THE RISE OF WINGFIELD AND NIXON ANY one in Goldfield who was willing to admit that stocks were selling too high at the time was decried as a "knocker." You could borrow freely on all listed Goldfield stocks at John S. Cook & Company's bank, owned by the promoters of the Goldfield Consolidated, and the men of the camp for that reason felt that there must be concrete value behind nearly all of them. Brokers in Eastern cities reported that few of their customers were willing to take profits even at the prices to which stocks had been skyrocketed. Most mining-stock brokers of the cities had "knocked" the stocks of the camp in the early days before the advance. At this stage, when prices had reached undreamed-of levels, the brokers did not advise their customers that values had been worked up far beyond intrinsic worth. Indeed, they actually waxed enthusiastic in their recommendations to buy. Every one was a bull. Sessions of the Goldfield Stock Exchange reflected the extent of the craze. Outside of the exchange the stridulous, whooping, screeching, detonating voices of the brokers that kept carrying the market up at each session could be heard half a block away. Later, did you find your way into the crowded board-room, the half-crazed manner in which note-books, arms, fists, index fingers, hats and heads tossed and swayed approached in frenzy a scene of violence to which madness might at once be the consummation and the curse. George Wingfield and his partner, George S. Nixon, were the heroes of the hour. Less than five years before, Mr. Wingfield had come into Tonopah with a stake of $150, supplied by Mr. Nixon, whose home was in Winnemucca, Nevada. Mr. Wingfield had formerly been an impecunious cowboy gambler. Born in the backwoods of Arkansas, and later of Oregon, he hailed from Golconda, Nevada. Mr. Nixon, at the time he staked Mr. Wingfield and until his election as a United States Senator in 1904, was known as the "State Agent" of the Southern Pacific Company for Nevada, having succeeded on the job the notorious "Black" Wallace, who for many years handled the "yellow-dog" fund for the Huntington régime when franchises were hard to get and legislatures had to be bought. Mr. Nixon was also president of a bank in Winnemucca, which was a way station on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Mr. Wingfield had signalized his money-getting prowess by running Mr. Nixon's $150 into $1,000,000 as principal owner of the Tonopah Club, the biggest gambling house in Tonopah, and later "parleying" the money for himself and partner into ownership of control of the merged $36,000,000 Goldfield Consolidated, which was their corporate creation.