U. S. Civil War Debt 5

  Red Cloud photographed in 1872 shaking hands with William Henry Blackmore, an Englishman clearly impressed to meet an Indian leader who had by this time become a national celebrity.

(Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Univeristy [Zc16D1 +872ga])

In 1863 English financier William Blackmore met U. S. government officials in Washington as well as Union generals in order to assure British industrialists the Union would prevail in the Civil War. He had a plan to invest in U. S. lands. Once assured, Blackmore conferred with Kansas Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, another railroad and land promoter. As a result of this conference, a bill was drafted and introduced to Congress on January 18, 1864. The bill proposed to incorporate the North American Land & Emigration Company with power to buy and sell land in various states and territories. A loan of half a billion dollars would be made based on appropriation of public lands. The time span for repayment was thirty years. The plan was not approved by Treasury Secretary Chase and eventually dropped. However, on a tour of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868, Blackmore’s interest in western lands was renewed.

While the eastern war raged, and once the Confederate invasion of New Mexico was put down, the California Column soldiers mined $325,455,375 of which five-sixths was gold. In 1867 the U. S. Treasury was not depleted by the war, but it was not yet strong and the transcontinental railroad was incomplete. Furthermore, personal taxes on individual incomes would not be assessed in all states and territories until 1868. All mining by soldiers apparently ended by the beginning of 1868.

The arrangement to sell western lands to the English was made in 1868. See William Blackmore: The Spanish Mexican Land Grants, Vol. 1; Herbert O. Brayer; Bradford Robinson; pp. 29-40. The second source is The Army of the Pacific: 1860 – 1866; Aurora Hunt; Stackpole books; 2004; p. 329; fn. 413. This latter source, on page 135, details one specific mining operation carried out by Company D, First Cavalry, U. S. Army near Prescott in the Arizona district.

A final source explains further the method used to provide the Union with income from gold and silver mines. See Rocks to Riches: The Story of Arizona Mines & Mining by Charles H. Dunning with Edward H. Peplow, Jr. (Published by Southwest Publishing Co.; 1959; pp. 59-60.) Dunning was a Yale graduate (1909) and mining engineer. A mine operator and mining consultant in Arizona for 50 years, he was also Director of the Arizona Department of Mineral Resources. “General Carleton seems to have been genuinely interested in opening up Arizona and in obtaining gold to help the Federal war effort . . . . Unfortunately, he also advocated the nationalization of the mines, or a high royalty, or seigniorage to the government, or the requirement that when any mining claim was located, an adjoining claim on the vein be located for the government.”