Free Trials of the Monkey by Matthew Chapman Page B

for making bricks. Chickamauga Lake, which came right to the edge of town, was actually an offshoot of the huge Tennessee River only two miles away, and so, with the coming railroad, the city would have two ways to send its heavy goods to market.
    Within five years of the company’s formation, the population
of the town shot up from 250 to 5,000. The price of real estate jumped by 300 per cent. By 1890, the population was over 6,000 and Dayton was a bona fide boom town. Soon there were several elegant hotels, and a year-round resort known as Dayton Springs.
    What no one in Dayton knew was that the parent company in Britain was in financial trouble from the start and that the boom was founded on debt and chaos. As far back as 1884, Titus Salt had been forced by lack of capital to sell much of his stock to James Watson and Co., Iron Merchants, of Scotland.
    In December 1895 an explosion in one of the mines killed twenty-nine miners, including two boys, one aged fourteen, the other aged fifteen. The company, now entirely controlled by Watson, reorganised again, seeking to protect itself from possible lawsuits from the families of the victims. They need not have worried. The naive Daytonians settled for between $125 to $400 per dead miner. In the next few years there were two more explosions, which killed another fifty miners. From the turn of the century, the company operated at a loss.
    In June 1913, Peter Donaldson, president of both the Watson company and Dayton Coal and Iron, drove down to the Thames in London, chained himself into his car, and took the plunge. As the car took the man, so the British company took the American company. Dayton Coal and Iron was declared bankrupt in 1915 and the boom was over.
    In 1924, with the population of Dayton shrunk from 6,000 to a mere 1,800, one last attempt was made to revive the mine. A company named the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company was formed and an engineer was employed to explore the mine’s potential.
    His name was George W. Rappleyea.
    George, described variously as a chemical engineer and a metallurgical engineer, was from New York. He had married a local woman, Ova, a nurse he met in a Chattanooga hospital after he hurt himself playing touch football. In 1925, he was thirty-one years old. He had a grey-streaked mop of black hair which seemed to shoot directly up from his scalp. A short man, he
always dressed well, favouring snappy suits, bow ties, and a straw boater. Fast-talking and jumpy, his eyes were dark brown behind round horn-rim glasses. He was not good-looking, but clearly his intelligence and energy made him attractive. Always in motion, always busy, he danced and played tennis and drove his car too fast along the country roads as if he might miss something.
    In 1925, Prohibition was in full swing, along with heavy drinking, flappers, the Charleston, and art deco. The first issue of the New Yorker magazine was on sale. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby; Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy; and an obscure Adolf Hitler, volume one of Mein Kampf. And on May 4, before dinner, George read the ACLU announcement in the Chattanooga Times .
    George, who had fully accepted the idea of evolution while in college, was outraged by the law. He saw immediately—and this is where his genius came in—that this was a big issue and could become a big trial which, apart from being important and fascinating, might also attract investors to the ailing town. The whole state had read the ad somewhere or other. Only George saw what it could mean. The next morning, he drove through town to F. E. Robinson’s drugstore. Although there was some industry in the town, a lumber company, two canning factories, a hosiery mill, and Morgan Furniture manufacturing, all but one of the hotels, the Aqua, had closed down and the place had an empty, defeated quality. Robinson’s drugstore, which had a soda fountain, was a thirty-second walk from the large three-storey courthouse, and was