Bright with silver

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 countless thousands of pounds of their homegrown product to the Far East. But this was, and still is, incidental to fox-raising. Breeding a fox brighter with silver than any ever seen before became the sole passion of the Fromms, and during the forty years that their venture has grown, from one fox pen to many thousands, it was a never-ending struggle along an uncharted road. In the first place, they had to prove that fur grown on a farm was as fine as fur trapped in the wilds, and no sooner was this battle won than diseases - nature, prevention, and cure unknown - began to decimate their foxes. The fight against fox encephalitis and distemper is a scientific thriller, and the successful outcome ovet the years not only safeguarded all fur-farming, but produced the infallible vaccine for canine distemper, master scourge of domestic pets. That it cost millions of dollars meant nothing to the stubborn Fromms. That every step of the way has cost millions, and turned up countless by-products of medical and genetic knowledge, means less to the Fromms than the now-established fact: bright silver is admittedly beautiful, desirable, and obtainable at a comparatively low price. The story of this close-knit "company" of farm boys, building on a dream a business bigger than they knew, has the fascination of reading about four backwoods pioneers loose in the sophisticated world of fashion - and winning out.