“Did you work entirely alone?”
“No. It was not long before I met Mr. Croarkin at a little mining camp called Virginia. He had the next claim to mine, and we became partners. After a little while he went away, but came back in a year. We then bought in together. The way we ran things was ‘turn about.’ Croarkin would cook one week and I the next, and then we would have a clean-up every Sunday morning. We baked our own bread, and kept a few hens, which kept us supplied with eggs. There was a man named Chapin who had a little store in the village, and we would take our gold dust there and trade it for groceries.”
“Did you discover much gold?” I asked.
“Oh, I worked with pretty good success—nothing startling. I didn’t waste much, and tried to live as carefully as I ever had. I also studied the business opportunities around, and persuaded some of my friends to join me in buying and developing a ‘ditch’—a kind of aqueduct—to convey water to diggers and washers. That proved more profitable than digging for gold, and at the end of the year the others sold out to me, took their earnings and went home. I stayed and bought up several other water-powers, until, in 1856, I thought I had enough, and so I sold out and came East.”
“How much had you made, altogether?”
“About four thousand dollars.”
“Did you return to Stockbridge?”
HE ENTERS THE GRAIN MARKET.
“For a little while. My ambition was setting in another direction. I had been studying the methods then used for moving the vast and growing food products of the West, such as grain and cattle, and I believed that I could improve them and make money. The idea and the field interested me and I decided to enter it.
“Well, my standing was good, and I raised the money and bought what was then the largest elevator in Milwaukee. This put me in contact with the movement of grain. At that time John Plankinton had been established in Milwaukee a number of years, and, in partnership with Frederick Layton, had built up a good pork-packing concern. I bought in with those gentlemen, and so came in contact with the work I liked. One of my brothers, Herman, had established himself in Chicago some time before in the grain-commission business. I got him to turn that over to the care of another brother, Joseph, so that he might go to New York as a member of the new firm, of which I was a partner. It was important that the Milwaukee and Chicago houses should be able to ship to a house of their own in New York—that is, to themselves. Risks were avoided in this way, and we were certain of obtaining all that the ever-changing markets could offer us.”