All this successful work in South Australia occupied but seven months. Back in London again he gathered about him a remarkable staff of skilled young mining engineers, mostly Americans. There were thirty-five or forty of them, indeed, not on salary or fixed appointment, but men eager to attach themselves to him for the sake of working with him or for him in connection with the ever-increasing number of his large enterprises in the way of reorganization and rehabilitation of mines scattered all over the world. He became the managing director or chief consulting engineer of a score of mining companies, and the simple association of his name with a mining enterprise gave investors and other engineers a perfect confidence in its success and its honest handling. Two of his largest undertakings were in Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the Urals, the other at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Manchuria. The Kyshtim property was a great but run-down historic establishment, on an estate of an area almost equal to that of all Belgium. One hundred and seventy thousand people lived on the estate, all dependent on the mining establishment for their support. The ores were of iron and copper, but the mines were so far from anywhere that not only did these ores have to be smelted at the mine mouths, but factories had to be erected to manufacture the metal into products capable of compact transportation. When Hoover took over the bankrupt properties he found himself not only with mining and manufacturing problems to solve, but with what was practically a relief problem to face. For the underpaid workmen and their unfortunate families were in a state of great misery. He succeeded not only in modernizing and rehabilitating the material part of the great establishment, but at the same time in rescuing and revivifying a suffering laboring population of helpless Russians. The Irtish properties were near the Manchurian border, a thousand miles up the Irtish River from Omsk, a mere remote bleak spot on the wild, bare Siberian steppes. But at this spot lay extensive deposits of zinc, iron, lead, copper and coal, all together. He had first of all to build 350 miles of railroad to make the spot at all accessible. And the actual "mining" operations included everything from digging out and smelting the ores to manufacturing all sorts of things from metal door-knobs to steel rails and even steamboats to ply on the Irtish River. He put a large sum of English, Canadian and American money--including much of his own--into the work of building up a great establishment which was just on a paying basis when the war broke out. It is all now in the hands of the Bolsheviki, with a most dubious outlook for the recovery of any of the money put into it.