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Asbury Harpending (ND-ND) http://tinyurl.com/Harpending

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Perfect Amity

From The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Episodes in the Life of Asbury Harpending, 1913. Read Online Download PDF

Reader: Kevin Hearle

Conventional wisdom allows that the quest for riches leads to strife rather than amity—but once in awhile conventional wisdom is just plain wrong.

Asbury Harpending—once a Confederate agent who famously attempted to disrupt California shipping—later recalled that life in a mining camp could unite sons of the North and sons of the South, despite their differences.

. . . the big boom for the camp came through my old journalistic enemy, the American Flag. Word came to it somehow that I was located in the mountains back of Kern City, ostensibly engaged in mining. Straightway it gave me a terrific blast, claiming that mining was only a cloak for a new piece of deviltry I was hatching. The effect of this was that it located me for a lot of my Southern friends who really believed that I was organizing a band to fight through to Texas, and as a consequence they began to swarm into Havilah in large numbers. . . . Also several Northern men, fired by the word "gold," took a chance of entering into an alleged stronghold of conspirators. They would have marched into hell, just the same, for gold. They had the same reception as anyone else. Far up in the mountains, away from strife and faction, these men mingled in perfect amity and good fellowship. It was another illustration of what I said before—that if the people had been left to settle matters in their own way there never would have been a Civil War.

The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Episodes in the Life of Asbury Harpending was first published in 1913.