Word: fisk
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Melodrama. In a stovepipe hat, and suiting of extreme flare, a jovial peddler startled New England villages out of their mid-century placidity to gape at a wagon resplendent with paint and varnish and polished brass, four white horses jingling the harness. Gilded letters announced "JAMES FISK JR. Jobber in Silks, Shawls, Dress Goods, Jewelry, Silver Ware, and Yankee Notions...
Shawls were soon supplanted by army blankets-lucrative civil war contracts Fisk secured for his Boston firm. And before long he was buying cotton at 12? a pound in the South, selling it at $2 in the North. Some days he bought $800,000 worth, only to lose it (well insured) on the Mason Dixon line. One day, pursued by a Rebel patrol, he tossed them his wallet stuffed with $300,000, and made off with his more precious life...
...that time, thousands of Confederate bonds were daily bought and sold on the London stock exchange. Mouth watering, Fisk conceived the shrewd scheme of hiring a fast clipper to start for England the moment Lee surrendered, sell hand over fist until official news of the defeat, then buy and make delivery when the bonds were practically worthless. Over the 50-mile gap in the telegraph line to Halifax gangs of linemen strung a temporary wire; and in thirteen days-so well had he calculated-Fisk flashed over it the one word "Go!" His clipper reached Liverpool five days before...
Whetted by his first stroke of high finance, Fisk brashed into Wall Street, but with indifferent success until Uncle Dan'l Drew, dour and dignified and sanctimonious, took the mustachioed youngster under his batlike wing. Drew was the man who drove thirsty live stock into Manhattan, and having watered it just before weighing it, greatly increased the pounds for sale, thus originating the financial term of "watering stock...
...Fisk and his partner-Jay Gould of the dark, calculating eye-were apt pupils, useful aides in Drew's grim wrangle with Commodore Vanderbilt. Between them they trimmed the old war-horse in the Erie Railroad deal, and escaped melodramatically across the river (state line) with six millions of his greenbacks in a little black bag. When Drew thereupon double-crossed his juniors in a dicker with the commodore, Fisk and Gould cut loose upon an independent career of buying railroads, Tammany judges, and gold. On the famous Black Friday, 49 years ago, they cornered gold in a grand...