Jay Cooke was perhaps the foremost broker of that day. Hard luck bankrupted him. His brokerage houses in three eastern cities collapsed in 1873, causing one of the greatest financial panics of all time. He was financing the building of the Northern Pacific railroad and had made too many advances. But Jay Cooke was still the promoter par-excellence. He was the promoter previously mentioned as having received an interest in the Horn Silver mine for securing a railroad to the camp.
Jay Cooke was heavily involved when Green Campbell became a member of the firm, and through an oversight a protecting clause was omitted. With new money in the firm, Cooke’s old creditors forced their demands. Green Campbell’s first check was drawn for nine hundred thousand dollars! And that was by no means the end of enforced payments. However, much of this loss was salvaged through securities turned over to Campbell by Cooke.
It was not at all strange that at some time in his financial career, after climbing up to the heights, that Green Campbell should take his turn on the toboggan. Nobody ever wins every step in life. But these two reverses, falling so swiftly and so heavily as to make them the high points of the drama, cut a jagged gash in the fabric of his dreams. And while the hand of Fate continued, for a time at least, to carry the Campbell fortune steadily downward, he did not lose all. Far from it! There was no time after selling the Horn Silver mine that he was not a rich man!
But the winds of adversity, mighty dream-wrecking gales though they were, had not swept away the flame of hope. Back to his mines, unflagging in his efforts to do it all over again, Green Campbell was full of plans for the future when he died rather suddenly of pneumonia, in 1902. Thus, the call of the desert, the lure of the mining game, held him until the last.
And this is the true story of Green Campbell—gentleman, miner, and great wealth-builder, in whose heart there seems to have burned an inextinguishable desire for something that never came.
DESERT CHIVALRY
Published in Wetmore Spectator,
March 13, 1931.
By John T. Bristow
There were not conveyances enough to handle the influx of gold-seekers when I got off the train at Nipton, California, and a long walk across a dry sun baked waste lay ahead of me. I was on my way to the new mining camp of Crescent, just over the line in Nevada, and on my way to a fortune—maybe. Rainbow visions began to rise before me, and hot though it was I did not mind that six-mile walk one bit. I was not alone. She was young, slender — and pretty. And Elsie was a “gold-digger” too. There were others.