ATDTDA (7): (C of C) / Leadville; Adams on silver

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

Peter Petto wrote:
> 
> Leadville - another Colorado mining town: The famous Younger Gang 
> lived here; Doc Holliday had his final shoot-out here; Bat Masterson 
> and the Earps were here. And of course perhaps the most famous 
> rags-to-riches- and-back-to-rags story began here with Horace and 
> Baby Doe Tabor. From their Chamber of Commerce:
> 
> http://www.leadville.org/
> 

good idea to check the C of C for towns mentioned!

mined a little bit there; 
1) the original find was gold, but that got played out.  While
that was happening, the town was called "Oroville" 

2) "Little did they know at the time that "all that black stuff" that seemed so difficult to separate from the gold in their pans, sluice boxes and cradles, was actually silver bearing lead ore..."

3) Hence the name Leadville, which sprang up just
a little ways from the old Oroville, to be closer to the best 
lead-silver deposits.

4) the lead-silver deposits were in a form called "cerussite"

5) "In 1882, the Tabor Opera House hosted Oscar Wilde on his lecture tour of the West, one of many celebrities who graced the city. Mayor David H. Dougan invited Wilde to tour the Matchless silver mine and open their new lode: "The Oscar." Wilde later recounted a visit to a local saloon, "where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice - 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'"" (copy-pasted from Wikipedia)

6) direct quote from leadville.org: "Millionaires were made overnight... some for as little as a $37.00 grubstake investment like Horace Tabor who became rich overnight with his grubstake interest of the Little Pittsburg Mine. His rise to political power was one of many spawned from the wealth of Leadville?s silver mines. Presidents and dignitaries held interests in many of these mines which were producing hundreds of thousands of dollars in income for them every day. By June of 1893 however, the inevitable catastrophe happened. A number of circumstances finally culminated in the price of silver dropping to almost nothing and the "silver crash of ?93" as it has been nicknamed brought countless millionaires to their knees - Tabor among them."  ---
 
inquiring minds want to know:
why do they call it the "inevitable" catastrophe?  
Presidents and dignitaries held interests?
if so, why did they let the Repeal happen?
and why is it elided here as "a number of circumstances"
is it a Plot?


Just because I'll bet that everybody is as hungry for Henry
Adams quotes as I am this weekend, here are 3.

copied from the gutenberg.org copy of Henry Adams's Education: 

"In the course of fifty years the banks taught one many wise lessons for which an insect had to be grateful whether it liked them or not; but of all the lessons Adams learned from them, none compared in dramatic effect with that of July 22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the morning with Senator Cameron on the top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka Pass, they reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters from his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because the community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar."

and then Adams works in a reference to his brother's theory of history
which informs his own, a-and maybe Pynchon's????

"For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old; a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history that civilization followed the exchanges, and having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic. Everything American, as well as most things European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new equilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the advantages of ten years' study, had swept away much rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that of daily events. The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts. The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules he laid down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logical outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study."

right after that in the book (which is full of ramblings on the surface,
like listening to an older gentleman tell a long, long reminiscence, which,
it turns out, he has shaped carefully and which has much relevance to one's current dilemmas) - he goes to the Chicago Exposition...

and then (last one for today...) 
For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery. All one's friends, all one's best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the one he liked least, but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple conditions.


-------  dude!  _theory of history_, Chicago exposition, "not collectivism,
but anarchism", turning points...