In 1909, Julian Hawthorne wrote this pamphlet, which was a thinly disguised sales pitch for investors in a Canadian mining scheme. He later served time in federal prison for fraud in connection with this scheme. Excerpts from Hawthorne's pamphlet are below:

Odd! – that precious metals and stones are found in greatest profusion where human populations are scarcest, or non-existent.

Deserts in Aisa; deserts in Africa; in America, deserts and wildernesses. In South America they are entrenched in stupendous mountain fastnesses, or guarded by terrific heats.

In Alaska, coldness not less terrific watches over them.

Northern Ontario is not so bad.

A day and a half in a Pullman will take you to the midst of it.

In winter, the cold is severe enough, and snow lies from November till May.

But the air, winter and summer, is like distillation of diamond; and the climate from July to Thanksgiving equals the best of California.

Still, men cannot derive subsistence there from the earth around them.

It is a magnificent wilderness, with a surface so rough and soil so thin that agriculture (over the greater part of it) quits without entering the ring.

But O the hunting and fishing! – the furs and the trout!

And O the jaded, flabby-muscled business-men who go up to rough it with French Canadian or Indian guides, – and return in a month or two fit a run a Marathon or eat an ox!

To discover the silver took a long time. But, long years ago, there was found there something without which silver and gold are a mockery, – the Elixir of Life.

Farmers, however, knew that wheat, corn, cabbages, garden-sass and milk could be more profitably raised elsewhere.

Had they suspected what immeasurable wealth would have been disclosed by a few strokes of the pick, – they would have forgotten they were ever farmers.

Had fishermen dreamed that the diabase cliff whence they cast their lines in the lake harbored veins of pure silver worth thousands of dollars the ton, – the gullets of the trout would never have known the contents of the bait-boxes.

If the fur-hunters … Well, furs, as it is, are worth their weight in gold, and with fur-hunters turned miners, how could we keep our winter wives looking like human menageries? – as they insist on doing.

At all events, hunters, fishermen, farmers and business-men know the truth now; and the rush of treasure seekers into Northern Ontario has become one of the great spectacles of the word.

Government railroad builders, working day and night, can no more keep abreadt of that rush than could the Tortoise with the Hare – and the Hare is taking no naps either.

Railroads however are building, water-traffic is organizing, towns are sprouting as if house-seed had been sown broadcast and intesively fertilized; the Forest Primeval is being chopped down or burned up; and the new population is making itself at home.

Would you like to take a look at it? ...

My father was a writer.

He had me educated for civil engineering and mining.

"Whatever else you do," said he to me, more than once, "don’t try to make a living by authorship!"

For a couple of years, in New York, I practised engineering at a small salary. I didn’t need to be warned against authorship – nothing was further from my intentions.

But, during an interval between engineering jobs, I was betrayed into writing a story for a magaizne. It seemed easy money, and I wrote others.

The interval between engineering jobs lasted forty years.

After forty years, I took account of stock.

I found that I was unable to live on the interest on my principal.

I reflected that a man grows old, and incapable of work; and then – unless he can live on the interest of his principal, he is likely to live on other folks.

I began to wish I had stuck to engineering.

But it was rather late to begin thinking about that.

However, as I said, beyond my expectations or deserts, Opportunity came to me, and she wore the guise of my old profession.

In her hand she held – not a silver mine, but – a very modest and strictly limited mining development proposition.

It was in a hitherto untried district of Northern Ontario. No one but the discoverer of it believed that there could be anything in it.

I knew him; he was college classmate of mine, and a man of scientific traning.

I had heard of Cobalt Camp, and of sensational silver finds there. But I had taken them to be humorous exaggerations by fishermen tired of spinning fish-yarns, and trying their hands at less hackneyed subjects.

I went up there; saw the producing mines of Cobalt; and then spent a few weeks investigating his own little project.

Before I left, I had case in my lot with him; I had accepted the gift of Opportunity; I had joined – in a small way – the Firm of Solomon, Columbus, Rhodes & Company...

Our business (is) the systematic and normal development of the greatest mining country in the world.

We are in no hurry to make swollen fortunes for ourselves.

But we are in a position to make immense profits for many thousands of people, at a cost to them practically nominal; and, as you will see in a moment, we are taking very effective measures to accomplish just that thing.

It is on the next page...

In a day or two you will find in your mail-box the document outlining these reports; and if you have faith in the goddess Opportunity, you will be careful not to let the document get into the waste-paper basket.