It would have been the better part of valor to have emulated Bob Acres--back up and "live to fight another day." Instead, I attempted the impossible in my endeavor to stem the tide of liquidation, and exhausted our resources to the last dollar in buying back the Sullivan stocks at advanced figures over the promotion prices. I didn't know then, as I know now, that the accepted practice of the successful market operators is to go with the crowd--to help along an advance when the public is buying, and, with equal facility, to further a decline when everybody wants to sell. It was my first experience, and, like so many beginners, I was overconfident, lacking in judgment, and fatally ignorant of the finer points of the game. The complete collapse of the financial structure I had labored so hard to construct came as an overwhelming blow to the camp and marked the beginning of the end of the great Goldfield mining-stock craze. Our enemies had overshot the mark. Public confidence was irreparably shattered by the smash of the trust company, and it would have been better for Goldfield and Nevada had Wingfield and Nixon possessed sufficient foresight to go to our rescue instead of facilitating our destruction. Money that had poured into the camp without cessation month after month for mine development started to flow the other way. Less than a year later, when Wall Street's financial cataclysm put a quietus on market activities of every sort, the great fortunes of Wingfield and Nixon themselves hung in the balance, and had it not been for a quick transaction by which the United States Mint at San Francisco forwarded by express to Reno and Goldfield $500,000 in gold, the failure of Wingfield and Nixon and their chain of banks might have happened as a fitting climax to the scheme of aggrandizement which they had fostered. It was rumored at the time that this money had either been obtained from the Government as a deposit for the Nixon National Bank in Reno or was obtained at great sacrifice from Wall Street bankers, and that only by virtue of Mr. Nixon's position as Chairman of the Committee on National Banks of the United States Senate was he able to get the Sub-Treasury in New York to instruct the Mint at San Francisco to supply the gold at this crucial period when fiat money was current in the East. Whether it was a Government deposit or not, Senator Nixon got it--and he needed it. Even to this day Wingfield and Nixon are engaged in an effort to shift the responsibility to me for the destruction of the great mining camp of Goldfield, which to-day marks the graveyard of a million blighted hopes.