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Golden Sunrise Over the Bay
Millions of dollars were mined from the earth during the Gold Rush of the 1840s and 50s. Even more was made ten years later with the flow of money from the silver mines of the Comstock Lode. So in 1870 when Phillip Arnold showed up in San Francisco with a bag of the diamonds, garnets, rubies, and sapphires he claimed to have mined, people were ready to believe as there seemed no end to the riches of California.

Arnold fooled some of the richest men of the time, including William C. Ralston, General George S. Dodge, Charles Lewis Tiffany (Tiffany & Co.), and Horace Greeley into investing in his scheme. With the money they invested with him he traveled to London and bought more diamonds only to be rewarded with even greater investment capital. The Great Diamond Hoax was not discovered until October 1872, by which time Arnold had made off half a million dollars in investor's money. Not satisfied, Arnold would die less than six years later from injuries following a shotgun blast he received from a banker he tried to cheat in Kentucky.
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