The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-08-02
"The days of old,
 The days of gold, The days of '49.
Went to British Columbia


 Going out to Canada IS a young bank clerk, Mckane soon heard the call of the wild and deserted his office stool to join in the Lardran Lake excitement in British Columbia. About all he got there was experience, but he turned that ex- perience to good account in Nelson and many other camps Of southern British Columbia, where he was a pioneer. With Patsy Clark, the Spokane mutimillion- a1re, Dr. Bowes, now of Seattle, and many another well known mining man, he played a part in the frenzied whirl of mining politics. that revolved around the meteoric figure of r. Augustus Heinze, the boy mining king of Butte. then at the height of his fame, when the latter made his historic raid" into the boun- diary country and scooped up two or three unconsidered millions under the very | noses of his rivals and in what had been considered their exclusive sphere of in- | fluence
 The boundary camps gave John Me- Kane fortune, but it was lost almost as soon as made and when, in 1901, the discovery of the wonderful Mizpah mine at Tonopah by bluff old Jim Butler start l ed the inevitable stampede to southern Nevada, John McKane was "broke," not | flat-broke, for he had a ''shoestring" and nthat "shoestring' he got as far as the old mining town of Sodaville. in llOSe udyS lne nearest 1dllTOau point to Tonopah. There however, his money gave out, and he melted his last dollar with Tonopah still 65 long, burning, dusty miles away across mountain and desert. Walked the Distance
 1t took more than mountain and arid lsdesert, though, to stop the dour, rugged Scotchman, once he had set his iron heart on reaching the southern Eldorado. He sold his gun, with the proceeds bought httt,1 1Ia ..f l~t little grub, and thus provided Init the trail'' for Tonopah. On the morning of the third day he arrived there, penniless, but that fortune which does not desert brave men. stood by him and almost the first man he met in the main street-it was Tonopahs only street then-was his old ally of the boundary country, Dr. BoWes. They met in an suspicious hour, for Bowes and his associates had just secured an option on what was then known as the Graveyard Group, destined to become the famous Tonopah extension, and were casting about for a booster. Bowes. knowing that McKane with his Celtic eloquence, was as good a single handed talker as any man in the inter- mountain country, streightway proceed ed to clothe him in sucn purple and fine linen as the stores of an infant mining camp could afford. A purse was made up among Bowes and his associates and Mckane was "grub-staked" to go back east and turn the property" Back he went to Sodavile by stage this time, and then on to Pittsburg. A strong group of Philadelphia capitalists had by this time made an enormous profit by buying Jim Buffers "Mizpah'' and all Pennsyl- vania was agog with the story of the re- juvenatioh of Nevada and the tale of Tonopah's wealth. McKane had come to the right place.
 How he succeeded in interesting Charles M. Schwab, youngest and most enter prising of Carnegie's financial offspring how Schwab's money was used to open up the Tonopah extension, how the stock thereof ran up from a few cents to s14.50 how John McKane receiEed a big block of it for his services In interesting Schwab, and how, like the canny Scot that he was, he succeeded in slough- ing off nearly every share he held at or near the top of the market before the big fault was encountered on the lower levels that sent the stock tumbling down. stairs again-all this is a matter of rec crd, recorded by the little thin white tape that clicks out the glass box and twists and coils and writes the lives of men.