The tempter then went to him on another tack, agreeing to carry the stock for him, so that he would have no risk whatever, at the same time remarking that, in turn for the favor, generous recognition in the news columns of the publication, in support of the Curb campaign, would be expected. Again the newspaper man declined, this time with unmistakable emphasis. He intimated cannily that while he might be taken on he might not be told when to get off, adding that he might be discharged if he fell for anything of that sort.
When the market price toppled from $33 back to around $6 this man's newspaper did not carry any front-page story denouncing the outrage upon the public.
I do not know that the manipulators of Nipissing "got to" his employers, but I do know of some newspapers in New York which pose before the public as embodying the very highest type of newspaper morality and which have at their head, either as part owners or as editors, men who were taken in hand by Wall Street magnates at a period when they were dependent for their daily livelihood on their weekly wage, and were lifted into the millionaire division by being put into "good things." Do you suppose newspapers presided over by those men are going to say a word against the enterprises of their benefactors? Conversely, if their benefactors happen to be bothered by any man whose business purposes run contrary to theirs, how far, do you think, these gentlemen of the press would go in their own news columns to poison the public mind against the enterprise of their patron's enemy?
When I witnessed the climax of W. B. Thompson's marvelously successful campaign in Nipissing on the New York Curb, I was fresh from Goldfield. My recollection is that my chief thought at that time, with the Goldfield Consolidated swindle fresh in my mind, was simply that the Western multi-millionaire highbinder promoter didn't class with his Eastern prototype. Indeed, the two appeared to be of different species, as different as the humble but noisy coyote from the Abyssinian man-eating tiger.
The late Spring of 1907 found me back in Nevada. I selected Reno as a central point for residence and decided to locate there. Eastern stock markets appeared to be beyond my ken. It seemed quite apparent that the Western game, as compared with the Eastern, was one of marbles as against millions. In New York's financial mart I felt like a minnow in a sea of bass. Without millions for capital, Nevada appealed to me as a more likely field of usefulness. I believed in Nevada's mineral resources. Having seen Goldfield evolve from a tented station on the desert with a hundred people into a city of 15,000 inhabitants; from a district with a few gold "prospects" into a series of mines producing the yellow metal at the rate of nearly $1,000,000 a month, I was enthused with the idea that there were other goldfields yet unexplored in the battle-born State and that opportunity was bound to come to me if I pitched my tent on the ground.
