After that Drew’s cunning and sagacity seemed gradually to fail him. He met with a succession of disasters through bad judgment, but was more liberal than before in endowing the Drew Theological Seminary and other Methodist institutions. Yet, instead of giving the endowments in cash, he gave his notes for them, and paid interest on these. The consequence was that when he finally lost every dollar that he had, and was declared a bankrupt, without any assets, the notes were worthless. While in this bankrupt condition and dependent for a home on his son, he died, and his death was as unnoticed as that of any other Wall Street wreck. He had gone out of sight, and out of mind, when his money was gone. Never did anyone go further up or further down in Wall Street as a stock speculator than Daniel Drew.
Charles F. Woerishoffer was a brilliant Stock Exchange operator, who made a large fortune out of nothing and then lost most of it again by overstaying his market as a bear after the panic of 1884.
James R. Keene came to New York with several millions, made out of mining stocks in California at the time of the great Bonanza gold discovery at Gold Hill, when Flood and O’Brien, Mackay, and John P. Jones made their millions. But Keene, after adding to his “pile,” lost all he had through overextending his operations in bulling stocks and grain in the eighties. He, however, got a fresh start through being employed by large interests to manipulate stocks for them, and after several more ups and downs he is rich again.
Henry N. Smith, a former partner of Jay Gould, made five or six millions as an operator in stocks, only to lose them again and die poor. The brief meteoric Wall Street career of Ferdinand Ward, who lured General Grant into forming the firm of Grant & Ward, is well remembered. He went up so high that when he came down he landed in Sing Sing prison. Fish, the president of the Marine Bank, did the same, after being long in good repute.
It is unnecessary to dilate on any of the Vanderbilts, or Goulds, or Russell Sage, or Henry Keep, or Henry Villard, or William E. Travers, because they had no totally overwhelming reverses in their Wall Street career; but John F. Tracy, the president of the Rock Island Railroad in the sixties, was ruined by his stock speculations after being worth more than five millions, and he had to relinquish his presidency, and died in poverty. Cyrus W. Field, too, lost nearly all his large fortune through overloading himself with Manhattan Railway stock; and Addison Cammack, the Ursa Major of Wall Street, died worth little in comparison with what he had once possessed.
How violent the vicissitudes of Wall Street are at times we may easily infer when we recall the tremendous convulsion produced by the gold conspiracy of Black Friday, on September 24, 1869, which involved thousands in enormous losses, and caused both the Stock Exchange and the Gold Clearing House, and Gold Exchange Bank, to be closed; or when we think of the devastating Northern Pacific panic of May 9, 1901, or of the far-reaching and long-continued havoc worked by the panic of 1873.
The memorable failure of Jay Cooke & Co., early in the last-mentioned panic, will be recalled by many as vividly as the collapse of the Ohio Life and Trust Company that started the panic of 1857.
All these reminiscences of the ups and downs of Wall Street will serve to remind my readers that, while it is often easy to make money, it is still easier to lose it. Therefore, boldness should be always tempered with caution in the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar in Wall Street.