Mr. Thompson was a product of Butte, Montana. Early in the game he had learned the Wall Street lesson that "stocks are made to sell." Born and reared in Butte without the aid of a silver spoon, he had never been "in the money" before coming East. The great pay-streak in the East apparently looked better to him than the pay-streaks that some of his Butte neighbors had missed in their deep-mine operations. He was an ideal man for the Nipissing job, as subsequent events in his career thoroughly confirm. Of a school that believes money in hand to be worth more than mining certificates in the box, Mr. Thompson's route from Montana to Broad Street was via Boston, where he made his first visible stake by marketing stock in the Shannon group of mines. When the Cobalt excitement was in its infancy Mr. Thompson took a run up to the camp. The Nipissing mine was about the best thing in sight. It was producing real silver. The company was owned by a little club consisting of E. P. Earle, specialist in rare metals, Captain Delamar, millionaire soldier of fortune, E. C. Converse, banker and steel magnate, Ambrose Monnell, R. M. Thompson, Joseph Wharton, since deceased, of Philadelphia, and Duncan Coulson, a rich Canadian lawyer. Considerable silver was being produced. The veins, however, were exceedingly narrow, not more than a few inches wide. It was impossible to block out ore to an extent that would warrant any opinion as to the real measure of the mine's riches. The gentlemen owners were not averse to giving Mr. Thompson an option on 100,000 shares of treasury stock of the 1,200,000 five-dollar shares ($6,000,000), at $2 a share, when he made the proposition, and another 100,000 shares at $2.50. Later, they sold him a call on 50,000 or 100,000 shares around $7. All of this happened in the Summer of 1906, six months before I reached New York and at a time when the country was giving indication of going mining-stock crazy, Nevada stocks having advanced on the New York Curb in the Goldfield boom hundreds per cent.