J. E. "LUCKY" BALDWIN.

 

            NO ONE has ever yet given a clear idea of "Lucky" Baldwin. Who can? Tall, and strong, and swarthy, his eyes sometimes blazing like a fiery Spaniard's, sometimes deep and sullen as a Pottawattamie ; not much faith in the average man, looking on most women as schemers - he must have been the child of parents who cared little for each other and to whom his birth brought little joy. Still there was plenty of red blood in his veins and a rude integrity and fierce pride gave him the respect of business men. Moreover, there was a strata of generosity in him which, as is often seen in some mineral formations, was prone to crop out in real gold in unexpected places.

            He reached California early in the fifties, with little save his hands and his brains, but that did not disturb him, for he possessed a dauntless courage. Moreover, he had no false pride ; he was ready to engage in any work which was honorable, and he believed that with his capacity and industry he could forge out for himself a place among men.

            He made a stake by contracting in San Francisco ; then lost most of it. How, no one seemed to know, but all agree that when the Comstock was found, he had little. He went there early, and his subsequent career for fifteen years is a pretty good indication that he had been a chance-taker in everything that came along, from lottery tickets to mining shares.

            He had been in Virginia City but a brief time when he began nibbling at stocks, then to plunging in them.

            But he was harder student than he had ever been before and he knew the Comstock as he did his alphabet, from the Sierra Nevada to the Justice.

            He steadily made money and steadily invested it where he believed that his dollars would multiply fast. He had large interests on the Comstock and in California and finally obtained the control of the Ophir.

            In some way he had about $40,000 in a Los Angeles bank.

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It was said he loaned it to a friend and had no security save a mortgage on a wild tract of 22,000 acres of land some few miles from Los Angeles. He was obliged to take the land at last for the debt, when it could not have been sold for fifty cents an acre.

            But that ranch gave him the title of "Lucky" Baldwin, for a railroad crept down there at last, then another, and southern California began to boom and the Santa Anita ranch became a principality.

            I met him once in San Francisco and he did me the honor to ask me to "come down and spend a month on the ranch." Continuing, he said, "There's a lot of horses, steppers and flyers, saddles and buggies, cattle, sheep, fruits and flowers of all kinds, enough to keep you enjoying yourself for a month or six weeks."

            Then I asked him what he raised on his ranch, and his reply was : "Every blamed thing in the world, except the mortgages."

            This was in the early eighties, after the place had become famous.

            He left the Comstock in the late sixties to make his home in San Francisco to mine the Comstock- -from the other end on the stock board.

            In the early seventies Mr. Sharon wanted the Ophir in his business and his battle with Baldwin for the control was a battle royal, and Sharon won.

            Baldwin's financial weapon was an old-fashioned musket, Sharon's a rapid-fire magazine gun ; but in addition Sharon had much the heavier reserves.

            The Ophir's proximity to the California and the indications of a bonanza in the latter was the impelling force which made both men fight for the control.

            It was no wonder either : a few months later California advanced from $35 per share to a figure which was equivalent to $12,000 per inch for the whole length of the mine.

            In those clays Baldwin accumulated a great fortune, built the Baldwin Hotel and theatre and gathered in property in half a dozen states and territories.

88 AS I REMEMBER THEM.

            He stocked the Santa Anita ranch with blood horses, the very finest that could be found by scouring the world for them. His ambition was to have finer and fleeter race horses than any other man.

            It was, too, a labor of love with him, for he revealed more affection for some of those animals than he had ever shown for anything else in his life. His friends declare that when the finest one of them all died, Baldwin's heart was broken, and he never had a well day afterward.

            When a great fortune came to him, many an adventuress sought his acquaintance. He knew their object; he was restrained by no sense of propriety, no regard for public opinion, no chivalrous regard for womanhood, and it was not long until he took the blackguard's idea that "every woman had her price."

            He was the only man that we ever heard of who plead in answer to a complaint filed against him, that his public reputation was such that every woman who came near him must have been warned against him in advance.

            Though destitute of sensibility and callous against criticism, the poison of the reputation he made for himself in that regard, at last penetrated his mind and his bitterness and smothered wrath against the world and himself gave a sombre shadow to his last days, which was a reminder of a wounded lion, his confident roar hushed forever, going limping to his lair to growl and die.

            But : 'Lucky" Baldwin had a wonderful brain, immense sagacity and solid judgment ; he could grasp a business proposition instantly and by an intuition all his own trace from a cause to an inevitable effect with lightning swiftness ; while on the other hand he grasped with equal celerity a pure gamble and wagered what the chances were to win.

            And he was ready for either proposition at all times.

            He was, moreover, a most shrewd judge of character.

            He could describe in three sentences either of the strong men around him in those tremendous days of speculation when the arena was filled with giants and every one was a trained financial gladiator.

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            In his methods he was more like Jim Keene than any of the others ; he could neither be frightened nor bullied ; he as a rule held his gambling instinct in leash by his steady judgment, but when he did gamble in earnest, no chance was desperate enough to make him shrink from taking it.

            It is idle to say what, under gentler influence and different associations and conditions, lie might have been, for no one can tell. As it was, he, with no discipline in his youth, with no great moral principles to hold him in restraint, was tossed upon the west coast just when a new epoch was to usher in the metallic age, when the age of scholarship and statesmanship and conservative business methods were to be subordinated to money, and men's respectability and power were to be estimated by their bank accounts, and the place which has to be his field was that winsome city by the Gate of Gold, where restraints were few, where the very air was a tonic to eager men's brains and extravagance in thought and act was the rule.

            It was there that he was tossed, there with his quick brain, his tireless energy, his splendid courage, his impatience of all restraint, and his absence of all moral restrictions except his rude integrity in business matters.

            And he gloried in the work. His great love for blood horses, we suspect, was because in a race they would go to the last limit of their strength to win, and we doubt not that as he watched them he was crooning to himself : "That is like Requa's fight for the Norcross ; like Johnnie Skae's wrestle with the Sierra Nevada; like Sharon's first fight to stand off D. O. Mills, when he wanted the bank to desert the Comstock," so through his horses he could live over again his feverish career.

            Still it all passed in a few brief years, and there is nothing left him but a lonely grave, and one looking upon it and thinking what the occupant might have been and done with his opportunities and gifts, cannot shake off the thought that the Angel of Pity comes to it and sheds tears upon it every day.