The diamond hoax of 1872 was a swindle in which a pair of prospectors sold a false American diamond deposit to prominent businessmen in San Francisco and New York City. It also triggered a brief diamond prospecting craze in the western United States, in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. History 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 $660,000 ($ million today) and formed the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company. They selected New York attorney Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow as legal representative. Barlow convinced them to add U.S. Congressman Benjamin F. Butler to the legal staff. Barlow set up a New York corporation known as the Golconda Mining Company with capital stock of $10,000,000, 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. 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. Financiers sent mining engineer Henry Janin, who bought stock in the company, to evaluate the find. Arnold and Slack led him and a group