The Swindle's Snow Tunnel

1867

Summit County, Colorado.

If you hire someone called “Gassy” Thompson, you probably deserve what you get.

This was a lesson an American mining firm by the name of the St Lawrence Company learnt the hard way.

During the winter of 1867, the St Lawrence Company hired Gassy Thompson to dig a 100-foot mining tunnel into the side of Decatur Mountain, Colorado.

Gassy got to work despite the dreadful winter weather, which had covered everything in a tremendously thick blanket of snow.

Satisfied with the final product, the St Lawrence Company paid Gassy $2,000 ($57,309.14 USD in today’s money).

So far, so good—until springtime.

When the frost began to thaw, the company owners realised they’d been had: a long, hollow, cylindrical structure of rock and mud emerged from the melting snow, right where Gassy’s tunnel was supposed to be.

It turned out that Gassy had used the horrible weather to his advantage. Instead of making inroads into the mountain, he had simply carved out an 86-foot-long tunnel in the thick snow, and doctored up the walls with mud, rock and timber struts to look as though the whole thing was situated underground.

As any good con artist knows, a touch of truth makes a lie all the more convincing: Gassy did actually bore about 14 feet into Decatur Mountain. The snow tunnel then connected up seamlessly with the real thing.

When the snow melted, the lie was all that was left; Gassy Thompson had long since skipped town to enjoy his $2,000 profit, and you could do a lot with a profit like that.

Gassy Thompson now has a ski run named after him in Summit County, Colorado. The St Lawrence Company appears to still be running.

At Global Tenements we’ll help you sort out the lies from the truth—before you pay out money.

This story was sourced by "Stephanie Russo, who is a freelance journalist and a Kalgoorlie native now based in Perth, Western Australia. Among many other things, she is fascinated by larger-than-life people and the weirdness of the mining industry. She can be found at stephanierusso.com.au."