Belt Valley Times
J.E. Sheridan - Editor
R.H. Bemis - Business Manager
April 29, 1897
Last Sunday Ben Watkins and another man were playing “crack-a-loo” using a 20 dollar gold piece.
When “A young hanger on who gave his name as George Teddy, happened into the saloon about this time, and seeing the shiner laying on the floor, picked it up and darted down the road.
Deputy sheriff McLeod was at once notified of the theft and surmising that the gold bug would make for the hill and board a train just pulling out, he jumped on a horse and rode up town, where he succeeded in capturing the lover of the yellow metal.
Teddy had $14 in his possession when he was arrested.
Monday, he appeared before judge Fitzgerald,
although the judge is a strong advocate of free silver, and consequently not partial to goldbugs, he was lenient with the believer in free gold and let him off with 60 days in jail.
According to Merium Webster, Crack-a-loo is a gambling game in which players toss up coins and consider the winner the one whose coin falls and rests nearest to a crack in the floor.
The 1897 Liberty Head 20 dollar Gold Coin was designed by James B. Longacre and was struck by the Philadelphia and San Francisco mints.
20 dollars in the year 1897 would be the equivalent of 750 dollars today so that when George Teddy was caught by Sheriff McLeod with 14 dollars on him, he had burned through the equivalent of 225 current day dollars in the short period of time from when he snatched the gold piece to his capture.
A prime example of the efficiency of the saloon keepers and merchants of the Black Diamond City, as the unincorporated mining camp of Belt was known, at extracting the coal miners hard earned wages as they extracted coal from the mines of the Great Falls Coal field.
The Editorial pages of the Belt Valley times proclaimed that Belt was a free silver town.
According to Wikipedia, Free silver was a major economic policy issue in the United States in the late 19th century.
Its advocates were in favor of an expansionary monetary policy featuring the unlimited coinage of silver into money on demand, as opposed to strict adherence to the more carefully fixed money supply implicit in the gold standard
Free silver became increasingly associated with populism, unions, and the struggle of ordinary Americans against the bankers, monopolists, and robber barons of the Gilded Age.