_Ruined Financier Had Deeded His Property to William Sharon, Who Forces Widow to Accept $250,000 as Payment in Full._ Among the common traditions of William C. Ralston’s death is the story that he committed suicide to escape exposure. Notwithstanding the fact that a coroner’s jury found on ample expert evidence that he died from a cerebral attack, and the further incident that a life insurance company promptly paid a policy of $50,000 to his widow--a policy void by express terms in the event of suicide--this impression seems to persist to-day. When I came to California for first-hand information concerning my old friend’s tragic end, my earliest business was to investigate the question of self-destruction; for if it were a fact that he made away with himself at a time when much explanation was needed, it would have had assuredly an ugly look. The evidence was all fresh and so overwhelmingly conclusive of death from natural causes that I cannot see on what basis a theory of suicide was reached, unless it were suggested by ulterior motives. The testimony of eye-witnesses was that the swimmer suddenly collapsed and floated with the tide. The lungs were inflated with air, not with water, as in cases of drowning; otherwise the body would have sunk. The features had not the ghastly pallor that follows water suffocation; on the contrary, they were suffused and livid as when death ensues from a bursting blood vessel in the brain. To this physicians gave further testimony. The sad facts were plain enough. For many days Mr. Ralston had suffered a mental strain against which the human machinery is not often proof. It reached the crisis when he was excluded from the meeting of the bank’s trustees. Then something snapped. Perhaps the plunge in the cold waters of the bay hurried on the catastrophe. But the baseless story of Mr. Ralston’s suicide ought to be finally set at rest. The inside history of the failure of the Bank of California in 1875 has never been told. About the only definite statement ever made was that its capital stock of $5,000,000 had been exhausted, although the institution had resources sufficient to protect depositors. It was rehabilitated by an assessment of $100 a share which was paid by the stockholders, giving a new capital of $3,000,000. Five weeks after the failure it reopened its doors, with almost undiminished prestige, and with all the many ups and downs of finance has maintained its position as the leading commercial bank west of the Missouri River.