Transcriber’s note: Table of Contents added by Transcriber and placed
into the Public Domain.
Contents
Page
PREFACE
CHAPTER I 11
CHAPTER II 18
CHAPTER III 25
CHAPTER IV 32
CHAPTER V 40
CHAPTER VI 45
CHAPTER VII 55
CHAPTER VIII 65
CHAPTER IX 73
CHAPTER X 78
CHAPTER XI 83
CHAPTER XII 89
CHAPTER XIII 98
CHAPTER XIV 109
CHAPTER XV 114
CHAPTER XVI 120
CHAPTER XVII 128
CHAPTER XVIII 139
CHAPTER XIX 146
CHAPTER XX 159
CHAPTER XXI 168
CHAPTER XXII 174
CHAPTER XXIII 180
CHAPTER XXIV 185
CHAPTER XXV 191
CHAPTER XXVI 201
CHAPTER XXVII 206
CHAPTER XXVIII 212
CHAPTER XXIX 217
CHAPTER XXX 224
CHAPTER XXXI 230
CHAPTER XXXII 243
CHAPTER XXXIII 250
CHAPTER XXXIV 255
CHAPTER XXXV 259
CHAPTER XXXVI 267
CHAPTER XXXVII 271
CHAPTER XXXVIII 278
[Illustration: YOURS WITH BEST WISHES, ASBURY HARPENDING
JUNE 20, 1915--AGE 76]
THE
Great Diamond Hoax
AND
Other Stirring Incidents
IN THE LIFE OF
ASBURY HARPENDING
□□□□
EDITED BY
JAMES H. WILKINS
□□□□
Copyright by
A. HARPENDING, 1913
□□□□
The James H. Barry Co.,
San Francisco.
[Illustration: HARPENDING CREST]
To my friend, unassuming John A. Finch, of Spokane, Washington, a
man of great ability, possessing, according to my ideals, all the
attributes of greatness, as a token of my deep esteem, this book is
dedicated.
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
On my return to California, after an absence of many years, my
attention was called, for the first time, to the fact that my name
had been associated unpleasantly with the great diamond fraud that
startled the financial world nearly half a century ago. Plain duty to
my family name and reputation compelled me to tell the whole story of
that strange incident so far as my knowledge of it extends. I sincerely
trust that a candid reading of these pages will satisfy the public that
I was only a dupe, along with some of the most distinguished financiers
of the last generation. Concerning two of the historians who maligned
me, I am without redress. They are dead. The latest author, Mr. John P.
Young, repeated the accusation of his predecessors in his history of
San Francisco. This gentleman has admitted that he merely copied the
story of the earlier works, having no personal knowledge of events at
that period, and has handsomely admitted, over his signature, that he
unconsciously did me an injustice.
To the diamond story I have added, at the request of friends, some of
my experiences and reminiscences of California of the early days.
ASBURY HARPENDING.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY YEARS--MY VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA.
My father was one of the largest landed proprietors of Kentucky,
in the southwestern section of the State. That was still on the
frontier of the Far West. Beyond stretched the land of enchantment and
adventure--the plains, the mountains, the unbroken solitudes, the wild
Indians, the buffaloes and the Golden State on the shore of the Pacific.
Youngsters whose minds are occupied today with baseball and tennis
and who still retain a lingering love for taffy, sixty years ago on
the frontier were dreaming of wild adventures that were nearly always
realized to some extent. We lived on the border line, where the onward
wave of emigration broke and scattered over the vast vacancies of the
West, and it is hardly saying too much to assert that fully seven boys
in ten were caught and carried forward with the flood before they had
gone very far in their teens.
For myself, I simply gave up to the spirit of the times. At the age
of fifteen I ran away from college to join an aggregation of young
gentlemen but little older than myself, who enlisted under the banner
of General Walker, the filibuster. The objective was the conquest of
Nicaragua. The Walker expedition sailed to its destination and what
followed is a matter of well known history. But for my companions and
myself, numbering 120 in all, it ended in a humiliating disaster.
For, as we sailed down the Mississippi River the long arm of Uncle Sam
reached out and caught us, like a bunch of truant kids. I managed to
elude my captors, and after various wanderings and strange experience
made my way to the paternal home in a condition that made the Prodigal
Son look like 30 cents.
That didn’t abate the wandering fever in the slightest and in order
that I might not commit myself to another Walker expedition, my father
consented that I should try my luck in California and I started with
his blessing and what seemed to me a liberal grub stake. I had just
turned sixteen.
Instead of going to New York and taking passage from that port, I
decided to travel down the Mississippi River, have a look at New
Orleans and leave on one of the various steamers there that connected
with the Pacific Mail at Darien.
Here an unforeseen calamity very nearly upset all my plans. My money
consisted of currency, issued under the auspices of the various
States. A financial storm of some kind had just swept the country and
the currency became legal tender only in the borders of the State of
issuance. All that I could realize on my bills was barely enough to buy
a steerage ticket to California. That, together with five dollars in
gold coin and a revolver comprised my earthly possessions.
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR AT 16
Taken just before his migration to California]
At Panama we were crowded into a small steamer designed for about 400
passengers, but nearly 1,000 were crammed into it. Conditions in the
steerage were appalling. Besides, the ship was under-provisioned and
we soon ran short of anything like vegetables and fruit. The purser
had thriftily laid in a large private supply of oranges and bananas for
sale in San Francisco. These he had divided into two caches. The hungry
mob seized on one of them, located between decks, in the night, and
cleaned it up to the uttermost peel. The purser knew only too well that
the next night would witness the disappearance of the balance of his
property. He was in despair. An inspiration seized me.
“How much will you take cash for the lot?” I asked him.
“Give me $10 for them and it’s a bargain,” he answered.
I fished out that lonesome $5 piece, paid it on account and made some
vague excuse about getting the other five from my bunk. I was given
permission also to hold a fruit auction sale on the upper deck.
Being a fruit peddler shocked my southern ideas of a gentleman’s
employment. Nothing but downright poverty could have driven me to it.
However, I took the edge off the thing as far as possible by employing
an itinerant gambler, also dead broke, to act as general salesman and
orator while I took in the cash. He had a voice like a fog horn and the
gall of a highwayman. He cried our wares with such success that in a
few minutes the whole ship’s company was engaged in mad competition to
buy oranges and bananas at five for a half. It would have been just the
same if I had made the price five for a dollar.
Money rolled in faster than I could count it. I could see that my
chief of staff was “knocking down” on me in a shameless way, but I
didn’t have time to check his activities--in fact, I didn’t care. In a
little over an hour, the last orange and banana had vanished. I settled
accounts with the purser and counted my capital. I had a little over
$400 to the good, enough to make a decent start in California.
I do not tell this incident because it is noteworthy in itself.
Instances were then so common of needy gentlemen who extricated
themselves from the financial bog by some shift which in other days
they would have thought ignoble--almost disgraceful--that this event
would not be worth recalling; but in the peculiar way that destiny is
worked out, it had a decisive part in directing very important matters
of the future. And it has been my observation that the most impressive
movements in the lives of most of us have been determined more by
chance than by a fixed purpose.
Among those who watched my fruit sale with interest was a gentleman
named Harvey Evarts. He was a successful plumber in California and
was returning from a trip to the “States,” whither he had gone with a
party of bankers, mine owners and others of fortune commensurate with
his own. Plumbers were not in 1857 the financial giants that they have
become today. Still their stars were in the ascendant and Mr. Evarts
was one of the brilliant luminaries in the sky.
This gentleman approached me after the sale. I had transferred at once
from the steerage to the upper deck, as became my altered fortune, and
he congratulated me in a pleasant way on my extraordinary good luck.
I told him all about myself in boy fashion and when we reached San
Francisco we had become so well acquainted that Mr. Evarts invited me
to accompany him to Camptonville, then a great mining district, now
off the map, so far as the yellow metal goes, where he had important
interests.
Placer mining was on the toboggan in 1857, when I arrived in
California. All the great “bars” and gulches had been located and
worked out. Very few individual strikes were made after that date.
I do not know whether it was good judgment or just a case of pure
“nigger luck,” but at all events it happened that even in those days
of declining fortune, every suggestion that Mr. Evarts gave me turned
to gold. He advised me to take a chance at the head of a couple of
abandoned gulches. In both cases I struck it rich enough to add $6,000
to my working capital. Again he suggested a lease of a hydraulic mine
on what was known as Railroad Hill, which had been the ruin of several
experienced miners. I followed his advice and after being brought
to the verge of bankruptcy struck it rich, to my way of thinking,
and cleaned up finally with $60,000 to my credit, all before my 17th
birthday.
I visited the newly discovered Comstock Lode. Didn’t like it, for deep
mining seemed too slow a way of making money. Later I had a spectacular
race with Jim Fair, then a hustling prospector, to locate a mining
claim in Utah. But the tales of mountains gorged with wealth vanished
when we got there.
Then I began to listen to a lot of mining camp talk about Mexico and
its riches. California and Nevada were growing dull to my way of
thinking and I turned my thoughts to the land of Montezuma.