The bank people became alarmed.
In requisitioning the $300,000 we had stated that we would call for it piecemeal, as had been our custom in the past. The five days' mail had piled up drafts totaling nearly the entire amount. I was absent from Goldfield. Mr. Grant was away, and so was Mr. Sullivan. Employees were running the business. Cashier Lindsey concluded that we were "overboard." On top of it all, Donald Mackenzie, the heaviest depositor of the State Bank & Trust Company, had that very morning drawn out a large sum, said to aggregate $400,000, and had it transferred to San Francisco. Our wires from Goldfield stated he had been frightened by rumors that the Sullivan Trust Company was in trouble and that the State Bank & Trust Company would be involved.
That settled it. The enterprise that I had built up from such a meager beginning into a $3,000,000 trust company crumbled in a heap and left us stranded on the financial shoals of an over-boomed mining camp.
SOME HINDSIGHT THAT CAME TOO LATE
I attribute the destruction of the Sullivan Trust Company to six factors, namely, (1) politics; (2) blackmail; (3) lack of wide distribution of our later promotions, we having sold most of these stocks in large blocks during the exciting boom days through brokers to speculators instead of disposing of them in small lots direct to investors; (4) my lack of knowledge of markets and inexperience in market manipulation; (5) my own stubborn pride and optimism, and (6) the failure of the State Bank & Trust Company to keep its pledge of assistance.
It is conceded in Nevada by all honest men that, without exception, all of the properties promoted by the L. M. Sullivan Trust Company had merit, and that money was lavishly provided for mine development as long as the trust company was in existence. The properties were selected with great care. They were very much higher in quality than the average. Those at Manhattan are yielding treasure to this very day, and may make good yet in a handsome way from a mining standpoint. Those at Fairview bid fair to duplicate the performance. Had I kept out of politics, been a good market general, and taken cognizance of the fact that the law of supply and demand is as inexorable in mining-stock markets as in every other line of human endeavor, I could have saved myself and associates from financial ruin.
It would have been the better part of valor to have emulated Bob Acres—back up and "live to fight another day." Instead, I attempted the impossible in my endeavor to stem the tide of liquidation, and exhausted our resources to the last dollar in buying back the Sullivan stocks at advanced figures over the promotion prices. I didn't know then, as I know now, that the accepted practice of the successful market operators is to go with the crowd—to help along an advance when the public is buying, and, with equal facility, to further a decline when everybody wants to sell. It was my first experience, and, like so many beginners, I was overconfident, lacking in judgment, and fatally ignorant of the finer points of the game.
The complete collapse of the financial structure I had labored so hard to construct came as an overwhelming blow to the camp and marked the beginning of the end of the great Goldfield mining-stock craze.
Our enemies had overshot the mark. Public confidence was irreparably shattered by the smash of the trust company, and it would have been better for Goldfield and Nevada had Wingfield and Nixon possessed sufficient foresight to go to our rescue instead of facilitating our destruction. Money that had poured into the camp without cessation month after month for mine development started to flow the other way.
Less than a year later, when Wall Street's financial cataclysm put a quietus on market activities of every sort, the great fortunes of Wingfield and Nixon themselves hung in the balance, and had it not been for a quick transaction by which the United States Mint at San Francisco forwarded by express to Reno and Goldfield $500,000 in gold, the failure of Wingfield and Nixon and their chain of banks might have happened as a fitting climax to the scheme of aggrandizement which they had fostered.