Bright with silver

About this book

Once in a while, even in the twentieth century, this country still sees enacted the kind of drama that made America what it is - the story of men tapping an unsuspected natural resource and adding another great industry to the national economy. One of the most astonishing of these latter-day frontier sagas is the story of the Fromms who, in the early 1900's, were the four youngest sons of a large family on a wilderness farm in Wisconsin. They helped their parents in the struggle for a bare existence, they earned everything they wore and ate, and they dreamed of snaring in their traps one day a creature they had never seen but which, they were certain, was the most beautiful furbearing animal in the world - a silver fox. Today the four brothers and their families are still in the Wisconsin home; but now the wilderness has been pushed back by a complex organization that covers many times the area of the old farm, and it houses the largest silver fox farm in the world, a business that is worth millions of dollars. It was in 1903 that the dream of silver fox began, and soon the fading hope of trapping the fabulous animal gave way to the determination to breed it. How the Fromms raised the modest sum necessary to start this enterprise is a story in itself. They discovered that a strange root called ginseng, found in their own woods, was esteemed by the Chinese to the tune of six dollars a pound. They gathered, dried, and finally cultivated the esoteric plant to finance fox-raising. At present the Fromms are the largest ginseng-growers in the world, too, having supplied countles…

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