Birth: 20 May 1820
Elizabethtown, Hardin County, Kentucky, USA
Death:26 Jul 1896 (aged 76)
White Oaks, Lincoln County, New Mexico, USA
Burial Cedarvale Cemetery
White Oaks, Lincoln County, New Mexico, USA
Plot Burial Plot – Row G – Northside
Memorial ID 9393166 ·
John B. Slack had a secret life he never mentioned while in White Oaks New Mexico, involving a diamond hoax like never seen, accounting for 25 companies with capitalization over $225,500,000! He lived his life in White Oaks New Mexico as a carpenter and undertaker, very similar to Max Koch in White Oaks- undertaker, photographer, builder. In Fact, Slack later sold his undertaking business to Koch.
In 1871, veteran prospectors and cousins Philip Arnold and John Slack traveled to San Francisco. They reported a diamond mine and produced a bag full of diamonds. They stored the diamonds in the vault of the Bank of California, founded by William Chapman Ralston.
Prominent financiers convinced the “reluctant” Arnold and Slack to speak out on their find. The cousins offered to lead investigators to their field. Investors hired a mining engineer to examine the field. They planted their diamonds on a remote location in northwest Colorado Territory. They then led the investors west from St. Louis, Missouri in June 1872. Arriving by train at the town of Rawlins, in the Wyoming Territory, they continued on horseback. But Arnold and Slack wanted to keep the exact location a secret, so they led the group on a confusing four-day journey through the countryside. The group finally reached a huge field with various gems on the ground. Tiffany’s evaluated the stones as being worth $150,000.
When the engineer made his report, more businessmen expressed interest. They included banker Ralston, General George S. Dodge, Horace Greeley, Asbury Harpending, George McClellan, Baron von Rothschild, and Charles Tiffany of Tiffany and Co. The investors convinced the cousins to sell their interest for $660,000 ($13.8 million today) and formed the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company.[1]:45 They selected New York attorney Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow as legal representative.[1]:26 Barlow convinced them to add U.S. Congressman Benjamin F. Butler to the legal staff.[1]:28 Barlow setup a New York corporation known as the Golconda Mining Company with capital stock of $10,000,000,[1]:28 while Butler was given one thousand shares for amending the General Mining Act of 1872 to include the terms “valuable mineral deposits” in order to allow legal mining claims in the diamond fields.[1]:36–37 The U.S. Attorney General, George H. Williams issued an opinion on August 31, 1872 specifically stating that the terms “valuable mineral deposits” included diamonds.[2]
Financiers sent mining engineer Henry Janin, who bought stock in the company, to evaluate the find. Arnold and Slack led him and a group of investors to just north of what is now called Diamond Peak in the remote northwest corner of the Colorado Territory, where Janin and the investors found enough diamonds in the soil to satisfy themselves. Janin submitted a highly optimistic report, which found its way into the press.
The United States Department of the Interior sent staff geologist Clarence King and two other geologists to inspect the unusual field. King concluded that the site had been salted (as a geologist, King was aware that the various stones formed under different conditions and would never be found together in a single deposit), and notified investors.[3]
Further investigation showed Arnold and Slack bought cheap cast-off diamonds, refuse of gem cutting, in London and Amsterdam for $35,000 and scattered them to “salt” the ground. Most of the gems were originally from South Africa.
Arnold returned to his home in Elizabethtown, Kentucky and became a successful businessman and banker. Diamond-company investors sued him, and he settled the cases for an undisclosed sum. Years later he died of pneumonia after he was wounded in a shootout with a rival banker.
John Slack dropped from public view. He moved to St. Louis, where he owned a casket-making company. He later became a casket maker and undertaker in White Oaks, New Mexico, where he lived quietly and died in 1896 at the age of 76.
Below is a copy from the book, “Diamonds in the Salt”
Slacks lot and block below added to the Interactive Map
