| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top: Fraud and Deceit in the Golden Age of American Mining. By Dan Plazak. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006. 374 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95.)

The Infamous King of the Comstock: William Sharon and the Gilded Age in the West. By Michael J. Makley. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2006. xii + 291 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)

Writing in the introduction to his intriguing compendium of cupidity, Dan Plazak observes that in the United States during the years between the Mexican-American War and World War I (an era he characterizes as "the golden age of mining"), "mining and its enormous wealth excited the public imagination as much as the high-tech start-ups of today" (p. 1). In the two volumes under consideration here, we have the opportunity to witness the pursuit of such wealth by means fair and foul throughout the trans-Mississippi West across those decades.

Although Plazak asserts that his book "concentrates on fraud, deceit and reckless finance in the American mining industry" during that "golden age," his focus proves wider than this notion suggests (p. 1). As he follows the money trail, he leads us from barren mining camps on three continents to the plush salons, banking houses and stock exchanges of San Francisco, New York, and London in demonstrating the pervasive and pernicious allure of easy riches. Such celebrated episodes of western lore as the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 or Death Valley Scotty's "lost" gold mine thus take their proper place as exemplars of an endemic affliction that weighed heavily upon western mining enterprises.

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