Fish would follow that pattern for the next six years, believing himself Ferd’s enabler and sometime co-conspirator—but ultimately becoming just another of his dupes.
For a twenty-eight-year-old from a small upstate town, Ferd was doing remarkably well in Manhattan. Thanks to his late father-in-law, he now had access to money with which to work, and he had the financial backing and the kind of cover only a seasoned, apparently conservative Wall Street veteran like James Fish could provide. Fellow plungers on the Produce Exchange began calling him “Futures Ferdinand”13 for his apparently uncanny skill at seeing which way commodity prices were going to go. Without quite saying so, he gave the impression to them and to Fish that he was being guided by inside information gleaned from his close working relationship with influential men like his immediate boss, S. Hastings Grant, and the president of the Produce Exchange, Franklin Edson.
Still, he was not satisfied. More success required more connections. It fell to Will Ward to provide them. He had landed Ferd his first job in New York and then made him stick to it, had tried his best to keep him away from temptations and out of trouble in the big city, just as their mother had hoped he would. Now, he would unwittingly make it possible for his kid brother to give in to temptation and get himself into trouble on a scale even Jane Shaw Ward could not have imagined.
By the late 1870s, Will had grown restless. Every morning for nearly a decade he had gone to work at the U.S. Assay Office at 30 Wall Street, where he helped ensure the purity of the gold and silver bullion used to make coins at the Philadelphia mint. It was exacting, tedious work, and before long, he had begun looking for ways to rekindle his imagination and supplement his income. He served as part-time science editor for Appleton’s Journal for a time, and wrote on scientific topics for that magazine, Scribner’s Monthly, and the American Encyclopedia. He helped organize a laboratory at the short-lived New York Aquarium at Thirty-fifth Street and Broadway, too, and began investing in small blocks of mining stocks that performed well and whetted his appetite for more.
In April 1878, three months after Sidney Green’s death and while Ferd and Fish continued to speculate in Produce Exchange certificates and odd lots of flour, Will moved into new quarters, an elegant flat in the brand-new Bella apartment building at the southwest corner of Twenty-sixth Street and Fourth Avenue.†
Thanks to dividends from his mining investments, he was able to afford $300 rent in advance, a fact that brought out all his mother’s buried envy.
Why Willie, dear, you do not know how big such a sum seems to me, nor what it would do for us here in the country. Shall I tell you? Well, it would put two coats over all the outside of the house. It would also paint the 15 sets of window blinds, newly roof with shingles the house, kitchen and wood-house, would get a new carpet for my parlor and lower hall which they greatly need, and leave me $50 to spend on outside ‘fixing,’ etc.! And yet this all seems a small sum to you. Well Dear, I am glad you have it, much more glad than if I had it myself, and you have earned it by hard labor which gratifies me much more than if some good fortune or windfall had given it to you without effort. Since you have no home of your own [because he was still unmarried] surely your bachelorship entitles you to comfortable, respectable and even luxurious quarters, if necessary. I know you thank God for all you have and as He gives it to you He wants it to be used for your happiness, as well as that of others.14
Will had a new roommate as well as new digs: twenty-five-year-old Ulysses S. Grant Jr., the second of three sons of the ex-president of the United States. Nicknamed “Buck” by his father because he’d been born in Ohio, the “Buckeye State,” he was nine years younger than Will Ward. As early as the winter of 1877 they had planned together to produce a history of the Civil War, and General Grant—who liked Will as soon as his son introduced him—had promised to provide them with fresh anecdotes to set it apart from its competitors. Will’s father was sure the result would be “a most interesting & popular & saleable volume.… The promise of General and Ex. Pres. Grant to aid you is an omen of success.”15 In the end, the plan had come to nothing—upon leaving the White House in March, the ex-president and his wife had begun an overseas journey that would stretch on for nearly three years—but the two young men remained close.
Buck Grant was round-faced, soft-spoken, and genial—“without enemies,” a Chicago newspaper said, “amiable and stalwart.”16 But he was also always unsure whether people were responding warmly to him or to his illustrious name. His elder brother, Colonel Fred Grant, had been closer to his father; he had accompanied the general during the Fort Gibson and Vicksburg campaigns, attended West Point, and risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel before marrying a beautiful Illinois heiress, Ida Marie Honoré. Meanwhile, Buck had been largely under the care of his mother, Julia Dent Grant. A reporter who covered the White House during the Grant presidency remembered him as “a modest, retiring lad, as sensitive and kindly as a girl,… so sensitive that a cross word was more of a punishment to him than a severe chastisement would be to most boys.”17 He attended Phillips Exeter, Harvard, and the Columbia Law School and acted briefly as his father’s private secretary, but it was a word from his mother to the wife of one of the senior partners that had won him his first job, as a clerk in the Manhattan law firm of Davies, Work, McNamee & Hilton, specialists in real estate and tax law. (He and Will first met at a dinner held at the home of the firm’s senior member, Julian T. Davies.)
Neither Buck nor his employers believed quarrels over the titles to brownstones or suits for damage done to local businesses by the clamorous new elevated railroads would hold him long. Buck had begun to court Fannie Chaffee, the daughter of Colorado’s Republican senator, Jerome B. Chaffee, who had made millions in mining stocks over the years and saw no reason why he—and his prospective son-in-law—shouldn’t make millions more. Buck agreed, and with advice from Chaffee and the ex-president’s other friends in the mining business, and with written instructions from the general himself, traveling in Europe, earned enough money investing in the Nevada Comstock Lode to send his parents $600,000 with which to extend their tour all the way around the world. When the Comstock mines began to peter out in 1879, Buck joined a syndicate of other ambitious young men on the lookout for fresh opportunities at the site of a potential new bonanza: Leadville, Colorado, a played-out gold camp eighty miles southwest of Denver that now turned out to be rich in silver mixed with lead.
“Mining securities are not the thing for widows and orphans or country clergymen, or unworldly people of any kind,” wrote Charles H. Dow, the savvy newspaperman who would one day help develop the Dow Jones Industrial Average. “But for a business man, who must take risks in order to make money; who will buy nothing without careful, thorough investigation; and who will not risk more than he is able to lose, there is no other investment in the market today as tempting as mining stock. And among mines there are none the value of which can be more fully foreshown than those in Leadville, Colorado.”18
A Leadville mine called the “Evening Star” was up for sale at what seemed a very low price. Buck’s syndicate was eager but wary. Mining was always a gamble: General Grant himself warned that it was “beyond humankind to judge with accuracy as to what lays hidden in the bowels of the earth.”19 And Leadville, like every other mining camp, was alive with thieves and confidence men; ever since the California gold rush of 1849, eastern investors had joked that the definition of a mine was “a hole in the ground with a liar on top.”
Before he or any of his friends wrote a check, young Grant said, they should have the mine thoroughly examined by a seasoned assayer whose integrity could not be questioned. His friend Will Ward was just the man. Watson B. Dickerman, a successful broker who happened to have been Will’s classmate at Williston Seminary, seconded the motion. Bored by the Assay Office, eager to apply his skills in the field and to make some real money on his own, Will agreed to take a month’s leave, head west, and have a look at the Evening Star. He returne
d with good news: the mine seemed very promising. The syndicate bought it and asked Will to become its manager.
On January 1, 1879, he resigned from the Assay Office and signed a five-year contract to run the Evening Star. Only afterward did he tell his parents. His father was displeased at first; the depression was only just coming to an end, and he was concerned that his son was giving up a “permanency” at the Assay Office. His mother was more supportive—“you may become a millionaire!” she told him—but she also begged him to take a temperance pledge before leaving home, worried he was about to enter a world of “temptations,… rough society [and] the want of moral restraints.”20
That world was very real. When Will got to Leadville in February 1879, claim jumping was common. So were street holdups, pickpockets, confidence men, and Saturday-night brawls. Everybody wore a gun. Saloons and gambling houses never closed their doors. Whorehouses advertised openly: the women at the Red Light Hall were billed as “rounder, rosier and more beautiful than elsewhere.… You don’t care a cent whether school keeps or not just so the girls are there.”21
Will seems to have stayed away from all of it. He proceeded with greater care than most of his rivals, ensuring that every foot of the five mine shafts he ordered sunk was securely timbered and every vein of ore his miners exposed was meticulously assayed before declaring the first monthly dividend of $25,000—more than half a million dollars today.
Will also made it possible for his younger brother to buy a large block of shares at the bottom price, just $2 a share; within a few months, they would be worth $50 apiece. Monthly dividends rose steadily, too. Thanks to Will, Ferd now had an income of his own to add to the funds he was quietly taking from his wife’s family’s estate.
The Evening Star’s grateful owners were soon asking Will to scout out new properties (in which both he and Ferd also invested), and he had become one of the camp’s leading citizens. He built himself a gabled double-storied house on Capitol Hill, overlooking Leadville at 220 West Eighth Street. He first thought to call it “Indianola,” after the ironclad aboard which he’d served during the Civil War, but settled for “Cloud-rift Cottage” because of its sweeping mountain views. One frequent visitor to Will’s porch never forgot the “great silencing sunsets” that could be seen from there each evening.22 The couple living in the log cabin next door provided Will with congenial and cultured company. Arthur D. Foote was a fellow mining engineer, trained at Yale. His wife, Mary Hallock Foote, was an illustrator and writer whose work, like Will’s, had appeared in Scribner’s Monthly.‡
She found her neighbor “cheerful, refined, clean-souled,” she told a friend, “and he wears wonderfully well.”23 When he asked if he could build a covered walkway from the Footes’ cabin to his house and invited the couple to board with him, taking advantage of the cook the Dickermans had sent west to serve him, Mary happily agreed. In turn, she helped him buy carpets and curtains for his new home—his “trousseau,”24 she called it—and acted as his hostess and chaperone, permitting him to invite the right sort of young women to dine. “He entertains a great deal,” she wrote to a friend, “and we see an amusing procession of New York bondholders and capitalists, tourists, newspapermen, mining men, and men of all descriptions.”25 J. Watson Dickerman and his beautiful wife, Martha, came west to see how their mine was doing—and seemed delighted with everything. Buck Grant visited, too, and Mary Foote found him “extremely modest and very sensible.”26
Among those who also dined at Will’s table that summer were the two daughters of Judge Jasper Delos Ward, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, who owned another mine on Carbonate Hill, the Little Giant, and presided over the brand-new Leadville courthouse as district judge. The judge’s elder daughter, Emma Jane Ward, called “Kitty” and “Kate” by her family, caught Will’s eye. She was “a handsome girl of the (I sh’d fancy) English country house style,” Mary Hallock Foote told a friend. “Admirable on horseback—beautiful hands and feet and head—thorough-bred looking—descendant of General Artemas [Ward] who came near being the father of his country.”§
Will courted Kate on horseback, galloping with her back and forth across Tennessee Park, a mile-long meadow blanketed with wild-flowers that stretched along the Lake Fork of the Arkansas River. By December 1879, Mary Foote noted, “they had become engaged.… They are as foolish as usual and as happy as it is rather unusual to be.” Will’s father was happy as well. Everything he and Jane had heard about his son’s fiancée and her family was reassuring. “Rather singular that her name should be Jane Ward,” he told Sarah. “He always said that Jane Ward [his mother] was as good a wife as he wanted & he has found her.”‖
William and Kate Ward were eventually married in her father’s Chicago home at 285 S. Ashland Avenue. Three hundred guests attended and afterward danced to the music of Hand’s society orchestra. Will’s father officiated. His mother did not attend, perhaps because of the great distance involved, more likely because champagne was served at the reception. “The presents were unusually numerous and fine,” reported one Chicago paper, “among the number being … two bronze vases and a solid silver and gold-lined ice-cream set from Ulysses Grant and a magnificent set of solitaire diamond earrings, brooch, and ring from the groom.”27
Will’s full-time mining career in the West meant that he was now only nominally involved in his younger brother’s affairs, and could no longer exert the kind of caution he had once insisted upon. Ferd was free to act as his instincts and his conscience—or lack of it—dictated.
Sometime late in 1879 he told S. Hasting Grant, his employer at the Produce Exchange, that he was leaving his post after six years in order to go into the brokerage business on his own. (Even as he left, he was careful to maintain his ties with Grant, lending him several thousand dollars with which to import Jersey cattle; he always tried never to alienate anyone who might prove useful to him in the future.)
As a favor to his friend and classmate Will Ward, J. Watson Dickerman allowed Ferd to set up his own desk behind a heavy curtain in the corner of the office he shared with his partner, Benjamin Dominick, at 74 Broadway.
At first, James Fish doubted Ferd would do well on Wall Street, where, as he said, “very few men succeed and thousands fail.”28 The young man’s boldness and inexperience were likely to do him in. But Ferd was reassuring, Fish recalled: “He said that he would do nothing that was risky and that he had some very good backers who … gave him pointers and were willing to let him into good things.”29 David Dows was just one of them, Ward said. The retired patriarch of the New York grain trade, Dows had made himself two great fortunes, first in commodities and then in railroads. Now, according to Ferd, he enjoyed offering the young man his investment advice just for the fun of seeing his predictions come true. “Ward declared that Dows had … advised him to buy Rock Island stock,” Fish recalled. “It turned out that Rock Island was a splendid thing and this [impressed me].” Fish lent Ferd more money with which to speculate: “He was remarkably successful and for a long time he made me about $200 a day [$4,300 in today’s dollars].”30
Rock Island stock did do well, but there is no evidence that Ferd had ever so much as shaken hands with David Dows, who had become famously reclusive and had come to see the stock market as inherently unsafe in any case. But Fish evidently believed his young associate’s story and marveled both at the way he seemed able to befriend so many powerful older men and at the energy with which he bought and sold stocks, apparently at their direction. “He would sit by [his own stock ticker] daily from ten o’clock till three,” a visitor to the Dominick & Dickerman offices remembered. “Even while talking to a visitor he would slip the tape through his fingers and write orders.… It was generally thought in the office that when a fellow went behind that little curtain with Ward that Ward was in no danger. The friends of the other fellow … often got uneasy.”31
Among those who frequently joined Ferd behind his curtain was Buck Grant. Will had introduced Buck to his
younger brother before he left for Colorado, and they had since become better acquainted as fellow investors in the Evening Star and other Leadville mines. “Buck didn’t know anything about stocks and he asked me to advise him on a good many things and make his investments for him,”32 Ferd remembered. He eagerly complied. Flour, railroads, mining stocks—Ferd seemed able to record big profits on them all. Buck was amazed: “Why is it that you always come out ahead?” he asked Ferd one day.33 Ferd just smiled. Buck asked that nearly every dollar he made be reinvested, and promised to come up with still more money for Ferd to work with.
Will Ward regarded Buck Grant as a friend. Ferd saw him, as he saw everyone around him, as someone to be exploited, a means to achieving his own ends: if properly managed, this naïve, overeager young investor with the famous name and close links to his father’s influential friends could help attract almost unlimited capital. And if Ferd could persuade both the son of the ex-president of the United States and the president of the Marine Bank officially to go into business with him, he was sure millions could be attracted to the firm. “You know the old saying is true that the more one has the more one wants,” he told Fish, “and this is so with me.”34
He first needed to bring Buck and the banker together. Will Ward innocently made that possible, too. In December 1879, the Evening Star syndicate summoned Will back to New York to make a presentation about the mine’s future to potential investors at the Union League Club. Ferd and Ella were glad to see him: Will spent Christmas with them in Brooklyn, and the brothers sent a barrelful of brightly wrapped gifts to their parents in Geneseo with cards signed by both of them. But before the Evening Star dinner began, Ferd made sure that the seats were arranged so that Fish and Buck sat next to each other.
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age Page 18