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Just as Manhattan's Wall Street dead ends at Broadway, so did Montgomery stop cold at Market. All who go to California want to see you and want letters of introduction."ĭuring the silver boom of the 1870s, San Francisco's Montgomery Street became known as the Wall Street of the West. Ralston's banking partner in New York wrote him in 1870 that "Everybody talks about you, your princely hospitality, and large-scale of expenditures. He is our friend and I think will assist us." "Give him sugar and molasses at present, but when our time comes give him vinegar of the sharpest kind. Ralston advised Sharon to go easy on a wealthy associate who owned valuable stock that they wanted. Fortunately for Ralston, William Sharon cared little for popular opinion and served as the genial banker's lightning rod.Ī confidential letter from Ralston to his partner suggests their modus operandi. If it took insider trading, backstabbing, and wholesale political corruption to accomplish his ends, those were the rules of the game and everyone else who could afford to play was doing the same.
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He was, unquestionably, a visionary his discussions with Frederick Law Olmsted, for example, led to the cultivation of Golden Gate Park. His lavish entertainments, his carriages, his ducal estate at Belmont, and his many charities earned him, like Keating later, a deserved place in the developmental history of his adopted city.
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Huntington, boss of the Central Pacific Railroad, wrote to his partner Mark Hopkins: "I think time will show that Ralston has got a larger institution than he is able to run." Ralston returned Huntington's trust by referring to him in coded telegrams as "Hungry." Both were astute judges of character.Īs long as Ralston rode the wave of riches, he was the city's paragon of virtue, a role model for pecuniary emulation. It seemed that there was scarcely an enterprise in which Billy Ralston did not have an interest. Ralston converted his Comstock capital into coastal transport, insurance, telegraph lines, currency speculation, woolen and silk mills, canal companies, hydraulic mines, political and judicial bribery, Alaskan furs, gas works, refineries, and hazardous real estate schemes. He directed the profits back to his partners in The Bank Crowd. He expertly manipulated the stock market with the advantage of insider information gleaned from the mineheads. Sharon adroitly devoured mines, mills, business associates, transportation, forests, and Virginia City's water works. To call Sharon a piranha would be to insult the character of the fish. As his agent on the Comstock, Ralston installed a stock jobber named William Sharon. They became known as Ralston's Ring, or simply, The Bank Crowd, and they constituted the West's wealthiest capitalists during the Civil War period.įor the titular head of the Bank, Ralston enlisted Sacramento's Darius Ogden Mills, the most respected financier on the Coast, though Ralston actually ran the Bank as its Cashier. With these men, Ralston entered ever-shifting partnerships and betrayals. Rumors abounded that Billy had been paid $50,000 to do so by the twenty-five or so bank directors with whom he surrounded himself. To his former partners' displeasure, Ralston took most of their best clients with him when he left to found the rival bank. In that year, Congress admitted Nevada into the Union as San Francisco's most lucrative colony, a state commonly known as the nation's "great rotten borough."Īlso in 1864, Ralston established The Bank of California. Five years later, he was treasurer or director of most of the bonanza mines. It was to the Comstock Lode south of present-day Reno that "Billy" Ralston hitched his star soon after its discovery in 1859. Some things like helping to finance the takeover of Nicaragua by soldier of fortune William Walker just did not pay off. Ralston dabbled in a number of schemes before finding his lode. In a land whose abundant resources had scarcely been scraped and whose real estate values climbed with each new immigrant, the future belonged to the ruthless and to the lawyers who wrote the rules of the game for them. Bank of California at Sansome and California, founded in the 1860s by William Ralston.įrom the moment he arrived in San Francisco in 1854, William Ralston was a leading player in the high-stakes game of Western exploitation.