Mohave County miner and our mineral wealth., 1921-10-21


 died a year ago leaving a fortune of half a million, bought a one-third in terest with Smith in these claims and also a one-third interest in the Jumbo, Florence and other claims. The Red Top claim of Goldfeld made Dick Colburn, Captain Menardi and w. s. Williams several hundred thousand dollars apiece because they took stock as part payment for the surveying of this property. Red Top scared as high as $5 a share. Tom Lockhart, who went to Nevada practically broke and died a few years ago in Los Angeles leaving big estate, located the Tono- pah Extension and later bought con- trol of the Florence at Goldield. The Tonopah Extension was later taken over by Charles M. Schwab and asso- ciates. Florence sold for over $7 a share in the height of the boom and today is producing and paying divi- dends to leasers. The Riley lease on the Florence was at one time given up as hopeless but the day before pay ing off the miners, Big" Jack Camp bell scratched with his candlestick a bit of decomposed quartz out of a small seam that banned we'll and he decided to put in final shot to test it out. It opened up an actual vault of high grade ore that was later known as the Riley Million Dollar Lease. 1 we'll remember the Riley Lease discovery because of a real de- sire to be small of stature on the oc- casion of Big" Jaik Campbell cele- brating the find by shooting out the lights in the Merchants Hotel at Co., lumbia. l wasn't alone in this desire, nor was alone in ducking to avoid the fusillade of shots from Jacks "45" which put the Merchants gambling room in darkness.
 After Hays and Monnette had struck rich ore on the Mohawk, D. Mackenzie came there with very little money, secured a sub-lease on a small block of that gronnd and made mil lion from it. Later, after the panic of 1907 Mackenzie went to New York and it is said ran his million up to ten million or more. He is today a successful oil operator in Texas.
 What was a barren desert at the be- ginning of 1903 became the townsite of Goldfield, and a corner lot was sold for $50 in 1904. About six months later it sold for a site for the John S. Cook Bank for $10,000 and lots in the same neighborhood less than two years later were sold as high as $50,- 900. Those were the days when sud den fortunes were made by men who staked their all, as Kipling said:
 'If you can make one heap of all
 your winnings
 And risk it on one turn of pitch
 and toss"
 Lose, and start again at your begin
 nings,
 And never breathe word about
 your loss."
 w. H. Knickerbocker, pastor of a fashionable church in Los Angeles, went to Nevada and worked in. Tono- pah as an ordinary mucker. Later, he and James F. O'Brien took a horse and buggy, the horse being claimed by O'Brien to have been the slowest nov ing horse on earth, and with patience and perseverance succeeded in coaxing old "Dobbin" to pull them in to the then new camp of Goldfeld some thirty miles from Tonopah. After a period of few months guessing where the next meal was coming from, Knickerbocker started to make money and never stopped until he had cleaned up quarter of a million in less than years time. He later went broke and followed up the Rawhide boom and at the death of Riley Gran non, the famous race track plunger, he delivered from a billiard table in one of Rawhide's gambling house, one of the most remarkable eulogies ever heard coming from a man dressed in corduroys and high-top boots in a mining camp; he brought tears to the eyes of every man and woman who heard him on that occasion and it is said of him that he himself after the deliyerance of that eulopy became