"salting"

[Joel S. Berson]

George,

I just looked into EAN.  I assume, since you wrote "garbled" and not
"unreadable", you have the whole last sentence, which reads:
"When the lucky spot is pointed out to the gold hunter, and it is
"panned" as the term goes, particles of gold salted in a proper way,
of the course discovered, as the land is bid for accordingly."

My guess is that the meaning is "[particles of gold] are of course
discovered, and the land is bid for accordingly."

EAN has this from the Rhode Island American, Oct. 18, 1832 (two days
later than the Morning Courier & New-York Enquirer, which was a
little closer to the South); and the Salem Gazette, Oct. 26, 1832.

This is presumably about the Georgia Gold Rush of 1829.  I think
someone of Hawthorne's family went South and lost his investment
(although I don't know whether he bought into a salted mine).  The
publication in the Salem Gazette is perhaps not surprising.

Joel

At 9/10/2010 05:08 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>My many fans will be disappointed to find that there is nothing at
>all indecent about this posting.
>
>Salting. -- A new and unprecedented scheme to knavery has been
>invented in the gold regions of the South. . . .  It consists of
>sprinkling judiciously a few penny weights of gold in places which
>have all other signs of containing the precious metal, except the
>gold itself.  When the lucky spot is pointed out to the gold hunter,
>and it is "panned" as the term goes, particles of gold salted in a
>proper way [are found].  ***
>Morning Courier & New-York Enquirer, October 17, 1832, p. 2, col.
>3  [The end of the last sentence quoted is garbled beyond
>explication.  The article concludes with an instance of a man who
>paid heavily for land that had been salted, and after more than a
>year's effort, had found only a few dollars worth of gold.]

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