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Show I 1 As I Remember Them William Sharon II m By C. C. Goodwin H p TT IS said that a new bonanza lias been dis- H i I covered and Is now being explored In the deep H levels of the old Mexican mine. It lacks but a H i couple of months of fifty-two years since two placer H miners, working with rockers on a little stream that ran down Bast canyon from Mount Davidson I in what was then Carson county, Utah, found as they worked up this ravine increasing values in each day's work until at last they, as they reached the head of the ravine, realized ?300 per day from each rocker; notwithstanding that a persistent bluish rock annoyed them by clogging their rockers rock-ers and despite the fact that some incomprehensible incomprehen-sible alloy reduced the value of their gold to $13 per ounce. Their eyes were not lighted. They never once thought of sending the material they were washing to an assayer. Why should they? It was one hundred and fifty miles by rail to the nearest assay office, and then It was only gold j' 1 1 that they were after and could not they get the H ' gold by washing? At the head of the ravine Hi they came upon a great deposit of this rich gravel H and located it. The news of the rich diggings they H had found was told by one prospector to another I and now and then a man climbed that rugged I jj mountain out of curiosity to see what was there. I j One of these picked up a piece of this strange I j i p blue-black metal and carried It away as a pocket H piece. He lived near where Reno, Nevada, now I . is, but a few days later made a visit to his old I J home in Nevada-California. There he gave thH I strange pocket piece to a friend. The friend took Hi It to an assayer and asked him to test It for gold, K. silver, copper or anything else he could think of. L H The result was nearly $1,200 gold and nearly Hjt $1,500 silver per ton. Mr, i So the gravel that the miners had been work- f i ing up the ravine and the deposit they had lo-j lo-j Ik cated at the head of the ravine, was not gravel at Mm H all, but "decomposed rock from the croppings of Ifljl I the old Ophir and Mexican mines, as they have Wm ! since been known. HB That was how one end of the great Comstock BB lode was discovered. Of course, there was an un- 2 paralleled excitement and rush for the astounding T ' I new camp. It was the first silver mine ever found I . . j in the United States; a little later more silver W , i mines were found out on the desert, north, east I I 2 and south; the whole financial world was olec- trifled. What fortunes could not men accumulate , I now? Who could measure the wealth of such a ' i I country as ours? j I No man in the republic knew how to 'success- I ' J fully reduce silver ores, but that abashed no I j 1 one. The silver and the gold were there, and i ' 3 there must be a way to work them, so they went I to work. The story of those first years has often I j j 1 been told. I Two or three years later a man went up from , San Francisco to see the famous lode and the M state of business around the mines. That man I was William Sharon. He had early gone to Cali- i fornla and engaged in the realty business in San I ji Francisco. S He was well educated in the schools, had stud- Iied law enough to understand its exact relations to business, was by nature shrewd and far-seeing and could reason from cause to effect on "a busi- Hh ness proposition with, the quickness of intuition. mMm, He was a small man, weighing perhaps 135 i pounds, always delicate of health, his hands were W : j small and white as those of a small and perfectly H groomed woman, but he carried a sovereign head V upon his shoulders and his features were as l i clearly cut as were those of that class of old W ' Greeks that rung the world in their day. His face ' was lighted by a pair of cold -gray eyes, a glance into which made clear that any one who dealt i M with him should understand from the first that no bluff would ever carry with him, that no matter what the crisis might be, it would be met without fear. The Vigilance committee of. 1856 gave San Francisco business a very black eye; the cream of the California placers had been skimmed; the rush to Fraser river of thousands of miners in 1858, and the return of those' miners as a rule bereft of everything, made any advance for San Francisco impossible, and men who were loaded up with San Francisco real estate, if much in debt, could not extricate themselves, and lost all they had. After 1859 the liveliest business there was dealing in mining shares. Sharon watched this for a while an'1 then went in person to Virginia City. He fou 1 a strange state of affairs. A good many crude quartz mills had been built, generally gen-erally on insufficient capital; the cream of the croppings of the great lode had been skimmed; most of the mines were in litigation; the little banks there had loaned all their monsy on mills and mines at a regular interest of 5 per cent per month, but could collect neither principal nor interest, in-terest, nor could run the mines nor mills; n there were no pay days for miners, and Sharon found a community of several thousand people standing over immeasurable treasures, but unable to utilize them. It was a case of oceans in sight but not a drop to drink. The prospect of bringing order out of such a situation would have daunted most men. Sharon, after looking around a few days wired W. C. Ralston of the bank of California that the thing needed there was a bank. Ralston wired back: "Come down and we will talk it over." The result was that in a few days a branch California bank was established there. It took over the interests of the little banks In the mines and mills, a regular pay day for miners was established; es-tablished; interest was reduced to 12 per cent per annum; regular superintendents at high salaries sal-aries were appointed on the separate mines; about the same time the dealing ceased to be in feet and began to bo carried on in shares; order was established es-tablished and business, reduced to business channels, chan-nels, began to move without friction. And William Sharon was the captain on the bridge that ordered everything, anticipated everything; prepared for everything and with a nerve that was superb fought the difficulties that confronted him and kept the immense machinery of that business running smoothly; though there were .times when the obstacles in the way would have broken the heart of any other man, for sometimes it looked as though the whole lode was going into perpetual perpet-ual borasca. His troubles were not all local. D. O. Mills was then president of the parent bank in San Francisco, and was as exact in his business busi-ness methods as a perfectly adjusted engine is in itn movements, and looked upon anything like gambling in business when that in any way affected af-fected the integrity of a bank as an unforgivable crime, and mining was not reduced to an exact science in those days by a very considerable extent. ex-tent. Indeed, there is always an element of gambling in mining and for that matter in every kind of business. When the farmer ploughs his field and plants his crop, he gambles that the soil, the moisture, the sunlight and the air, will return him three or four or forty fold what he plants, and he does this, knowing that possibly the frost, or the drought, or the locust or the worm or the storm may render all his efforts rewardless. So the miner, when ho sees an indication on one level, knowing the pitch and trend of the mine, figures that at a certain point in the depth, that indication will have swelled into an ore body and dolves for it, all the time aware that a fault may have occurred a million years ago that would make his hopes futile, and his labor vain, but from the record of the doctrine of chances, estimates esti-mates how often he will win. Many people pronounce pro-nounce this as extra hazardous, but call the gambling gamb-ling of the insurance man legitimate business when he in fact for $30 of your money hand paid, wagers that your $3,000 house will not burn for a year to come. In the same way Mr. Sharon learned the habits of the Comstock and so dealt with its moods, and though carrying the cares of a hundred hun-dred men in his brain, he directed and controlled that mig1 y business and knew every day his business busi-ness lat ,ude and longitude as certainly as does the master of a ship his place on the sea, when every day the great sun bends down to give him the needed data. So he was justly called the king of the Comstock for ten years. At last he aspired as-pired to bo elected to the senate and he was. I fear all his methods would not have been approved ap-proved by Senator Beveridge, but his methods were not like those in the east. Here is a sample: Joe Stewart was a Virginia City gambler. He was known far and near as a dead square man in business. Sharon met him one morning and said: "Joe, I am going to be a candidate for senate. You and I have long been friends. I want you to help nit among your class of men. It will take much of your time and you will naturally spend a good deal of money. Come into the bank and I will give you a check." "Your check be d d," was Joe's reply. "I expect to help you; you know that I will do all I can for you, but not for money. You can command me without any of your checks." " Oh! All right," said Sharon. Then they talked ror a few minutes, when Sharon suddenly said: "By the way, Joe, it is a long time since we had a game of poker; can you not fix for one tonight?" "Oh, yes," said Stewart. "W , make it for about 9 p. m. and I will be up," saiu Sharon. He was there at the hour and the game began. be-gan. Sharon was unlucky from the first. He kept losing and lost with a bad grace. He made a great deal of fuss with every loss, until Stewart said: "Why, Sharon, what is the matter with you tonight? I have seen you lose before, but never known you to make such a fuss over it." "It is a blankety blank thieving game. How much do I owe?" asked Sharon. Steward looked over the memoranda and replied: "Four thousand seven hundred and thirty-five dollars," said Stewart. Stew-art. Sharon called for a blank check, filled in the amount and signed it; then pushed it over to Stewart and said : "I suppose you think you have earned that." "Yes," said Stewart; "it was a square game." Then Sharon said: "See how much trouble you can make a man sometimes. That is just $235 less than I intended to give you this morning, if you had not got so cranky about nothing." In that same campaign a husky young man called at the office one day and saying that his name was Sharon asked to see Mr. William Sharon. Sha-ron. General Dodge was In the anti-room, showed him in and explained to Mr. Sharon that the man said his own name was Sharon and that he hailed from eastern Nevada. Sharon greeted him cordially, cordi-ally, asked him what Sharon family he belonged to, and how things were in eastern Nevada. The man proceeded to business at once. He said he could control at least fifty votes, but it would require re-quire some money. "About how much money? ' asked Sharon. "About $100 apiece," was the reply. A cold bluff for $5,000. It was too transparent, trans-parent, Sharon sprang from his chair like a tiger and hurling an unspeakable volley of anathemas at the man, wound up by saying: "You infernal petty larceny hold-up. I will give you $500 if you (Continued on page 10) AS I REMEMBER THEM WILLIAM SHARON, f (Continued from Pago 6.) will petition some legislature to change your name, but would not give you another cent to save (your worthless Hie." The man seemed glad to get out alive without even the $500. A year and a half later Ralston stretched out too far, and the great California bank had to close Its doors. It was a bad break, so bad that it was believed to be hopeless. The eastern newspapers held It up as a sample of wild speculation and iscoffed at the idea that it could ever again open its doors. The directors of the bank were overwhelmed over-whelmed and utterly prostrated. For the marriage of his daughter to Senator Newlands, Sharon had fitted his San Francisco home beautifully; the parlors were a dream. When the bank closed its doors he had some rough tables placed in those parlors, upon the tables were paper and pencils and cigars, and around these tables amid clouds of cigar smoke, for six weeks the directors sat and consulted. Some were quitters, some cowards, some belliger-ant, belliger-ant, but all at the beginning settled in the conviction con-viction that the bank was hop.elessly wrecked and intent only on seeing how much of their private fortunes could be saved from the wreck. ' One of the band intimated that the trouble started by adopting mining methods of running the bank. At this Sharon quietly rejoined that he had never suggested a change in the bank's methods; that by his work in Nevada he had made every one of them more money than he had lost by the failure, and more, had four years previous pre-vious saved the bank from disaster, when by the the opening of New Montgomery street and the purchase of the necessary realty, the bank had advanced too much. Another director then began to assail the memory mem-ory of Mr. Ralston and then all the smothered wrath in Sharon's soul burst forth, and in a few terse and incisive sentences he declared that Mr. Ralston had more heart and soul than the whole band. That whatever his faults were he had made restitution for them all by dying of a broken heart, and that in their further deliberation those faults should not be called in evidence. Then he, continuing, insisted that the question before them was not how to bury a wreck, but how to re'nstate a great financial institution and save their individual honor, and The honor of the city and the state. They all declared that to be impossible, but Sharon insisted. So the matter hung for days. The bold and angry ones Sharon bluffed; the fearful and timid ones he coaxed and conciliated, his position being that each from his private fortune should double his subscription as a stockholder; that by so doing the bank would be in better standing in a year than'lt ever had been and would pay them better interest on their money than they could obtain in any other way. In addition ad-dition for his part he took the half-finished Palace hotel with its liabiitles. After some weeks of this, the announcement was one morning made in the papers that on a certain day the Caifornia Dank would resume business and be prepared to meet all demands. It did open as advertised, in three months it had won back all the prestige it had lost, and was making more money than ever before. It exalted ex-alted the prestige and credit of the west in the east more than any other event ever did, and it made clear that among shrewd and sagacious financiers William Sharon was a past grand master. mas-ter. In private life Mr. Sharon had his moods. When annoyed he could be unreasonable, and say unjust words; again he could bo the most delightful delight-ful of hosts, and a most brilliant conversationalist for he was a finished scholar along all the lines of the great thinkers and again when in reminis- cent mood, to trusted friends he made clear the burdens he had carried while lifting the burdens from the well-nigh prostrate Comstock. In the gentle way he rehearsed them with nothing like vanity or egotism in the narrative, the story was as winsome as a great drama. Then, too, he had some weaknesses of character, but these he' admitted ad-mitted and never tried to conceal them. Why rehearse re-hearse them here, or the sorrow they drew around the closing months of his life. His forte was to organize and carry on great enterprises, to anticipate every Jjquirement and to provide the means to meet them, to seize upon the most complicated financial problem and to solve it like a problem in mental arithmetic. In this he was a master who never had an equal on this continent. |
