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Harrisburg’s Wild West Auction

Internationally famous as my city is, it’s not because we were one of the first municipalities to declare bankruptcy. Rather, it is due to our former mayor’s penchant for collecting western frontier artifacts on the public dime.

Derided as a careless buyer with Other People’s Money, former mayor Steve Reed was hounded out of office for his investment of about $8.1 million of public funds in these western artifacts.

I had no idea how many he had purchased, and how keen his eye was, until I visited the warehouse where they were all stored last week. My God, the place was the proverbial and de facto Wild West Museum that Mayor Reed had long sought to build.

Everything in it was incredible. One of a kind, extremely rare, irreplaceable iconic artifacts symbolic and piercingly representative of our nation’s western frontier experience.

Mayor Reed was an incredible mayor, up until the point where he wasn’t. It took an international recession to take him down, and expose his over-leverage of Harrisburg. However, he was in good company in both the public and private spheres. And there is no taking away from Reed that he had one hell of a good eye for hostorically important artifacts. One of his former sellers was in town the other day at the auction, actually buying back the items he had originally sold to Reed.

He credited Reed with being a highly informed, careful buyer.

Allen Pinkerton’s personal detective badge just sold for $37,500 plus 25% buyer’s premium. A Dodge City Marshal’s badge just sold for $4,000. A historic Wells Fargo trunk sold for $15,000. These are historic, one-of-a-kind artifacts, bringing in commensurate prices.

I say job well done, Mayor.

As for me, I have done my part and bid on a multitude of items, only to lose at every turn. After bidding on Canada Bill Jones’s nasty little push dagger (Jones is credited with coining the phrase “But it’s the only game in town”), and losing, I did win a sad old elk antler, which had purportedly served as a hat rack in some western bar. But now I own a piece of the city history. It’s good enough for me, and the icing on the cake is that the city is raking in millions of dollars from the auction. The stuff Reed bought years ago was so valuable that it has increased tremendously in value.

UPDATE: I have just posted the winning bid for Steve Reed’s Wild West Moose, and I am so pleased. I am naming it Stephen.

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