Mark Twain Quotes
A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the bottom.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Mark Twain, Writer, Founder, Anti-Imperialist League, Quoted on The History Channel, Pawn Stars, July 17, 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The discovery started a white frenzy to prospect the Black Hills. The trouble was that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux. The Army tried to keep the white gold seekers out, but it was too difficult and there was not great public support for honoring the treaty. So the army decided to buy the Black Hills from the Indians and open it to legal prospecting. But the Sioux refused to sell not wanting to trade their sacred land for money and having no interest in gold. So the whites broke the treaty and took the gold anyway. This led to the hostilities and the greatest Indian victory wiping out Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
Describing Martin Luther King Jr.:
Sherman then was a young officer assigned to the military command in California.
It was on his land that the first California Gold was discovered. In one of the great ironies, the California Star stopped publishing 4 days later. The staff had all run off to try and find gold.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
