1.b This Was Hinsdale (Gold) part 2

(Continued from Last Month)

A month later it was time for the “sugaring off” ceremony, during which Mrs. Page (wife of the company president) clad in blue with a darker blue cloak) split open a crucible with a heavy hammer, the Sun reported. “Some of the processed materials preceding the stroke were attended to earlier in the day,” the newspaper said.

“There tumbled out of the waxlike slag a button of gold beautiful and brilliant, the weight indicating a value of $35.00.  Professsor Sutphen was pleased with the pleasure that surrounded him (but) the result to him was a foregone conclusion.”  -- The Pittsfield Sun.

“The material is practically inexhaustible in quantity and unvarying in richness,” the paper reported on October 12, 1899.

Eighty four years later The Berkshire Eagle wrote: “Then prospects dimmed a little. The weekly Pittsfield Sun carried an authoritative letter from E.A. Morley of Lee ... “he had mines in real gold fields and opined that the promises about Hinsdale were ‘hogwash’.” Public confidence was waning.

Then, the Eagle went on, “Professor Sutphen was dying up in Glen Falls and told investors the truth: His fabulous assays were fakes.”

The Eagle concluded, “it isn’t clear who profited from this hoax. Sutphen probably did on the fees he charged for his false assays ... the bottom line on gold mining for profit is full of negative numbers.”

End