The men who chiefly profited by the great decline were Charles F. Woerishoffer and Addison Cammack, the leaders of a small but powerful bear party, which for several years had been preparing for this depression, and by all the bear tactics, of which they were masters, assisting in the downward movement. They were two men of mark. Woerishoffer was the superior in mind and nerve. When he died in 1886, while under forty years of age, he was worth, it is said, $8,000,000 to $10,000,000, the result of his daring speculation. He was probably the ablest stock speculator Wall street has ever seen, not excepting Gould, whose principal success, it should be remembered, was in operations outside of the street. Woerishoffer was by birth a German, and was the son-in-law of Oswald Ottendorfer. Some of the most successful men in Wall street, it may be remarked, are Germans or of German descent, as for instance Villard, who after his collapse in 1884 had recovered in 1888 the ground he had lost; August Belmont, the banker, the Wormsers and the Seligmans. Cammack was a man of much coarser nature than Woerishoffer. He came originally from the South, and the Wall street tradition was that he had been a slave-driver by profession. Gruff in his manner, uncouth in his language, he yet had qualities as a speculator which made him a power in the street. These two men, with their following, are believed to have very nearly driven Gould to the wall in 1884, and the story is that Gould might have gone down if Cammack, of all men, had not relented. This story, like many others told in Wall street, probably has a mixture of truth and fiction. In 1887 and 1888 Cammack was very evidently in alliance with Gould in stock operations.