Books: Mining Engineer

PAY STREAK—John Baragwanath—Doubleday, Doran ($2).

Except for the pontifical autobiography that the late John Hays Hammond wrote at the age of 80, U. S. mining engineers have been surprisingly reticent about their world-wide rovings, their climbs up high mountains and descents into the deep earth. Last week a successful mining engineer now little more than half Hammond’s age offered a volume of reminiscence as informal as Hammond’s was ponderous, less than half as long and twice as funny, and dealing with events that were as inconsequential as those that Hammond recorded were important. Saying he “would not be so brash” as to attempt an autobiography, John Gordon Baragwanath gives an “autobiographical minimum” that is so interesting readers are likely to regret he did not add more to it. Son of the pastor of Grace Methodist Church in Manhattan, he was inspired to study mining engineering by Richard Harding Davis’ Soldiers of Fortune. Young Baragwanath sailed for Ecuador as soon as he got out of college, hoping to emulate Davis’ hero who “figures heroically in South American revolutions, had amorous encounters with spitfire senoritas and was generally in vincible.” He waxed his mustache, got into the Ecuadorian cavalry, was all set for adventure when he came down with jaundice, ran out of money, made his way with great difficulty to Guayaquil only to find the port quarantined with bubonic plague. There the innocent soldier of mis fortune hit a real romantic adventure. Late at night he picked up a mysterious Chilean girl, a little plump and strangely absentminded, but pretty. He took her to his hotel. He ran out to get something to drink, found her in bed, moaning piteously when he returned. The plague! he thought. But when he asked, “What’s the matter?” her reply was: “I’m having a baby.”

Baragwanath’s two biggest adventures were finding some Inca treasure and buying a salted mine that cost his employers, American Mining & Smelting Co., $30,000. The Inca treasure turned up while he was hunting for coal on the Andean plateau east of Port of Salaverry, Peru. He saw some natives wading in a lake during a snowstorm, investigated, found they were taking out gold and silver ornaments. He jumped in with them and got 75 pieces, which he gave to the American Museum of Natural History.

Baragwanath never understood how he was duped with a salted mine, or why he was not fired for buying it. His swindle was minor compared to some he has heard of since : an old farmer in Georgia who tricked experts and promoters into paying $150,000 for worthless gravel; the celebrated Mulatos salting by which an exhausted mine was sold for $1,575,000. Baragwanath’s friend Joslin met a still trickier game. Inspecting a claim near Porcupine, Canada, Joslin reported that it was salted, took no samples of the rock into which the gold had obviously been pounded. Another company took such tests despite the clumsy attempt at fraud, discovered the samples averaged $25 a ton, paid cash for the claim, thinking the would-be crook had pounded gold into a gold mine unwittingly. But it developed that the crook had foreseen that line of reasoning, done a crude job of salting as bait, then an expert job of salting the samples, escaped in the double double-crossing that followed.

Now 48, Mining Engineer Baragwanath lives in Port Washington, L. I., works in a “well-padded” office in Manhattan, although visits to mining properties take him frequently to Canada, Mexico, Alaska, to such concerns as the Willow Creek Mines, of which he is vice president. Also president of Pardners Mines Corp., a director of the Golden Queen Mine at Mojave, Calif., he is a celebrated story-teller and practical joker, the husband of Artist Neysa McMein, paints in his spare time.