The Great Diamond Hoax: And Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending

In the 1870s, a diamond mine scheme swept through America's financial elite like wildfire, netting $600,000 from an initial investment of just $35,000 and duping scores of otherwise shrewd investors. Asbury Harpending was accused of masterminding the thing. This memoir is his defense. But Harpending is no ordinary penitent. He's one of the American West's most remarkable entrepreneurial rogues, a man who ran away from home as a teenager to seek fortune in California's gold fields, who allegedly connived to switch California and Nevada to the Confederate side during the Civil War, and who here claims to tell the 'whole truth' about his role in the infamous diamond swindle. Whether you believe him or not, his account crackles with the wild energy of a frontier that was still being invented, where fortunes were made and lost overnight and a man could remake himself with the right story and the right mark. The Great Diamond Hoax reads like a picaresque novel crossed with a confession, offering an unapologetically subjective window into an era when the line between visionary and swindler was thin enough to cross in either direction.