Buffalo Hump Mining Company stock certificate circa 1900 (New York)

Great mining collectible.  Nice vignette of stylized New York state seal with train and steamship in the background. Signed by Edwin Packard as president. Dated 190_. Circa 1900 from issued examples.

The Buffalo Hump Mining Company was  incorporated in the State of New York in 1899 by J.D. Rockefeller. Charles Sweeney became the President of the Company, succeeded by Q Edwin Packard.  The company ran mines in Elk City Idaho. The Buffalo Hump Development Company and Buffalo Hump Syndicate Company were incorporated in Washington State. The officers of the company were accused of swindling mine owners when the company bought up claims in the Buffalo Hump area.

Charles Sweeney was a second generation Irish immigrant who ventured westward to seek his fortune after the Civil War and moved to the Coeur d'Alenes during the first wave gold rush in 1883-1884.  Sweeney bought up the district's first town site and plunged immediately into the prospecting, speculation, and manipulation that were to characterize his whole career.  He was in many ways typical of the self-made entrepreneurs of his day, impulsive, opportunistic, alternatively acquisitive and generous, shrewd and naive.  Sweeney's circuitous path of buying and selling, organization and reorganization, financial dealing and legal dueling, which enabled him, by 1903, to consolidate most of the major mines of the Coeur d'Alenes into the "Federal Mining and Smelting Company".