Sharon was quite a different character. He was from the same part of the Northwest as J. D. Fry, an uncle of Mrs. Ralston, and so received a favorable introduction to the famous financier. Ralston sent Sharon to Virginia City during the early flush times as an agent for his mining interests, and when the Bank of California was organized and a branch located on the Comstock Lode, Sharon became manager, a position of great prominence and power. He was a daring, spectacular plunger, though a very shrewd one, made big money from the outset and with his general foreknowledge of conditions really took no chance at all on great stock market deals. With unexampled rapidity, he accumulated a fortune of millions. Having no pet hobbies to interfere with accumulating money, before the ’60s were over both Mills and Sharon probably possessed larger fortunes than their chief.
As I have said Sharon’s personality was very different from that of Mills in many ways. He had some habits that an anchorite might not approve. Among other things he was devoted to the great national pastime—draw-poker. Many legends of his prowess, of his bewildering bluffs and high-class technique were long fragrant memories of the Comstock Lode. It is related that a friend of Ralston with a moral turn warned him that his agent at Virginia was a notorious, abandoned and dissolute poker player. The banker listened with absorbed interest. “Does he win or lose?” he asked.
“My information,” said the informer, “is that he almost always wins.”
“Good,” said Ralston. “He’s the very man I want.” The three were associated in many enterprises of the first magnitude. They had combined resources, speaking very conservatively, of not less than thirty-five millions, which is a big bunch of money even today. They formed an irresistible power in California, until the railroad dynasty succeeded them. Still I have reason to believe that Ralston never gave these associates his full confidence, and that the relation became irksome, if not oppressive.
I judge the former from an unrecorded incident that ought to be remembered in financial history—an incident that just prevented a crisis far more terrible than that of 1907.
WM. SHARON
A leading Comstock figure,
former U. S. Senator
It was in the year 1869. Ralston had loaned the railroad people some months before $3,000,000, with which they pushed their line to Ogden, adding a hundred miles to the Central Pacific in its cross-country race with the Union Pacific for mileage. This large sum had gone out of the State absolutely. Also two millions had taken wing for South America to finance an investment there. Things were already a trifle tight when in July, 1869, Jay Gould’s famous “gold corner” raised the yellow metal to a huge premium and the gold coin of California was drained eastward, as through a sieve. The banks always carried a large amount of gold bars, but this was not available as coin, for the mint happened to be shut down pending a change of administration.