I was just a bit astonished at the proposition, but I was gratified that the financial autocrat of the Pacific Coast wanted to climb into my band wagon. The arrangements were made with less “jockeying” than now takes place over a thousand-dollar transaction. I made a complete statement of my investments, which Mr. Ralston accepted, and made me an offer based on cost, plus a very handsome profit, for a quarter interest. I accepted also in an offhand way and deeds passed to correspond covering all my real estate involved in “Montgomery South.” It was understood that we would stand together to push the new street through to the bay, and that in this project I should have the practically unlimited support of the Bank of California. Our holdings were merged into a corporation, known as the Montgomery Street Land Company.
Thus I became associated with this strange character, who has been dead almost forty years, yet whose name is still a household word to thousands and bids fair to be remembered long after those who pose as the truly great are asleep in forgotten tombs.
I spoke of Ralston as a “strange” character. But the adjective doesn’t fit the case at all. There was just one Ralston in California. Perhaps his counterpart never lived before. It would be far beyond my powers to draw a sketch of a man so many-sided, but here and there some traits cropped out so prominent that they could scarcely miss the observation of a child.
WM. C. RALSTON
President of Bank of California, the first dupe in diamond fraud
Ralston had a marvelous head for business. The most difficult problems of finance were as simple to him as the alphabet and his mind cut through all perplexities and obstructions straight to the truth. Had he possessed a few less red corpuscles in his blood—been a plain, downright financier, I am certain that he would have grown beyond the narrow environment of the Pacific Coast and become one of the world’s money kings. But he had an odd supplement to the cold-blooded faculty of making money, a sort of richly Oriental imagination that looked far beyond the mere acquisition of a pile of cash.
For one thing, he had a passionate, almost pathetic love for California. He wanted to see his State and city great, prosperous, progressive, conspicuous throughout the world for enterprise and big things. I think it was this imagination, this ambition, that kept hurrying him into one big undertaking after another, many of which were way ahead of time. While he was stacking up money in one direction, with the skill of a great native-born financier, it was leaking out in various other ways for rolling mills, vast hotels, watch factories, woolen mills, furniture factories, and what not. It was only an ambition to say that San Francisco had the grandest and largest hostelry in the world that prompted him to build the Palace Hotel. And so on down the line. He tried to do everything, and, like others, failed in the end.
With all of his tremendous business activities, I could never think of Ralston except as a big over-grown boy. He had an elasticity and buoyancy of spirits very seldom seen beyond the teens and a youth’s eagerness in the pursuit of pleasure. Nothing seemed to disturb his imperturbable good humor. He was at once the best winner or loser in the world—could pick up or drop a million with equal gaiety and nonchalance. He always smiled in conversation, but in moments of repose his features settled into an expression that was half thoughtful, half sad.