On the advice of former Governor Thomas, of Colorado, to whom the Sullivan Trust Company paid a retainer as counsel, and who later became chief counsel for the Goldfield Consolidated, I employed Christopher C. Clay of Denver to commence suit against the owners of the _Denver Mining Record_. As a result I secured from them a settlement by which they agreed not to mention my name again in their paper. I was harassed at the time, or I would not have compromised. The stuff printed by the _Denver Mining Record_, which has been rehashed by every blackmailer who ever attempted to levy on me, was about two-tenths true and eight-tenths false. It was a literal copy of an anonymous publication put out by a set of blackmailers who had tried to circulate it years before in New York when I was head of the Maxim & Gay Company. I had spent thousands of dollars to run down the authorship then, but without avail. The lawyers had succeeded in seizing thousands of copies of the publication, and had made an arrest, but they failed to prove authorship of the screed and ownership of the paper, and the culprits therefore were not punished. In Denver when Mr. Clay applied for criminal warrants, he was asked first to furnish proof of authorship, which was impossible for us, the articles having been unsigned. SOME PERTINENT PERSONALITIES The same stuff has recently appeared without signature in a Goldfield paper which originally came into possession of George Wingfield through foreclosure proceedings, and in a Reno evening paper which is controlled by Senator Nixon, who owns a large slice of the paper's mortgage. It has also appeared in other papers "friendly" to Wingfield and Nixon. Tens of thousands of copies of the Goldfield publication containing the anonymous libel have been sent broadcast. Other newspapers have reproduced the libelous stuff, some innocently and some for sordid reasons, but of this more later. My career is fraught with instances of recourse by enemies to blackmail and attempted blackmail. If I should undertake to tabulate the cases where men and interests, ranging from impecunious newspaper reporters to financial-newspaper publishers and mining-stock brokers and market operators who, from the background, publish market letters or furnish the capital for mining publications, have attempted to levy tribute or to club me into submission by the use of so vile a weapon, I should be compelled to write a big book on the subject. And right here I should like to place myself on record to the effect that seemingly the principal shortcoming that has marked my mining-financial career has been that I had a youthful Past--a Past which during the last decade has never been taken into serious consideration by men who have held close business relations with me, but which, of course, is a thorn in the sides of men and interests whose bidding I have failed to obey.