Recommended Summer Reading: Mark Twain's "Roughing It"

This summer seems like an especially fine season to read Mark Twain's "Roughing It." It helps to understand what a "salted mine" is before reading the story. "A salted mine is a mining claim that has been planted with a small amount of gold, silver, etc to make it appear more rich than it is. A classic confidence trick, the salted mine plays on the greed and haste of the "mark" who, in his hurry to claim near instantaneous wealth, fails to ascertain the true value of the land in question before laying out his money. The glittering appearance of the salted mine was designed to make the seller rich and the speculator poor.

The trick worked because most of the mining fortunes made after the initial surge of the gold rush were not made by individual miners driving their picks into veins of solid gold or panning goose-eggs out of the local stream. Actual mining was expensive, back-breaking work best conducted on a large scale by cheap labor. The real money was in speculation. Mines were established with minimal labor, their value assessed (often unreliably) by a small sample of rock submitted to an appraiser, and then they were sold by the foot to other miners, who often had no more intention of actually working the mine than the original owner did."

Adapted from a blog by Sterling at http://saltedmine.blogspot.com/2007/10/in-blog-titled-salted-mine-it-seems.html