THE GREAT DIAMOND MOUNTAIN Part One

I would like to see every PhD.. candidate in economics at an American university required to make a pilgrimage to the Unita Mountains, about 100 miles due east of Salt Lake City, Utah and about the same distance north-north west of Golden, Colorado. There, looming over tributaries of the Green River stands a lonely, wind swept conical peak, and a 7,000 foot high mesa called Diamond Mountain Plateau (above). There are no diamonds in the Diamond Mountain, but amongst the scrub brush, gravel, and oppressive isolation there is a zircon of veracity for these academic acolytes to contemplate, one brilliant shinning baguette illuminating the fundamental and eternal truth behind capitalism – greed makes you stupid.

In 1846, the 17 year old Philip Arnold left his home in Elizabethtown, along with his cousin John Slack to join 4,700 of their fellow Kentuckians serving in the Mexican war.  Both men were mustered out in 1848 in Texas, and rather than returning east, they joined the California gold rush. Like the vast majority of prospectors, they found no gold. They both worked for a time at a mine in New Mexico. Philip eventually found employment in San Francisco at the new Bank of California - owned by William Ralston – as an appraiser of other prospector's gold claims. It was not the romantic life's adventure Philip had dreamed of,  but as the precipice of middle age yawned open before him, he found it less physically demanding than prospecting. He eventually found even more sedentary employment, as an assistant bookkeeper for “General” George D. Roberts, at his Diamond Drill Company. And it was there where Philip saw his first diamonds, in the diamond dust used in the rock drills. 

From this reasonably secure pedestal Philip watched as the pattern established in California in the 1850's was repeated in the gold and silver strikes in Nevada of the 1860's. Out of the thousands of prospectors who rushed in, a mere handful of the early arrivals actually found gold, and they were quickly bought out or squeezed out by the banker run mining conglomerates which followed.  In 1869, when word spread of an 83 carat diamond picked up in plain sight on the ground by a sheep herder in South Africa, hundreds of aging desperate 49'ers  boarded ship for Capetown,  knowing nothing about diamonds, and aware they would arrive months too late to strike it rich.  So it was no wonder  that in 1870, at forty years of age, Philip Arnold gathered his life savings, quit his job and along with his cousin John Slack, went prospecting for diamonds in America. Amazingly they found them.

In early February of 1872, two dusty unshaven prospectors carrying a battered raw hide bag walked into a San Francisco saloon, ordered drinks and sat alone. Their furtive arguments  and their sheltering of the tattered bag, immediately drew attention. Many of the denizens recognized them as  the long missing John Slack and Philip Arnold.  After several minutes, the pair paid their bill and left. But they repeated their argument at several saloons before finally presenting themselves, dusty and unshaven and now reeking of whiskey, at the main office of the Bank of California - Phillip Arnold's old firm.  Without a word of explanation, they presented their bag for deposit. It was accepted and recorded by the bank manager as filled with diamonds, rubies and other sapphires. It took about twenty minutes for the whole town to assemble the story and to be set afire with rumors.

The bank manager immediately notified his boss, William Ralston. And after Ralston made inquires about the  two men, he then urged Major George Roberts to contact his old “friend” Philip Arnold. But Philip was reluctant to talk, and John Slack was virtually mute. After plying the prospectors with whiskey for hours, Philip finally admitted that some where in the great desert wilderness of Utah territory, just before winter drove them back to civilization, they had found a mountain literally peppered with diamonds and sapphires. The bag deposited in Ralston's bank was just a sample of what they had picked up in a few hours. Arnold explained, they had filed on the claim and were now the legal owners of a diamond mountain.

It was an unbelievable story. But Ralston (above) and Roberts both knew Philip Arnold as a trustworthy and honest employee. And John Slack was also know around town as a dull but hard working man. And there was a logic to finding yet another massive, rich deposit of wealth in the American west, where everything was possible. The biggest problem at this point was getting information out of the two prospectors. Over the next few weeks banker Ralston and a small group of close investors managed to convince the pair to allow two local jewelers to examine the diamonds. They pronounced the contents as worth $125,000. This inspired Ralston to offer $50,000 for one half of one percent interest in the claim, if it were first examined by two experts, one being David Colton, part owner of the successful Amador gold mine, and the other expert was General Roberts. Reluctantly, Philip Arnold and John Slack agreed to take these experts to their claim.

In early March they traveled by railroad from San Francisco to Sacramento. There the two prospectors and their charges boarded the Central Pacific Transcontinental Railroad line, climbing over the Donner Pass, down into the Nevada basin and across the Utah desert. After 36 hours on the train, and in the middle of the night, Philip insisted the two experts put on blindfolds, and they meekly complied. They continued their train ride across the desert with their eyes covered, and then just before dawn, at a small seemingly abandoned station, the train pulled to a stop.

Philip and John helped the two men, still blindfolded, off the train and onto horseback. Immediately they continued their journey. For the next two days the experts, softened by life in San Francisco, suffered on horseback in the oppressive heat of the sun, and endured freezing temperatures each night. They were allowed to remove their blindfolds only after sunset. And starting before sunrise each morning, they were required to replace their blinders. And then, just as they had grown so frustrated they were on the verge of ripping off their blindfolds, the horses were brought to a stop, and their blindfolds were removed.

What was revealed was a flat desert mesa, covered in scrub brush and gravel, with an odd thurst of a mountain at it's foot. Colton and Roberts wandered about, staring at and kicking the nondescript terrain until, suddenly, Colton reached into what appeared to be an ant mound and pulled out a small hard brilliant crystal. In an instant the two excited experts agreed. The Great Diamond Mountain was real!

They spent several hours collecting gems – diamonds and sapphires – before Philip Arnold and John Slack re-blindfolded the men and led their horses back off the mesa. It was a two day journey back across the horrible desert until they flagged down the west bound transcontinental passenger train in the dark, Colton and Roberts were accompanied by Arnold and Slack as far west as Oakland. There they collected their $50,000 down payment and returned to their "diggings". But the two experts continued on to San Francisco with the two bags of jewels they had collected.

With those jewels in hand it seemed obvious to William Ralston (above) that the Diamond Mountain Claim was going to make him and his friends (such as Colton and Roberts) even richer than they were already.  It was the usual two step plan for these masters of high finance, one they had already perfected in California and Nevada.  First they had to squeeze Philip Arnold and John Slack out of the deal as quickly and as inexpensively as possible. Then it would be just a matter of piling up the riches in their bank accounts. And you know, Mr. Ralston was half right.

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THE GREAT ABSCONDING

I am sure you have heard of “Tricky Dick” Nixon, and probably “Slick Willy” Clinton, and maybe even Martin Van “Ruin”, or “Ruther-”fraud” B. Hays or maybe even  “Ten Cent” Jimmy Buchanan - who opined that a dime was a fair daily wage, and vetoed new colleges because “"there were already too many educated people",  But I'm willing to bet few of those interested in the history of fraud and political con men  have never heard of James William “Honest Dick” Tate, even if you are from Kentucky. But you ought to have.

 

Sans his nom de plume, there was nothing special about James Tate (above). He was of average height and average weight. His forehead was made large by his retreating jet-black hair line. But his bushy “coffee strainer” mustache was the fashion in his day. However, it did hide a down turned mouth, that perhaps hinted at the tragic death of Howard, his three year old son. Still his daughter, Edmonia Lloyd Tate, survived, as did his loving wife Lucy Hawkins Tate. Then in 1867, after 13 years in various appointed positions in Kentucky politics, the 36 year old James Tate had so “materially contributed, by his personal popularity, to the great success of the Democratic party"  that he was nominated and elected State Treasurer.

The Treasurer was responsible for all funds collected in fees, permits, taxes, fines and rents, managed the state's bank accounts, paid state employees and dispensed benefits and verified and paid all bills. And despite it being around the time of this election that James acquired his cognomen, I cannot escape the suspicion “Honest Dick” Tate was not chosen for his probity, but for his “popularity”. In fact it was Democratic Party supporters who actually bonded him, pledging their wealth as a guarantee of Tate's “rock sand honesty”, as required by law before he could assumed the position. But that guarantee was contingent upon other state officials verifying “Honest Dick's” work And there is no evidence anybody ever actually did that.

To the public, James “Honest Dick “Tate was an average man, making an average salary, just $2,400 a year (barely $60,000 today), with perks worth perhaps a thousand dollars more. Jame's average unassuming home, at Second and Shelby Streets in Frankfort, cost all of $6,000 (about $100k today). But James was moving in powerful circles now, re-elected every two years for the next two decades. He was the “Treasurer for Life”, and it became known in Frankfort Democratic circles that should a politician need to borrow a few thousand dollars, as Governor Preston H. Leslie did in 1872, then “Honest Dick” would be happy to accept their IOU, and not be too bothersome about demanding prompt repayment. So amiable was “Honest Dick” that he had a safe filled with personal checks, cashed for Democratic friends, but never submitted for reimbursement.

James Tate also chased his own financial Eldorado, investing in land in Indiana, Virginia and Tennessee, along with several coal mines in Kentucky. However the land he bought does not appear to have appreciated in value, and the mines never seemed to produce enough coal to justify their purchase price. James also tried speculating in stocks and, it appears, when those investments failed, more direct forms of gambling. And like all gamblers, losing was just another excuse to risk more.

All of this was below the surface, while in the public view the 1878 “Biographical Encyclopedia of Kentucky” noted that “Honest Dick” Tate was “successively re-elected by popular majorities, perhaps exceeding those obtained by any other candidate for office in the State...it would seem that his lease on the office might be regarded as a fixed fact.” And in 1886, John McAfee described James Tate as the “trusted and honored treasurer” with an “unblemished record for probity and principle...(James) is held in high esteem, and his integrity and forbearance are regarded as of the highest order.”. But rumors must have been floating about Frankfort, because during the 1887 campaign for governor, the perennial second Kentucky party Republicans brought the issue to the surface.

Their candidate that year was the ex-prosecutor from Garrard County, orator William O'Connell Brady, and in what may have been the first Republican use of a “Big Government” attack, Brady charged the Democrats had created unneeded extravagant new offices, like Railroad Commissioners and an Agricultural Bureau. And almost as an aside, Brady suggested the time was past due for an audit of “Honest Dick” Tate's books. The Republicans had no evidence, but the attacks were so successful that after just one debate, ex-Confederate General and Democratic candidate Simon Bolivar Buckner, invented a reason to avoid any further debates.

Democrat Buckner defeated Republican Brady, of course, but his August 3, 1887 margin of victory was just 5 points, compared with a 19 point Democratic win in the 1883 election. Brady had made the strongest Republican showing since the Civil War, and it scared the hell out of the Democrats. In the same election, James “Honest Dick” Tate won re-election for the 11^th time, by a margin of 67,000 votes, far more impressive than Governor Buckner's 16,712 vote margin.

It was that fall, that newly elected Democratic State Senator John Kerr Hendrick, an ex-prosecutor from Livingston County, called for a full audit of “Honest Dick” Tate's books. But James Tate said a family illness required his attention, and he needed a little time to get the records together. Senator Hendricks thought Tate was stalling, but the Governor agreed to put the audit off until the spring of 1888.

It was than that a change appeared in “Honest Dick's” modus operendi. Some on his staff noted cash deposits in the state's bank accounts slowed to a trickle. And, if any had noticed, he paid in full a number of his personal debts. Then on Wednesday, March 14, 1888, Henry Murray, a Treasury Clerk, noticed his boss in the office vault, filling two tobacco sacks with gold and silver coins, and an approximately 4 inch thick roll of paper money. Murray assumed the Treasurer was preparing to make a bank deposit. And even after “Honest Dick” was found to have slipped out of the office unseen, no one was alarmed. A note left on his desk, informed the staff he was going to Louisville for two days. It caused little notice. Long time staffers knew better than to expect the boss to return to the office before Monday.

But “Honest Dick” did not return on Monday morning. A staffer dispatched to his home on Second Street, was told his wife Lucy had not heard from him since he left for Louisville, the previous Wednesday. Telegraphed inquires to the Ohio River town said the Treasurer was last seen on Friday evening at a bar, drinking heavily. Saturday, March 17^th, he was seen boarding a train for Cincinnati. After that, James “Honest Dick” Tate simply vanished. Newspapers would call it the “Great Kentucky Absconsion”.

The scene left behind told the story of a desperately disorganized personality. Staffers said it had always been that way. The account books seemed written in barely legible hieroglyphics, filled with post dated transactions, erasures, corrections, and indecipherable notations. The safe contained women's beaded bags and purses, and a satchel belonging to a dead infant. It was also brimming with $150,000 in IOUs and “cold checks” from $5 to $5,000, some going back ten years. No hard cash was left behind except for a bundle of $1,000 in $10 bills, found under the safe. How long it had laid there in the dust, no one could say.

In the afternoon of Tuesday March 20^th, 1888, the Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives, and the President of the state Senate, the Secretary of State, received the following message: “It having been learned this morning that said James W. Tate has been absent from his office since the 15th instant...there is in all probability a large deficit in his public accounts...we by virtue of the authority vested in us...hereby suspend said James W. Tate...” It was signed “S. B. BUCKNER, Governor”. From this day forward, “Honest Dick” Tate would be referred to as “The Defaulting Treasurer.”.

George Willis, a Democratic spin doctor was left spinning. “Such flash of lightning and peal of thunder as was never heard before or since came out of clear sky and rocked the state and the Democratic party as nothing had done since the (Civil) war." Kentucky's state historian noted that “almost everyone was under suspicion either as an accomplice of Tate or because of owing the treasury money, and those who had borrowed money from the treasury were numerous.” Briefly, and perhaps for the first time in Kentucky history, the politicians were ashamed. The Governor made a personal loan to keep the state afloat for awhile.

So inaccurate and confused was The Defaulting Treasurer's record keeping that it proved difficult to make an accurate account of the missing funds. And it was not in the interest of those with checks and IOU's in the safe to make an accurate accounting. A week later Governor Buckner announced the missing tally at approximately $247,128.50 (almost $6 million today). Within a week James “Honest Dick” Tate was impeached in absentia on six counts and removed from office, and then indicted by a grand jury. A reward of $5,000 was offered for his arrest. But the money was never claimed.

Luckily, daughter Edmomia had married a man named Martin, and was living free and clear in distant Kansas City, so the abandoned Lucy could live with her. Wife Lucy had to leave Frankfort because the state of Kentucky had seized the house and everything of value within it, all Jame's bank and stock accounts, including 100 barrels of “Big Spring” bourbon whiskey – another bad investment by the “Defaulting Treasurer”. 

The house, the whiskey, the investments, were sold at auction, and collected $50,000 (over $1 million today.) But that left the bond holders on the hook for the remaining $200,000 (about $5 million today). They paid, but thanks to a Kentucky Supreme Court decision in 1895, none of those who had authored checks or IOU's found in the safe were required to reimburse the bond holders. That judgement was marked “Not to be officially reported”, and sealed. Most of the names on the IOU's never became public.

But what happened to the “Defaulting Treasurer”, “the Great Absconder”, AKA James “Honest Dick” Tate? He was rumored to be everywhere from Bremen, Germany, to Toronto, Canada. Some said he had joined the expiate Confederate community in Honduras, or Brazil, where slavery remained until May of 1888. In October of 1893 there was a brief flurry of excitement when a newspaper reported he was “Said to have been seen on the “Cotton Belt Train.” in Arizona Territory. But that proved to be mistaken identity, since the New York Times had reported “friends who should know” said he had died in China three years earlier. In 1894 Navy Ensign Hugh Rodman, who had known Tate back in Frankfort, reportedly had dinner with the “Defaulting Treasurer” in Japan, and said he was not well. That should not have been surprising, since he would have been well over sixty by then.

Edmonia later admitted to receiving letters from her father, posted from San Francisco, British Columbia and Japan. The last one read, in part, “I know I will be much denounced and by parties who forget former circumstances”. He professed to being interested in returning to denounce his partners in crime. In 1896 1,200 Kentuckians signed a petition asking the Governor to grant a pardon to James Tate, so he could return and name names.. No such pardon was ever offered. With time new scandals rocked Kentucky, and people forgot about “Honest Dick “ Tate. But we should remember our mistakes. That is how we learn.

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LOST TREASURE

I have stumbled upon a fascinating tale which begins before dawn on March 27, 2009, in the tiny village of Stokestown, County Roscommon, in Ireland’s western midlands. At about 4 A.M., while the honest world slept, thirty-five year old Anthony Dowling, a father of three, used his shoulder to crack open the back door of Sheehan’s Pharmacy. He then stood lookout while twenty-nine year old Robert Dempsey ransacked the establishment. They took some drugs and cosmetics, and a small safe, which they loaded into their van before driving the two hours back to Dublin.

During the drive, the duo discovered their efforts with the safe had earned them some family papers, a few photographs and an envelope, marked “1947”, which they never bothered to open. Disgusted, they dumped the safe into a canal and its contents were tossed into a trash bin in front of apartments on Reuben Street in Dublin. The thieves then split up, returning to their beds before the sun shed light on their sins. But what the two miscreants did not know, was that their crime had now tied them to six thousand years of similar human cupidity.

Humans walked into Ireland across the land bridge from Wales about 4,000 B.C.. Like Greenland, the ancient name of “Eire” was a sales pitch. In Gaelic it means “land of plenty”. Six thousand years ago, as the glaciers retreated back to Scotland from whence they had come, the melting ice left Ireland dotted with lakes, much as upper Minnesota  is today. These Irish lakes became choked with decaying leaves, which turned the waters acidic and consumed the oxygen. Without oxygen new vegetation falling into the lakes could not decompose, and began to pile up until the lakes became bogs which became fields. The compressed vegetation became peat.

One of those early Irishmen is known to history only as Clonycavan Man. He about five feet two inches tall, and favored a spiked “Mohawk “hair style, accentuated with a thick gel imported from France. And one soft summer day this twenty-something was waylaid in a peat bog by an enemy armed with an axe. The first blow split the victim’s skull wide open. The second, probably delivered as he fell, sliced open his face, from his nose to just under his right eye. The passions behind this assault have long since cooled, but they remain common today, in Ireland and everywhere humans breed,. as shall be proven shortly.

The bogs of Europe are pockmarked with similar corpses, some sacrifices to forgotten gods, and a few, like Clonycaven man, crime victims. And all that remains of their humanity is a tannin stained body, as proof of passion spent and left undigested, until, usually, a farmer harvesting the peat for fuel, uncovers the crime scene.

In March of 1945, a farmer named Hurbert Lannon, of the village of Fourmilehouse, in County Rosscommon, struck metal while harvesting peat from his bog at Coggalbeg. He did not think much of the three pieces of metal he had uncovered. But, being a practical man Mr. Lannon held onto them, and on March 22, 1947, probably to pay a bill, he handed them over to the new pharmacist, Patrick Sheehan, who had just moved to the village of Stokestown, a mile and a half away.

Patrick Sheehan had a romantic youth. He had won a few road rallies and drove a red Triumph. His eldest daughter described him as “very into education”. He dragged his wife and seven daughters down to the local dump on the night of October 4th, 1957 to watch the tiny light that was Sputnik race across the night sky. In 1965, Patrick showed his eldest daughter Sunniva, the pieces of jewelry from the safe. He described them to her as a “collar and two buttons”. “It came out of the bog” he told her. Sunniva didn’t find the story very interesting. “It didn't mean a whole lot to me -- it was a flat piece of gold and I didn't think anything of it. It wasn't something you could wear or make use of,” The jewelry went back into the safe and Sunniva forgot all about it.

Patrick (Paddy) Sheehan died of cancer in the late nineteen sixties. “The business was nearly non-existent because he had been in bad health,” related Sunniva. Luckily she had graduated with a 3 year bachelor’s degree, which was all that was needed at the time in England to dispense medication. So she took over her father’s shop. “I had a mother to support and six sisters younger than me. So it was hard keeping things together, never mind thinking about a gold necklace in the safe.” Then, forty years later, came the robbery.

Sunniva Sheehan called in the Gardia, the “Guardians of Ireland” as the police are titled, to report the robbery and list the stolen items. The Gardia asked the locals, who remembered two strangers in a red van who had been acting suspiciously. The Gadia even went so far as to check the survalence video from a nearby highway toll booth. That video produced a photo of red van and a license plate number. This led them to the master crimminals Mr. Dempsy and Mr. Dowling, back in Dublin. Meanwhile, one of Sunniva's sisters reminded her about the gold from the safe. So she called and added them to the list of stolen items. And it was at this point that serendipity entered the story.

When Sunniva had added the gold to her list of items lost, one of the police officers bothered to call the National Museum in Dublin, and describe the jewelry, on the off chance it might be valuable. The museum immediately dispatched two curators to Stokestown, to show Sunniva some photos. What she identified was a photo of a lunnula.

It is Latin for “little moon”, and is applied to any number of crescent shapes, from the white arc at the base of your thumb nail, to the gold necklace worn by Bronze Age kings of Ireland. There are only 21 similar gold necklaces known to have survived over the last 4,000 years, and they were all the work of a few bronze age master artists in Ireland. And when the police explained to Robert Dempsey, now in police custody, what he had thrown away, he was motivated to identify the trash bins on Reuben Street.

The police collected all the bins just before they were emptied. In the parking lot of a police station Sergeant John Costello waded through tons of garbage and trash to recover the lunnula and the two gold pins. And that was the final journey of the four thousand year old collection of gold, now called the “Coggalbeg hoard”, from the hands of an ancient artist, to the modern day Dublin National Museum of Ireland.

All of which leaves a few unanswered questions. How did a King’s jewelry come to be lying, abandoned in a bog? It may be it was not abandoned. It may be that Hurbert Lannon also found a body in the bog, but decided not to deal with the attention such a discovery would have brought him. The manner in which he disposed of the gold certainly hints at a man protective of his privacy. And it may be that the lunnula and pins were the booty of a Bronze Age robbery, not unlike the twenty-first century one that brought them to the public attention. As for Mr. Lannon, he died three weeks before the break in at the Sheehan Pharmacy, at the age of 93.

Anthony Dowling pleaded guilty to breaking and entering, and Robert Dempsey pleaded guilty to receiving stolen goods. They both received suspended sentences. Anthony Dowling was even free to visit the Museum and view the booty he had thrown away. But it seems the booty was not yet finished with Anthony Dowling.

The press attention caused by the gold threw a light on Mr. Dowling, when he probably would have preferred to remain in the shadows. The light revealed that this was not his first conviction. It was in fact his 33rd. And it was not even his first suspended sentence.

On January 13, 2008, Anthony was involved in a serious altercation in the Deputy Mayor’s Pub, in Dublin. He and a friend, Charlie Russell, attacked one Peter Rogers, because they thought Roger had insulted Russell’s mother-in-law. In fact he had not.

But, drunk and bent on revenge, Anthony, armed with a claw hammer, and Charlie, who was carrying a samurai sword, assaulted Mr. Rogers without warning, and severed Mr. Rogers’ left hand. Mr. Rogers, who was also drunk and was unaware of his injuries, punched Charlie Russell in the face with his bloody stump. Twelve hours of surgery were able to reattach the hand, but Mr. Rogers, who had been a carpenter, will never regain its full use.

Charlie Russell received eight years (not suspended) for his part in the attack. And as was said, Anthony Dowling’s sentence was suspended. However,...

....the attendant publicity of this latest theft and the publicity about the pub assault, has made Anthony Dowling unlikely to receive another suspended sentence, as he is now the most famous criminal in Irish history, at least since the murderer of Clonycavan Man. The Irish government has now even banned the sale or ownership of samuri swords.

Meanwhile, Mary Hanafin, Irish Cultural Minister, has called the “Coggalbeg Hoard”  an “an amazing find…because it is Irish and part of who we are.” Yes, Minister, and a part of who we all are.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/kfcwmhcwsncw/rss2/#ixzz0sGYKe4EF

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