10,000 Live Gophers Wanted

     People in general have quite a capacity for gullibility. When history from the 19th century is read, many cases of people being conned come to light.

         Prompted by my recent purchase of the Eureka community book I went to the internet to look up a bit more about the city and area. This newspaper advertisement in the early 1900s  attracted my attention, “10,000 Live Gophers Wanted.” A local livery man received a letter from someone in Chicago that named him to act as representative for the AUSTRALIAN RABBIT EXTERMINATION COMPANY.  The pretense being the company in Chicago planned to inject the gophers with a disease fatal to rabbits and ship them to Australia where they were being overrun with bunnies. 

    Female gophers would bring 25 cents and males .15. Locals proceeded to capture them by the hundreds and brought them to the stable for future payment. Some farmers were said to be neglecting their duties for this sure thing. The stable became full of boxes full of gophers with no room left for the horses and the overflow became stacked around town. The advertised day of payment arrived and the promised money transfer from Chicago never arrived. 

     The smell of defecating gophers, dying gophers, and overcrowded gophers proved to be too much. An embarrassed livery man became very angry when he realized he’d been duped and began destroying the crates thereby releasing hordes of the critters to run in the streets of the town. People had to be careful not to step on one, plus hungry gophers began finding their way into gardens. Needless to say, the liveryman was not popular.

     Years later the truth came out. It was a practical joke pulled on the liveryman by a local man said to have a great sense of humor. The ‘joke’ had spread throughout a hopeful community, all wanting a little extra cash.  This story illustrates two points: immigrants were short of money, and they were just another gullible group in a long list that extends to the present day.

     “Do unto the other feller the way he'd like to do unto you, an' do it fust.” This line from the 1890s novel “David Harum” became associated with the art of horse trading, a profession with   many stories about someone getting hornswoggled, someone getting the better of another through cheating or deception. One old horse trader by the name of Ben K. Green has even written books on the subject. Let’s illustrate with a few examples he tells about.

      While Ben admitted there were many honest and reputable horse dealers, it was the wandering gypsies and their deals that he learned to avoid. This independent young man of sixteen owned a paint horse with many bad habits that he couldn’t correct, so he took him to a horse market. There, a man approached him with an offer to trade. The stranger had a nice little mare which he jumped on bareback and rode around the arena. Good enough for Ben, they traded with Ben giving him an extra $20 to boot. He threw his saddle on the horse and pulled the cinch tight, whereupon the horse reared, fell over, and refused to get up. He went to kick her in the belly, but the stranger stopped him, fed a sugar cube to the horse, loosened the cinch, and the horse stood right up.

     Disgusted, Ben led his new horse away and soon learned what had just happened. A bystander told him, “That there is a gypsy horse. It’s been trained to lie down for a sugar reward and do just what she did. When you complain and want your old horse back, they’ll agree but will keep the $20.”

     The horse called Sleeping Beauty by those in the know had bought groceries for those gypsies for several years. With this quick education, Ben set out to get the better of the deal. He tied the legs of the horse, threw her down, and waited. Soon the gypsy came back offering the predicted return trade, but Ben said it was his horse and he intended to properly train her. So much did the the gypsy want the horse back he finally offered to return the $20 if he’d give her back. Nothing doing.

     Soon an old woman arrived on the scene, begging and pleading for the return of the horse. Nope. To make it short, the gypsies ended up giving him a good horse that they had cheated out of someone else which he later resold for a nice profit. He’d made his first successful deal.

     Another story concerned his purchase of a beautiful matched pair of dapple-gray mules said to be eight years old. He offered the winning bid and drove them home where they worked beautifully. But then they got caught in the rain. Soon the dapple-grays turned pure white, and when he looked in their mouths he saw they were more like fourteen years old. The fact he’d been fooled bothered him; he wanted to even the score. He found an old-timer who could fake dappling with Easter egg dye after he learned the seller’s son-in-law was acting as his agent and buying horses for him. Ben found the unwitting son-in-law at the market and sold the freshly dappled mules back to him for a profit. There’s a moral here: beware of horse trades.