enty head of government horses for about five dollars each and drove them into Kansas; and all through the summer months he was breaking in the horses and selling them to farmers at twenty-five dollars a head. Doheny and his partner felt sure they had done the greatest stroke of their lives. Each then thought that if he could get an income of one thousand dollars a year he would be rich.
But the lure of the mines followed the lure of the forest, and Doheny was soon up north prospecting for gold, and for many years he mined and prospected through the Rocky Mountains, especially in New Mexico and Arizona. He was running a good sized mine in New Mexico and making ten dollars a ton when the McKinley tariff put him out of business.
His ore had a value of about fifteen dollars a ton, and he could smelt it at El Paso at five dollars a ton and get ten dollars a ton profit. The McKinley tariff put a duty on lead ores and made Monterey in Mexico the greatest smelting center in the world. The El Paso people could not get their lead flux except at heavy duty and therefore had to charge Doheny fifteen dollars a ton.
This sent Doheny to southern California. His
