well as more extensive speculations in the same line, they formed a partnership with Mackay and Fair—who were miners by occupation and were engaged in practical working on the Comstock lode in the very midst of the mines—in the buying and selling of which they had been so fortunate. Soon after the formation of the firm, whose legal designation still continued to be Flood & O'Brien, they purchased the then as yet unproductive ground near the north end of the Comstock lode, consisting of several locations and known as the Consolidated Virginia mine. It was thirteen hundred and ten feet long and divided into ten thousand seven hundred shares. The price paid was from four to nine dollars per share or altogether less than one hundred thousand dollars and less than one hundred dollars per lineal foot. It had been worked in the way of prospecting for ten or more years and in fact almost continuously since the discovery of the Washoe deposits, at an expense of over a quarter of a million of dollars; but it had never yielded any ore of value or returned a dollar of dividend. And it was plain to those who were acquainted with the ground that it would, under ordinary cir cumstances, require nearly as much more expenditure to thoroughly explore it. The new firm either knew, or thought they had reason to believe, the mine was rich and determined to expend the necessary money to find out. But instead of sinking on the old shaft, which was only four hundred feet deep, and continuing the old system of exploitation, they made arrangements to run a drift or tunnel from the Gould & Curry shaft, which was eighteen hundred feet deep and eight hundred feet from the Consolidated Virginia ground. This drift, which was twelve hundred feet below the surface, led to the discovery of the famous bonanza extending the whole length of the mine. Its value at once shot up into the millions. Almost immediately, what had been one mine was divided into two, the Consolidated Virginia and the California; and, instead of the original ten thou. sand seven hundred shares of the old mine, each of the new ones was divided into one hundred and eight thousand shares -cach share thus representing less than the one-fourteenth of an inch. But the actual receipts from the bonanza for the first six or seven months of 1875 amounted to an average of over a

million and a half of dollars per month; and the shares above mentioned, notwithstanding their extreme tenuity, ran up to upwards of seven hundred dollars each, or upwards of one hundred and fifty million dollars for the whole property.

While the so-called bonanza stocks and their neighbors, which were carried up by the same rise, thus advanced or were rather -to use the language of the day-"bulled" up with the most consummate skill and to figures that seem incredible to a sober age, the community became virtually frantic with the fever of speculating in them. There seemed to be nothing too insane for people to do. Reason appeared to have lost its throne. Those who had speculated before speculated again and raked and scraped the dregs of what they had left for means to retrieve, as they supposed, with compound interest, the fortunes they had lost. Many who had escaped before were now drawn into the maelstrom; robberies, thefts, breaches of trust and crimes of all descriptions were committed to procure money to purchase stocks; and no doubt, if all the brutality and sin that were occasioned by that extraordinary excitement could be known in detail, they would be appalling. But the frenzy did not last long. The men who were at the bottom of the business and who had engineered the rise in stocks, as soon as the output began to decline, also began to "unload" as it was called or sell out their shares; and the manner in which this was accomplished in various instances showed that there were many methods, in the manipulation of mines, that had theretofore been unknown but far exceeded all the old ones in deviltry. The result was that stocks fell; and, when they commenced falling, they went down rapidly-shrinking in a few weeks to a third of what they had been previously held at, and carrying with them in the general crash all except the manipulators, some of their special friends and a few others who were smart enough to see ahead and save themselves in time.

Among those who dealt largely in mining stocks, and assisted in various ways in giving them currency, was the Bank of California, a financial corporation of San Francisco capitalists and one of the leading banking institutions of the world. It was then under the management of William C. Ralston. This re

markable man, a native of Ohio, born in 1825, after receiving a common-school education, learned the trade of steamboat building and soon rose to the position of clerk on one of those Mississippi river steamers, known as floating palaces. In 1850 he started for California, but stopped at Panama, where he was made agent of the firm of Garrison & Morgan, owners of a line of steamships connecting San Francisco with New York. He was so energetic and brilliant as a business man that, in 1853, he was promoted to the post of agent of the same firm at San Francisco; and a few years subsequently, when his employers opened a San Francisco bank, they took him in as a partner, calling the firm Garrison, Morgan, Fretz & Ralston. About a year afterwards, Garrison and Morgan drew out, leaving the firm Fretz & Ralston, which, chiefly on account of Ralston's rare tact, passed successfully through panics and financial convulsions that carried many others. down. In 1858 the firm changed to Donohoe, Ralston & Co.; but the connection did not last long. In 1864 Ralston induced Darius O. Mills and a number of other millionaires to join with him in founding and organizing the Bank of California, of which Mills became president and himself cashier. This bank from the start was a very great success, monopolizing almost all the banking business of the country and extending its connections over all the world. In 1872, Mills having voluntarily retired, Ralston became president and started almost at once on the most extraordinary business career ever known in Californiaremarkable no less for the blindness and negligence, with which his associates sat by and let him go on, than for the prodigal splendor and magnificence of his expenditures.

Very early in the history of the bank, it had taken an active part in the Comstock mines and sent William Sharon as its confidential agent to reside in Nevada. Under general instructions, chiefly the work of Ralston, Sharon conducted the bank business there-particularly that of advancing money on the security of mining stock, promoting the building of ore-crushing mills and so regulating affairs that in a short time he bought them in on foreclosure or in some other manner obtained control. With so much ability and skill was this done that the next move was a sort of partnership between Ralston and Sharon, by means of

which Sharon became individually interested in the best part of the Nevada business; and, being backed, as it were, by the apparently unlimited capital of the Bank of California managed by Ralston, he soon developed into a personage of very great importance, into in fact the greatest man, in a financial point of view, in Nevada. The manner in which he conducted the business, thus worked up, was by means of a corporation known as the Union Mill and Mining Company, of which he was president and manager. It became the owner of nearly all the mills on the Comstock lode-supposed to be worth altogether over a million of dollars, not so much perhaps on account of actual cost as on account of their having in substance the monopoly of the orecrushing for all the mines. In addition to this, it became the owner of the Virginia City water-works and the Virginia and Truckee railroad-supposed to be worth some ten millions and being specially valuable on account of their control, the one of the water and the other of the timber and wood indispensably necessary for the operating of the mines and mills.

While Sharon was thus conducting strictly business operations in Nevada with extraordinary shrewdness and coolness, and becoming wealthy in his own right, Ralston in California seemed to become a sort of monomaniac on the subject of splendid projects and among them many calculated to develop Californian industries. His mind appeared to be peculiarly, and apparently unhealthily, affected in that direction. He was ready to listen to almost anybody who had an enterprise to offer, and to encourage almost any one that looked to him at all plausible. At the same time, on account of his great success hitherto and the almost unlimited control of the Bank of California which its careless trustees had allowed him to assume, he seemed to think he owned its funds and disbursed them very much as he pleased. He thus expended immense sums in all sorts of directions from which there was very little return. He promoted and became more or less largely interested in various manufacturing establishments-among them those known as the Mission woolen-mills, the Kimball carriage-factory, the Cornell watch-factory, the West Coast furniture-factory, the San Francisco sugar-refinery and many others. He contributed much to the building of the mag

nificent dry-dock at Hunter's Point in San Francisco, to reclamation works at Sherman Island and to the San Joaquin irrigating canal. He furnished capital more or less largely for the erection of the Grand Hotel, for the buying up of property for the opening of New Montgomery street and for the building of the California theater in San Francisco. He purchased an extensive and delightful country-seat in the Cañada del Raimundo in San Mateo county, which he called Belmont and improved into what might be supposed a resemblance to the famous country-seat described in the Merchant of Venice-where he entertained with such munificence that it was popularly supposed in uninformed quarters that the Bank of California furnished the money for it in order to impress the world and extend its influence and business. As a specimen of an enterprise of a different character, he was said to be at the head of a scheme to induce the city and county of San Francisco to purchase certain grounds including water-rights, in what was known as Calaveras valley in Alameda and Santa Clara counties, for ten millions of dollars, out of which it was charged that he and his associates would have made nearly half for themselves. The plan, which was called the "Calaveras cow-pasture scheme," was so vigorously opposed by some of the San Francisco newspapers, however, that it was defeated; and Ralston found himself considerably injured by the attacks and exposures, to which he was subjected in consequence of his connection with it. He also projected, planned and partly built the Palace Hotel, which at the time of its construction was the largest edifice of the kind in the world.

There have been various reports as to the manner in which Ralston managed to hoodwink the trustees of the bank, as to the sources whence he obtained the funds for all these lavish expenditures. It is certain that they were deceived, either by direct falsifications of the business of the bank or by a careless supposition, superinduced by the insanity of the stock mania, that the Union Mill and Mining Company was a sort of second robbers' cave and that Ralston had the "open sesame" to its unlimited treasures. And while the bonanza craze, even that of the Consolidated Virginia and California in which Ralston had no part, kept up, there was still no suspicion of anything wrong