Everything about The Diamond Hoax Of 1872 totally explained
The
diamond hoax of 1872 triggered a brief
diamond craze along the borders of
Wyoming and
Colorado,
USA.
In
1871, veteran
prospectors and cousins
Philip Arnold and
John Slack traveled to
San Francisco. They reported a
diamond mine and produced a bag full of diamonds. They deposited the diamonds in the vault of the
Bank of California.
Prominent financiers convinced the reluctant Arnold and Slack to speak. The cousins offered to lead investigators to the
Wyoming field. Investors hired a mining engineer to examine the field. From a railroad stop in western Wyoming, Arnold and Slack led the inspection party to a huge field with various gems on the ground. Tiffany's evaluated the stones as being worth $150,000.
When the engineer made his report, more businessmen expressed interest. They included
William C. Ralston,
Horace Greeley,
George McClellan, Baron von
Rothschild, General
George S. Dodge and
Charles Tiffany of
Tiffany and Co. Tiffany's convinced the cousins to sell their interest for $660,000 and formed their own mining company. Financiers sent mining engineer Henry Janin, who bought stock in the company, to reevaluate the find, and he sent the press wildly optimistic reports.
Government geologist
Clarence King and two other geologists decided to inspect the unusual field. King uncovered a stone partially polished and definitely not natural. He noticed the field had diamonds,
rubies,
emeralds and
sapphires in the same area and many of the gems were in places they couldn't have reached by any natural means. King notified investors.
Further investigation showed Arnold and Slack bought cheap cast-off diamonds, refuse of
gem cutting, in
London and
Amsterdam for $35,000 and scattered them to "salt" the ground. Most of the gems were originally from
South Africa.
Arnold returned to his home in
Elizabethtown, Kentucky and became a successful businessman and banker. Diamond-company investors sued him, and he settled the cases for an undisclosed sum. Years later he died of
pneumonia after he was wounded in a shootout with a rival banker.
John Slack dropped from public view. He moved to St. Louis, where he owned a
casket-making company. He later became a casket maker and
undertaker in
White Oaks, New Mexico, where he lived quietly and died in 1896 at the age of 76.
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