Before the housing market, before the internet bubble, even before oil, investors went crazy over hard rock mines full of gold, silver, and copper. Anyone amazed or disgusted by recent Wall Street tales will see a lot of commonalities in Richard E. Lingenfelter's two-volume work, Bonanzas and Borrascas. In Lingenfelter's telling, the Mining West was full of shady promoters, scam artists, stock frenzies, and, yes, financial bubbles just waiting to burst. The author traces the heyday of hard rock mining in the American West by covering both successful bonanzas and failed borrascas. He tells story after story of mines that often produced very little ore, were overcapitalized, sometimes went under in a matter of years, and usually paid their investors nothing in dividends; yet, many of them still created enormous wealth for their unscrupulous owners and operators. Even very successful mining companies often made little dividends for the holders of watered-down stock. For every actual mine, there appears to be one hundred that were sketchy propositions at best, run by greedy, conniving men. In these pages, Lingenfelter describes their tricks that ranged from salting an area with South African diamonds, to proclaiming the treasures of Montezuma, to promoting a nonexistent mine with the fastest train trip from California to Chicago, to planting documents in Mexican and European archives, to setting up fake stock exchanges, to gutting a mine and then secretly selling stock before the minority holders find out, to tying competitors up in litigation, to more expected tactics like mail fraud.

Many of these corporate booms and busts are well known; others are not. Bringing all of them together makes a convincing case that stock gambling and mine sharking were truly rampant, even if the reader can sometimes get lost in the specific cases. According to Lingenfelter, during the biggest frenzy (1904–1912), one out of every twelve Americans held mining stocks, investing an average of $10 a year for every urban man, woman, and child (pp. 356–59).

The first book, Gold Lust and Silver Sharks, 1848–1884 spends most of its time tracking the wheeling and dealing of the first series of western gold rushes. Much of the investment during this early period took place in the West, often in San Francisco. The chapter then moves to the Comstock in Nevada and the silver boom around the West. By the end of this period, investors from the eastern United States and overseas had become more and more involved in western mine speculation.

The second book, Copper Kings and Stock Frenzies, 1885–1918, covers the birth of the western copper industry, silver bonanzas, the revival of gold excitement in Nevada and Alaska, the biggest stock frenzy of them all, which took place during the early twentieth century, and the electrification-induced craze that took place when copper mining turned to low-cost open-pits.

Lingenfelter's major contribution is to show that this series of mining-induced frenzies meant much more than a few people getting rich. The national and sometimes global markets often lived and died on speculation over hard rock mining in the West. At one point in the early twentieth century, for instance, Amalgamated/Anaconda and ASARCO were the two most active stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. National politics were also often under the influence of mining stock speculation, as the sharks often held sway in Washington, either buying political favor or purchasing Senate seats for themselves.

Industrial titans show up, like William Andrews Clark, James Douglas, Dan Guggenheim, Henry Rogers, William Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. Others involved in running shifty mining companies are either slight surprises, like Herbert Hoover, or colorful unknowns. Most of the “silver sharks” and “copper kings” do not present well, no matter their often-vaulted reputations. George Hearst comes off the best, as he actually put money he received into mine development (which was surprisingly uncommon) and paid good dividends to investors. Lingenfelter tears others down, mostly for their unscrupulous business practices, though he also tackles the “Father of the Porphyries,” Utah's Daniel Jackling, claiming that Jackling was neither the first to practice porphyry copper mining, nor was he a particularly efficient manager of the now-famous Bingham Pit Mine. The reader will not find many miners themselves in these pages, but Lingenfelter does provide a fascinating picture of some of the average stockholders.

The pleasure Lingenfelter gets out of these financial shenanigans is obvious. The exclamation point is used far more frequently than in the last few histories I have read, but this enthusiasm helps make the two books quite lively. Despite their readability, the set of books is too lengthy for use in college courses, but their breadth means that they would serve as an excellent reference for economic historians and anyone else interested in the intersection between natural resources and capitalism.