, that's exactly how it works, right,
You get you hook people with that because you make
(12:30):
them feel like you've now entered into a bond of
privileged information or trust. So the way Arnold recalls this
was that the businessman Roberts was pretty impressed by this
discovery and he said, Okay, you guys, you can trust me.
(12:54):
I will keep your secret. You go explore this area
further and fig route what we're working with here. And
then Arnold knew that the best way to get this
word to spread was to get this businessman they didn't
know from mccanna paint to promise that he would be
quiet about it. Apparently, Roberts was cartoonishly bad at keeping
(13:18):
his promise. As soon as the guys were done, I mean,
thank god he didn't have a cell phone. As soon
as the guys twitter account right, right, Roberts is riding
around town. He finds one of the most important businessmen
in San Francisco, guy named William Ralston, who also owns
the Bank of California. And you could kind of picture
Robert's motivation, right, He's trying to get a big He's
(13:40):
trying to curry some favor, you know, and he wants
a piece of the diamond pie. Uh. Ralston gets worried
of this, and you know, you can picture the like
Morse code montage going on here with dits and dashes
and dots. Uh. And he sends a telegram to another businessman.
He knows. This guy has the best name you're talking about,
(14:00):
Ashbury Harpending. Yes, he's described multiple times as somewhat shady. Yeah,
I mean, I don't know, but with it with a
name like that, you've got the air of respectability about you,
so you're allowed to kind of, you know, have some
secret shady dealings. Who. Yeah, he had actually been accused
of high treason though, um eight years prior to that.
(14:22):
When he attempted to sail out of San Francisco Bay
with a ship that he was going to use as
a Confederate raider um along the coast of California. Pretty weird, right, Yeah,
what does that even mean? Ben? What do you mean
he was gonna go a raiding, a rapin and a
pilage in. Yeah, it's like pillage ade harrying the Union
(14:44):
forces on the West coast. I guess was his idea
or yeah, you know, he clearly he hadn't thought it
through all the way. But we we want to show
you how the web is spreading the web of this misinformation.
While this is happening concurrently, Arnold and Slack are returning
(15:05):
to Roberts and they say, okay, we wanted to keep
our word. We want to update you. We're pretty excited
by what we found. Yeah. Yeah, they came back with
more loot. Yeah they they you know, valued off the
top of their heads at about six hundred thousand dollars,
which is just that is an absolute fortune in those days. Right. Yeah,
(15:27):
let's do an inflation calculator just to give you a
sense of how much money that was. Drumroll, please, six
hundred thousand dollars in eighteen seventy was equal to about
eleven point eight million dollars today. So they walked up
(15:49):
to this guy and they said, hey, you seem cool,
thanks for keeping our secret. We have come back with
like almost twelve million dollar is worth of gems and
that's just the sixty pounds we could carry. Yeah, that's right, um.
And so they were kind of trying to just pull
(16:11):
him in deeper, and they could see those dollar signs
in his eyes just starting to flash like something like
a cartoon character. And so Robert's bit completely, he totally
took debit and started pulling in other businessmen, um, saying, look,
this is really real. Now. These guys are like they've
got a spot they're going to and bringing me these
diamonds from. We gotta figure out where it is, right yeah, yeah,
(16:33):
and yeah the jewels authenticated as well. So these were
not like fake jewels. I mean, this was they were
They were sort of I guess what you consider low
quality diamonds, right right, right, they were diamonds. Yeah, they
were definitely diamonds. That's the thing that we're real diamonds.
And they had had a jeweler say that and confirm it.
But remember we said these businessmen were overconfident. One common
(16:57):
thing about all great cons, all great scams, is that
they depend upon the human failings of people, in this case,
greed and over confidence. Because Roberts goes back to the
guy Ralston who owns the Bank of California, goes back
to that shady would be Confederate sailor Harpenden. And then
(17:19):
they also get to San Francisco miners who have already
made it. Two entrepreneurs named William Lent and a guy
named General George S. Dodge, and together these five men say, look,
we know the deal. Let's take these two yokels, these
two dumb dumbs from Kentucky, and let's buy them out.
Let's cut them out of the picture, and let's make
(17:39):
some serious scratch. And so they say, Okay, the easiest
way to do this is we'll buy out their interests
or their their right to mind in this land, yeah
wherever that might be right, Because they still didn't know,
and honestly, I mean, that's what they're that's what they're
angling for too. It's like they're willing to go out
of pocket on good faith, just in the hopes that
(18:00):
that will you know, be led to this magical trope
because they're picturing a like comstock load, but the diamond version,
you know, like they can just constantly pull precious stones
from the earth and be uh just gazillionaires. Yeah. Yeah,
and they know how to tease the money out. So
the five big shots go to the prospectors and they say,
(18:23):
all right, hey, we're gonna we just want to buy
your share. And then at first the prospectors say, uh,
you know, I need to think about it. I don't
I don't feel too too good about making a decision
right now. So they turn up the pressure and they
start offering them more money, and eventually Slack, who is
(18:43):
kind of the at least the less outgoing of the two, says, uh,
you know, I will, I'll sell, but I'll solve for
a hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, fifty now and fifty after
we come back and bring you a third haul, right
from from this secret mind. Um oh. Once he gets
the first half of the hundred grand, he and his
(19:04):
buddy head back off to England to take that money
and buy more uncut gems. Right. Uh. And this is
July of eighteen seventy one. They're using fake names. Uh,
they didn't deviate too far, at least Arnold didn't. Arnold
became on doll and Uh Slack used his middle name,
which was bircham Um. They bought twenty grand worth of
(19:25):
rough diamonds and rubies, spent many thousands of dollars on
other diamonds and rubies. Um all told. They had several
thousand stones that they were bringing back because they had
to have that wow factor. You know, this is the
third the third haul. They needed to show that this
was a producing mine and that it was worth what
they were being paid for it to keep the Cohn alive, right,
(19:47):
exactly exactly, So there's still thirty grand up right, thirty
more than they had. And there's a there's an interesting
thing that the guy in London they buy the diamonds
from is a man named lee A Pold Keller. Leopold
remembers thinking there was something weird about this, because he says,
I asked them where they were going to have the
(20:08):
diamonds cut, and they don't say anything, because of course
they have no plan to cut these. They want to
come up with another bag of loose stones and show
these Uh, businessmen in San Francisco that they have. They
just keep finding stuff. So they get back there it's
seventy one and they say, look, we'll make one more
(20:30):
trip to the diamond field. Will come back with a
couple of million dollars worth of stones, and then you
can hold that as a guarantee on your investment. So
they left and instead of mining the fields, they apparently
a salted them. And then that guy Harpending, who in
(20:50):
my mind is always the would be Confederate, Right, Harpending
meets their train in the town called Lathrop, California, which
is east of San Francisco. And he had as a
description of them when he sees them, right, he sure does.
He referred to them as both travel stained and weather beaten,
not the most flattering of descriptions. Um, and he referred
(21:13):
to their general appearance having gone through much hardship and privation.
Good good, good turns of phrase. There. Uh Slack was
sleeping at the time, um and Arnold was awake, and
he was sort of keeping watch almost right. He had
like his rifle, UM and that same buckskin satchel. Right, yep,
(21:34):
that's correct. And they say, you know, they look like
they've been mining and sleeping rough and they say, we
have found this spot, and we do have that two
million dollars worth of diamonds we talked about. We divided
it into two packs. But here's the thing. We're crossing
the river. We built a raft, but we're miners, were
not boat rights shipwrights, and so we lost one in
(21:54):
the packs. I know it's bummer, so we just have
this one pack. Uh, that's probably around a million. And
then they hand this package to Harpending and he gives
them a receipt for it, which is weird, but I
guess that's kind of like their deposit totally. So he
gives them the receipt and then he takes it into
a ferry and he goes back across the bay to
(22:16):
San Francisco. There's actually a memoir called The Great Diamond
Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Ashbury Harpending.
That is Harpending's memoir. It's a great, convolutedly long title.
I love it. Here's an exerpt from that. We're gonna
read um entirely. UM arrived at San Francisco. My carriage
(22:38):
was waiting and drove me swiftly to my home where
the other investors were waiting. This is when they were
waiting for proof. We did not waste time on ceremonies.
A sheet I don't know, he's not British, but whatever,
a sheet was spread on my billiard table. I cut
the elaborate fastenings of the sack, and holding the lower corners,
dumped the contents. It seemed like a death many colored
(23:01):
cataractive lights. Yeah, it's impressive, right, and they say, wow,
this looks great. This is literally a sack of precious gems.
But despite their very high opinions of their own intelligence,
they were not complete jabrones. They said, Okay, before we
get any deeper in this, we're gonna take a little
(23:23):
bit of a little bit of the loot, random sampling,
right exactly, let's say about ten percent of it, and
we're gonna carry it to uh, some jewelers. Actually, let's
find Charles Lewis Tiffany over in New York City, the
famous one from the salsa commercials, and uh, let's have
(23:43):
him a praise this random sample from this bag. And
then let's also hire a mining engineer, an actual expert,
to check out this diamond field. Let's also let some
of these stones be on display in a local San
Francisco jewelers store, and you know, kind of kind of
stoked the fires, what the appetite, uh, you know, make
(24:05):
the city start to desire diamonds. Yeah, So in October
of eights e anyone they met at this gentleman's house,
but them of Barlow was The address was twenty three
Street and Madison Avenue for this appraisal. And so Harpending
presents the diamonds and Tiffany took a look, likely through
his jeweler's loop. Um, and he was kind of storing
(24:28):
them into different piles. We had the sapphires, the emeralds,
the rubies, and of course the diamonds. Uh. He was
described as having viewed them gravely in Harpending's memoir and
he really gave them a serious looking over, it, didn't he? Yeah,
and uh, he got it wrong. Here's the Yeah, he
(24:50):
does the inspection and he says, jan driben abiond question
precious stone drivinrm's value. And he can't tell them how
much these are worth exactly until he has you know,
some of his boys take a look. And so two
days later he comes back and he says that these
this sample of stones, just the ones he looked at,
(25:12):
were worth a hundred and fifty grand Harpingdean does a
little math and he says, well, that sack they told
me was worth about a million dollars must actually be
worth one point five million. Here's where the scam gets
really interesting, because it starts like they are really benefiting
from some kind of random occurrences, like the best jeweler
(25:34):
in the world essentially are like one of the most
well known, well regarded jewelers totally borks it, you know,
and just just really like makes the wrong call. That
is something that that are are huckster boys could not
have predicted, right, and that would have been a sign
for a smart scams to to get out, you know, uh,
light out for the territories as Mark Twain. Which but
(25:55):
instead of course that they let it ride. And they
let it ride, so they knew that they lucked out.
They were they were beside themselves with joy and they
were flushed with they were flushed with good fortune. But
let's for us not forget they the investors still have
(26:15):
not seen this miraculous you know diamond field, right, right,
So at some point they are going to have to
see this field before they give them any more money.
So Arnold goes back to England, presumably under a pseudonym.
He buys more uncut gems, and then he and Slack
(26:37):
go to a little piece of nowhere on the border
of Colorado and Wyoming and they literally sprinkle these gems
that they bought just kind of on the ground. Realized
that's not how diamond mining works. Don't you have to
like hack it out of like a rock wall. You know.
I guess they were like the closest they got to
actually mining was maybe an East drag hunt. Yeah, that's wild.
(26:59):
Just sprinkling it in the dirt, that's fantastic. Um. Yeah,
So they take him to this this is in Wyoming,
by the way, and um they bring the investors there finally,
you know, it long last. It takes four days to
get there on horseback. Uh. They even go so far
as pretend that they're lost and make it real to
do to get here. You know, these guys are gonna
(27:20):
be like exhausted and annoyed by the time they get there,
So maybe they'll be a little distracted, I'm thinking, is
what their calculus was yeah, yeah, exactly. And more importantly,
they won't have an accurate memory of the true path
to this, this legendary diamond mine. So Harpending again, we're
using his memoir as a source here. Harpending notes that
(27:43):
eventually people got tired of it. They were kind of
sick of being in the saddle. They were crossed. They
started arguing with each other, and then finally on the
afternoon of June seventy two, they reach the Mesa and
they start looking for diamonds. Apparently Arnold was very much
like an adult at one of those Easter egg things,
(28:05):
and he was, you know, giving them hints. He's like,
I don't know, maybe maybe maybe go by that rock. WHOA,
look at you. Who's my big boy, it's you, Mr
Harbin Harbender, Harpender, Harpender. I like like, I like thinking
of it as being at War two where it's harp
and Ender Um. So yeah, they were pretty pleased. They
(28:31):
I guess we're not fully aware of how the mechanics.
I mean, I guess you can't find in the way
you find gold in a stream. Maybe you can find
little diamonds and the dirt, and I don't know about that.
That seems wrong. I mean, people luck out all the time. Yeah,
that's true, that's true. I guess some could have gotten
knocked loose or whatever through erosion or something. Yeah, But
I I maintain, though, I think you're right. The majority
(28:55):
of diamonds, because of the enormous pressure they have to
be under to transform from coal, enormity of diamonds are
probably on your ground. That's why they're called diamond minds, right,
not diamond fields. Yeah, it's like a diamond sandbox at
this point, which work into it at all um So
at this point they're relatively satisfied. Uh, they found he said,
(29:17):
you know Harpening. Harpening wrote in his memoir it was
a diamond fast enough. Any fool could see that much.
Then we began to have all kinds of luck. For
more than an hour, diamonds were being found in profusion,
together with occasional rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Why a few
pearls were whoa see? Why a few pearls weren't thrown
(29:38):
in for good luck? I have never yet been able
to tell. Probably it wasn't oversight. That's cute. I thought,
for a minute, I thought we were going to get
some pearls now. No, but everybody gets convinced, even people
you should know better. Jan And the mining engineer, was
paid at two thousand, five hundred dollar feet, and he
had also been guaranteed the right should he choose to
(30:01):
purchase one thousand shares of stock in this new diamond
venture at ten dollars a share, and Harpending later notes
he was wildly enthusiastic. You know, you can only watch
so many people just pick gems up off of the
ground before you think you have a good a good
shot at getting some of yourself. And he said to himself,
you know, based on my experience as a mining engineer,
(30:22):
the surrounding land has a pretty good chance of having
gems as well. So he stakes out three thousand acres,
even though the area where Slack and Arnold were perpetrating
their hopes was only an acre itself. He buys three
thousand acres around it, and then he says, these one
(30:44):
thousand shares of stock or easily worth forty dollars each,
and then he later sells his shares at that price,
so he makes in addition to his engineering fee, he
makes thirty thousand dollars and he is the only So
now people who are not the con artists are making
money off of the con. That's how lucky these hoaxters were.
(31:06):
This guy had nothing to do with it. He fell
for it, hook line and sinker, and he still made
thirty grand. Unbelievable. Yeah, you got to appreciate the hutzpah
of these two fellows, and just that they were able
to kind of like Bob and weave and go with
the flow to keep it going, you know. And so
everybody else finishes up their Easter egg hunt and they say, okay,
(31:29):
we gotta leave some people behind the guard the site.
They leave one of the con artists, Slack. They need
to leave another fellow Rubery and they're supposed to guard
the site, but they don't get along with each other,
so in a couple of days they Scedattle as well.
We never learned what happened to Slack. He disappears from
the historical record, but his family legacy carried on when
(31:52):
they invented a very popular messaging system. Yeah, yeah, it's true.
That is a direct result of the Diamond hoax of
eighteen seventy two. Way, who whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, whoa,
I know what's happening. Yes, I know what's happening. Here
are you feeling it? I think the listeners are probably
feeling it. Yeah, where there's no way we're going to
(32:13):
get this done in one episode. Yeah, we probably could,
since podcast is a is sort of a time you know,
there's no time restrictions on podcast. It's all we impose
upon it ourselves. Yeah. But like Dan Carlin Hardcore History,
which is a fantastic show that guy goes on for
like hours, that's a good point. You gotta you gotta
have standards, You gotta set boundaries, and by golly, we're
(32:35):
gonna do that today by making this one another two parter.
Please don't be upset. Um, we wanted to take President's
day off. Is that that? Come on? You can't hold
that against well. Also, we wanted to tell the whole story,
and I'm sorry it's mainly about that. It would be
it would be an hour plus long episode. But we
want to thank you so much as always for tuning in.
(32:57):
This concludes part one of the Great die In Hoax
of eighteen seventy two. Stay tuned for part two. Uh.
In the meantime, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
We especially recommend Ridiculous Historians, where you can meet our
favorite part of the show, your fellow listeners. You know, Ben,
I would say anything with great in the title deserves
the two partner. There we go. Yeah, huge, Thanks to
(33:18):
Casey Pegram, super producer, Exhordan Are, Alex Williams who composed
our theme, Christopher Haciotis, Jonathan Strickland, everyone, God, Bill Murray.
Um Uh tupac tupac was cool. Uh, let's see, I'm
thinking fran Dresser, you love friend Dresser. I've yeah, oh
(33:38):
man doing a new thing. I heard one time years
ago she uh, she tried to pay for dinner at
a fancy restaurant with autograph pictures of herself. I don't
think that currency holds up. I don't know. Man. If
I had been working at the restaurant, I would have
been like, thank you, this is amazing. What's the conversion
rate of fran Dresser autograph pick to dollar? I'd what
(34:00):
what price can you put on joy? Really is what? Uh? No,
Uh they do have an I think she has a
new show out. But yeah, thanks you friend Drescher. We
squashed the beef with Cheryl Crowe, So thank you to you,
Mrs Crowe. Uh. Leonard Nimoy, he's cool. I'm just naming people.
The Golden Girls Leonard Leonard Cohen, great one. Yeah uh.
(34:20):
And thanks to you, Noel Hey. Thanks to you Bett.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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