I was not long in discovering that my first deductions, made at the inception of the Rawhide boom, namely, that the country was in no financial mood to consider favorably the claims to recognition of a new mining camp, were right, and that it would have been better had the birth of Rawhide been delayed for a period or until the country could catch its financial breath again. Crowds came to Rawhide, but few with money. Flattering as was the extent of the inrush, it was easy to see that if the publicity campaign had been suppressed for a while, the result in harvest would have been immeasurably greater. Had financial conditions been right, the effort to give the camp "scientific" publicity would undoubtedly have been crowded with results for "the inside" of a character that would have meant much larger sums of money in the bank.
Nat. C. Goodwin & Company recognized, too, that they had been working at a great disadvantage by attempting to finance a great mining enterprise at so great a distance from Eastern financial centers as Reno. We were hardly a match for the Eastern promoter who, because of the handy location of his offices, was enabled to keep in close personal contact with his following.
The usual happening in mining took place at Rawhide. The extraordinary rich surface deposits opened up into vast bodies of medium and low-grade ore at depth. Rawhide's one requirement appeared to be a railroad, and a milling plant of 500 or 600 tons a day capacity. It was decided that I should come East and attempt to finance the company for deep mine development, mill and railroad construction, and also to go through with the deal made with the vendors of the controlling interest. The time period for payments had been extended for Nat. C. Goodwin & Company, and the option to purchase was now valued by the Goodwin company at a fortune.
In New York, over the signature of Nat. C. Goodwin the firm for a while, under my direction, conducted a display advertisement newspaper campaign in favor of the issue, which was now listed on the New York Curb. Hayden, Stone & Company, bankers, of Boston and New York, who have since successfully financed the Ray Consolidated and Chino copper companies, undertook to send their engineer to Rawhide to make an examination of the property with a view to financing the company for railroad and milling equipment amounting to upward of a million dollars. Under the impetus of this news and the Nat. C. Goodwin advertising campaign the market price of the shares shot up to $1.46, or a valuation in excess of four million dollars for the property.