Stuff You Missed in History ClassThis 2019 episode covers James G. Fair, known as the Silver King. But though Fair often appears on lists of the richest men in U.S. history, his image was also tainted by scandal.
Happy Saturday. This week, we talked about Nevada's divorce ranches, which gave people trying to obtain a divorce a place to stay while they established Nevada residency. One of our previous subjects who was divorced under Nevada law was James G. Fair, whose wife Teresa, filed her divorce complaint with the First Judicial District Court of Nevada in eighteen eighty three. Teresa did not need to stay at a ranch to establish residency, though the Fairs lived in Nevada and James was representing Nevada in the US Senate, which made Teresa's petition for divorce under the grounds of habitual adultery a huge scandal. This episode originally came out on April twenty second, twenty nineteen, So enjoy and please excuse our mispronunciation of classer mining, which is spelled as though it should be pronounced placer. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So Tracey, back in the fall when I was visiting San Francisco, as you recall, we ended our tour there and then I stayed for a week because I love that city. But the hotel that we were staying in had a photo of Senator James G. Fair framed and sitting on a little piece of furniture in the parlor, and my interest was immediately sparked because there was no context for this fie just sitting there. It was just there, And so I asked around and it turned out that Fair had actually paid for that building to be established as a boarding school in eighteen ninety and that school was run by a teacher named Mary Lake, and there were rumors at the time that she and Fair were romantically involved. They both denied these, but incidentally, Mary Lake allegedly haunts that hotel. She never visited me. To the best of my knowledge, we didn't see her. But I then was kind of left with the desire to know a lot more about James G. Fair, And it turned out as I did some digging, oh, he was a piece of work. He was a contemporary of Levi Strauss. He was living and working in San Francisco around the same time as the Denham Magnet. But though Fair often appears on lists of the richest men in US history. He just doesn't have the same level of name recognition, and so I thought it might be fun to do an episode on him. But spoiler alert, it's unlikely that you're going to come away from this episode feeling warm and fuzzy about James G. Fair the way you might have after the Levi Strauss episode. He's not quite as magnanimous and lovely a man. Yeah, if your primary affection is for money and the making thereof, you might be super into it, maybe at all costs, right, regardless of the consequences of your search for money. Fair's story starts in Chloher County Trone in Ireland, where he was born on December third, eighteen thirty one, and his father's name was also James Fair. His mother's maiden name was Graham, and that's where he got his middle name. Yeah, we don't know her first name any longer. The records don't seem to clearly indicate what her first name was. But when James was twelve, his family immigrated to the United States and they lived briefly in Geneva, Illinois. After finishing his early schooling in Geneva, Fair went on to study both business and science in Chicago, but the California gold rush captured his attention and ambition when that whole thing blew up, and so at the age of eighteen, Fair left Illinois to seek his fortune in mining. At first, he worked in placer mining, and that is using water to excavate and recover the deposit that you're trying to get at the most basic form of placer mining is panning, but there are much larger scale and more industrial forms of placer mining as well. He did okay in these efforts. He made a little bit of money, but it was never quite the major income that he was hoping for, and Fair floundered around a little bit. Once he decided that gold might not be the road to wealth for him. He tried mining for quarts, because a lot of courts was part of the source for where all of these gold mines were coming from, but he only met with a little bit of success. And then he actually gave farming a whirl for a little while on a plot near Petaluma, California, but that was similarly unfulfilling and not really very profitable, and he gave up after six months. In the early eighteen sixties, he shifted his gears again away from gold and courts and agriculture and California. This time he set his sights on Nevada. In the late eighteen fifties, silver loads had been discovered in Nevada, and Fair was eager to be one of the first people to capitalize on the silver trade. Yeah, he didn't run out there right as these silver loads were being discovered. He kind of wanted to get a sense of the whole situation and if it was really a viable thing, since gold had not worked out. But once he realized like, oh, this is a very real opportunity, he was on top of it. It was a really smart move, as he was much more successful in silver mining than he had been in gold mining, although I should point out that many of these mines were also producing both silver and gold, but silver was just what was making the most money. He went to Virginia City, Nevada, which is south of Reno. It's to the east of Lake Tahoe's northern tip. And Fair worked prospecting in Virginia City for five years on his own, but in eighteen sixty five, a corporate enterprise hired him as its superintendent, and that mine was the Opher Mine, named after King Solomon's o Fear mine, from which so much wealth had sprung. Soon Fair was showing just how good he was managing the oper mines, business interests, and day to day functions, and that skill attracted the attentions of other mining operations. He was hired as director of the Hale and Norcross mine. He also became friends with John W. McKay. His work at Hale and Norcross turned it from something that just wasn't turning a profit into a valuable venture, resulted in two billion dollars over the course of two years. That money didn't go back to Fair, though it went to the company. In eighteen sixty seven, Fair and Halen Norcross severed their relationship for reasons that have never been totally clear. Yeah, there are a lot of theories about maybe him being frustrated that he wasn't really getting much of the profit and that he kind of just told them to go take a hike, or that he may have been making noises like that and they told him to go take a hike. We don't really know what happened exactly, but Fair and his friend Mackay, who had also been working in mining, Towns joined forces with San Francisco stockbrokers James C. Flood and W. S. O'Brien to buy a controlling interest in the Hale and Norcross mine in eighteen sixty eight, and that four man partnership eventually came to be known by the nickname the Silver Kings. All of them were Irish. James Flood was not born in Ireland, but he was born in New York shortly after his parents immigrated. This by into Hale and Norcross was a really significant move. Prior to the forsome joining forces to come into control of the mine. Its previous controlling owners were the dominant powers in Nevadam mining. These were William C. Ralston and William Sharon, and they were backed by the Bank of California, which Ralston had founded. They had continued to capitalize on their wealth by making loans to hopeful speculators for the purchase of mines or stocks in mines. They weren't really hoping these people would turn a profit for the mine. They were hoping that they would lose their money and be foreclosed on if the notes weren't paid in time. Then Ralston and Sharon would take control of the mine after it had been foreclosed on, they would expand their own footprint. That was actually how they had come to own Hale and Norcross in the first place. They had not actually been the owners when Fair worked there. Yeah, they definitely get characterized, and not without reason, as kind of the mustache twirling villains of Virginia City and the surrounding area at the time. Fair, who at this point had a great deal more agency as a controlling owner of the Hale and Norcross, was able to run things exactly as he wished, and that way turned out to be very, very prosperous. Because Fair had begun as a prospector and worked in the mining industry for years at that point, and he knew a lot about machinery. He understood every facet of mining more deeply, perhaps than anyone else at the time. He was also quick to take action, but he was not impulsive. He thought through all of his ideas and plans completely before ever committing manpower and resources to them. He was also completely hands on, even as a high level executive. He would go into the minds just about every day to inspect the progress and equipment and to update the workers with new directives based on those inspections. Some of this was because he obviously did not trust anybody else's judgment as much as he trusted his own, but this really cost him. Having his hand in every level of the business meant that he did not sleep very much and he had very little time for his personal life. He did get married during this time, and we'll talk about his wife a little bit more later, but he pretty clearly was focused on the mind and making money. I mean, he did everything from these inspections. He wrote all of the checks instead of hiring a clerk or an accountant to do it. He would do like their reports at the end of every fiscal session and like literally go line by line through everything they had spent money on. He was completely devoted to this job, and the mind was so fruitful that it became really apparent that James Fair and his business associates should think about expanding their holdings and maybe buy up some additional property in the area. And some of that property already had smaller mining interests on it, and one of the minds that they bought a controlling interest in was the Consolidated Virginia, which they purchased from Ralston in eighteen seventy two, Ralston's partner Sharon, thought that the purchase was going to be dead weight for this collection of Irish businessmen. There had been so much effort already poured into the Consolidated Virginia mind and it was believed to be dry. But it turned out that belief was incorrect. And coming up, we're gonna talk about what happened when Fair and his company worked the Consolidated Virginia mine. But first we will pause for a little sponsor break. So once Fair and his partners took control of Consolidated Virginia, they opted to tunnel into the mine, and for a while it did indeed seem like a waste of time and money, and they would occasionally find small veins, but then they would follow them only to find an end. But then in March eighteen seventy three, they found a vein that widened more and more the deeper they tunneled into it, and before the news could break that the allegedly dry mine actually contained a very significant vein fifty feet in width. At that point, Fair and mackay contacted their partners who were in San Francisco and told them to buy any outstanding stock in the consolidated Virginia mine that they could. As an aside, Fair always claimed that he had been the one to find this vein and that he used his years of knowledge and skill to really carefully follow this vein of silver that was so thin and delicate that it would have been impossible for somebody with less savvy to do it. But his version leaves out the fact that there was another man named Sam Curtis who was the superintendent on the project and he was the one that actually made that discovery. And additionally, other accounts say that it was really easy to follow this vein once they had stumbled across it. Yeah, there's it comes up a lot in various biographies of him that he always describes it as a knife thin edge of vein that he, you know, intuited, might go somewhere further, And then other people are like, you could literally have driven a team of horses through there, it was so easy to find. So some disparity in the accounts of what this vein was actually like. Then. Also, if you work for a publicly traded company today, this business of buying up stock before you make a big announcement, that's the kind of thing you have ethics training about, right. I think that James G. Fair probably would have spat at the idea of ethics training. That's just my theory. I don't know. I don't mean to in any way disparage the van who clearly had a lot of business acumen, but I don't think he would have been down with ethics training. But back to the story. So once Fair and Mackay told their partners to buy up interest in the mine, and remember they already had the controlling interest, they just wanted as much of it as they could get. But they did exactly that, and they also bought as much additional property in the surrounding area as they could, and soon the partners had amassed a huge tract of land, which they called the Consolidated Virginia in California. And that vein that they had struck was massive. It came to be known as the Big Bonanza, and just a few years after the new company was established, their combined mind had earned one hundred and fifty million dollars that is not adjusted to today's dollars that was in the currency at the time. And along the way, Fair had astutely invited press rivals and brokers to all come and look at the mine, which was all part of driving up interest and value to ensure the best possible position should he and his partners wish to sell so. After this period of incredible growth, Nevada's mining industry started to take on a darker image. As stock speculation led to an economic downturn, Fair and his associates came to be viewed as greedy manipulators of this market. Fair made a variety of statements to the press, defending himself and defending his partners, but their images were already pretty well tainted. Furthermore, they had made a lot of money in part because of this over valued mining stock, and over the years, Fair and his friend McKay continued the hands on management of the mines together while their partners handled finances out of their offices in California, and Fair and McKay managed for a long time to stay cordial, despite James Fair's tendency to showboat and sometimes have temperamental outbursts, and that worked largely due to McKay's willingness to just sort of navigate around such things. And they were in many ways polar opposites, even down to their spending habits. McKay gave away money constantly, but he would spend very little on himself. Fair, on the other end, would spend lavishly on what we would probably call promoting his personal brand today. He liked to do things that made him look big and important, but he was otherwise really tight with money. Fair had diversified his fortune and invested in a number of other business ventures. Over the years, he amassed more and more wealth the whole time. We mentioned earlier that Fair was a contemporary of Levi Strauss, and one space where their stories are pretty similar is in the world of San Francisco real estate. So just as Straus spot up interesting properties around the city to build up his holdings, Fair did the same thing starting in eighteen sixty nine. In Fair's case, he focused first on businesses and residential properties, but then he started expanding his interests in his business acumen to get involved in railroads and transit systems as well. In eighteen seventy eight, he built the South Pasife Coast Railroad, and this also included a ferry system, and it was really a key moment in the growth of the Bay Area because it connected San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Jose, and Oakland, and less than a decade after it was completed, Fair sold the whole thing to the Southern Pacific Company in eighteen eighty six, and he made himself a million dollars in the process. Even before he sold off the South Pacific Coast Railroad, he had already moved into yet another entirely new career as a politician. In eighteen eighty one, he was elected to the United States Senate and a race against his mining rival William Sharon, and Fare had run on a platform that focused on the interests of the state of Nevada, even when those interests were not necessarily in line with his political party. The obituary that ran it got picked up by the New York Times, which is what I read it in, but it ran in other papers when Fair died described him as quote nominally a Democrat. The silver minds of the state were a huge economic driver, and as a consequence, Fair, who of course knew all about them, was able to prioritize those interests to keep the state economy prosperous. And in his campaign he told people that he didn't know anything about politics, but he knew what the state and its miners needed, but once he had his senatorial seat, he didn't actually do much with it. It was estimated that he had spent about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars getting elected, but after attending some sessions dutifully for the first few months of his term, he just sort of seemed to check out. Eventually, he was actually spending more time back in San Francisco than he was in Washington, and even on the issue of advocating for the silver mining industry, which he had run on as his platform, he led another Nevada Senator, John P. Jones, take the lead when it came to speaking on the issue. On the Senate floor, Fair voted in favor of the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty one, but he wasn't especially active on any other issues. He really preferred to go back to California and gossip to all of his friends about Washington politicians. Then when he was in Washington, he tended to skip sessions and drink in his office with his friends. It turned out that he just found the Senate to be boring. Yeah, at one point he said something about how to him like listening to a bunch of people talk about things like, you know, what a person should be paid as a fair wage just bored him to tears, and he would rather be either in the minds or running something. He was not so much with the legislation, but in the midst of his term he also became the focus of a massive scandal when his wife of twenty two years filed for divorce, and the scandal came about because she cited habitual adultery is the reason that she sought to end the marriage in eighteen eighty three. This was the first time such a charge was made against a sitting US senator, and it was nationwide front page news. Fairs fellow senators were horrified and denounced him. The divorce hearings took place in early May eighteen eighty three, and the testimony was big news. That testimony was also extremely damning to James G. Fair. One of his armors testified during the hearing and another one provided a deposition to the court. Fair claimed the whole thing was a political plot that had been orchestrated by his enemies, but he also didn't contest any of the charges that were made against him. He agreed to the divorce, and then when the dust settled, the judgment against him was really harsh. The conditions of the divorce stated that James would get custody of the couple's two sons, James and Charles, and they also had two daughters, Teresa and Virginia, who were to stay with their mother per the court's decision. But the big news was that missus Fair was also granted nearly five million dollars in cash and securities, which is believed to be the largest divorce settlement in history at that time. This was a huge loss for Fair, not just because of the public scandal and the dissolution of his family, but also because it led to the dissolution of his very successful long term business partnership. William S O'Brien had died in eighteen seventy eight, but McKay and Flood had sided with Teresa in the divorce. Things had already became I'm strained when Fair had started working as a senator while he was in Washington. Theresa would look to McKay for support in California, and by helping her, mackay had made Fair feel insulted. Since these three men couldn't untangle their business feelings. Fair instead contented himself by giving his business associates some backhanded compliments in the press. Yeah, he would say, you know, things along the lines are like, oh, they've done so well for themselves, considering you know, they started out poor stupid humans like they did. It was just really unkind to them. And we're going to talk next about some of the family drama that swirled around the Fairs after the divorce. But first we are going to take a quick break and hear from one of our sponsors. So Fair's daughters after the divorce were raised by their mother, Teresa, and she raised them to be educated and well mannered. Fair could not really be bothered to do the same for his sons had disastrous consequences. His son Jimmy, developed a serious drinking problem, which was often reported in the press, including what sounds to me like a terrifying night when he drank twenty cocktails in one sitting and a doctor had to be called because he passed out. Jimmy actually died very young, and his cause of death was it reported entirely differently from paper to paper. Some claimed that he died of acute alcoholism, others stated that he had died of suicide. Fair's relationships with his surviving children were strained when his oldest daughter, Teresa, who went by Tessei, got married in a high profile society wedding. Fair was not invited, although he claimed that he sent the newly weds a million dollars as a wedding present, even though he had not been invited. Yeah, it's unknown if that actually happened or if it was something he just said to the press to stir up their interests. He kind of liked to be in the press, but he definitely didn't go to the wedding. Fair retired from politics after his first term ended in eighteen eighty seven, and then he settled into the work of managing his real estate interests in San Francisco in the surrounding area. He bought more properties, particularly money making properties like office buildings and retail spaces that would generate rental income, and all of his rental agreements put the onus of maintenance and upkeep on the renters, so he was able to keep most or all of that rent money rather than funneling it back into property improvements, and this gave him something of a slumlord reputation. His properties were known for being run down, but he always claimed that the real estate taxes were just far too high to allow him any budget for refurbishment. His wife, Teresa Fair, died in eighteen ninety one. The Fair's son, Charlie, tried to get an advance on the trust fund that was set up in her will in order to pay off debts that he had accrued purchasing racehorses. Charlie had also developed a dependency on alcohol, and in a hasty move, he married a young woman who was rumored to be running a brothel out of her home. All of this caused a rift between Charlie and his sisters, as well as between and his father. And James Fair had always been a drinker. His sons inherited their problems with alcohol from him, but in these later years of his life his reliance on alcohol increased significantly. He also ate voraciously, and not in a healthy way. He started each day with four boiled eggs, a dozen slices of toast, a steak, and coffee, and the heavy meals and the heavy drinking really took a toll on his health, and as he began to reckon with the reality of his mortality. He also decided to reconcile with his son, Charlie. By eighteen ninety four, Fair's health started to decline rapidly, but even so he remained a contrarian. When his pastor visited to discuss the sermon that he might give at Fair's funeral service, it made the silver Magnet so furious that he got out of bed. He put on his work clothes and he walked his office to work, and he did that for two more days, but those were his last trips out of the house. Even though he knew that he was probably going to die soon, having someone else tell him that just made him irate, so he kind of wanted to prove them wrong. But time eventually caught up with him. He caught what seemed initially to just be a cold in December, but he couldn't seem to recover from it. He was also diagnosed with diabetes and kidney disease, and soon after that illness, around Christmas of December eighteen ninety four, he fell into an unconscious state, from which he never awoke. On December twenty ninth, eighteen ninety four, James Fair died at Lick House. That was one of his homes in San Francisco. At the time of his death, his estate was valued at and estimated forty million dollars. In his will, he arranged for each of his children to be supported by the estate with a regular income for the rest of their lives. In the event of his daughter's deaths, their inheritance would pass to their children, and in the case of his son Charles dying, his share would be split between his sisters. It would not go to Charlie's wife, Maud or any children of that marriage. Yeah, there had been hoped since he had reconciled with Charlie that he might also finally accept Charlie's wife, but apparently not so much. Charlie had sent word to his sisters, both of whom were living in New York at the time, that their father was about to die, but they had refused to answer their estranged brother because they had not reconciled with him. They instead sent word to other family friends in San Francisco, though about the situation via telegraph. Fair also left money to his siblings, who left his sisters, Mary Anderson and Margaret J. Cruthers two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each, as well as fifty thousand dollars to his brother William Fair and twenty thousand dollars to his brother Edward. Orphan asylums were also beneficiaries. Fair made provisions for orphanages run by different religious denominations in the city of San Francisco to each have their own bequest. Those are not massive bequests. They were large for the time, but when you consider how much money he was doling out, it kind of seems like I should give some to charity so people don't think of a journey. It's like, here have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Oh, you orphaned twenty five thousand. I'm not judging, yes, I am. Fair also put some really interesting stipulations into his will about potential efforts to break said will. So, according to how it was written, if any of his children contested the will, their share would automatically go to the other two siblings, and if anyone came forward claiming either to be James Fair's illegitimate child or claiming to be a common law wife, they would just be issued fifty dollars and get nothing more. What Fair didn't anticipate with those stipulations. Was all three of his children contesting the will in a sort of unified front. None of them wanted to deal with trustees and an income that was doled out from a trust. All of them wanted to just have their inheritance. And then, to make matters even more contentious, the will vanished from the county Clerk's office just a month after James Fair died. It was replaced with a blank piece of paper in the envelope that the will had been filed in. A lot of people were questioned as police tried to piece to together who had access to this ovelope, who could have made the switch. Nothing came of the investigation, and the will was never recovered, and the trustees claimed that the Fair children must have taken the will so that the estate would be split among them. The siblings believed that the trustees had stolen the will because they knew that it would be revealed as fraudulent. And as all of these accusations were made and the investigation stalled, a woman named Neddie Craven, who was the principal of the Mission Grammar School, came forward and claimed that she had a will that Fair made after the one that had disappeared. This was a handwritten will, so the press nicknamed it the pencil will, and it left the estate to the children. The will had allegedly been written because missus Craven had spoken to James Fair about a bill that was related to school teacher's pension funds, and he had written this copy to include a bequest of fifty thousand dollars to the pension fund. While the Fair family initially supported Missus Craven in her document, soon she produced more handwritten documents, claiming them to be the writing of James Fair. Two of them left her properties and one declared her his wife, and then that set off a whole series of events that ended up in a very expensive trial. Eventually, Craven caved under this financial pressure. She handed over the handwritten deeds and marriage declaration in return for a small sum of cash. Now, when she initially appeared with a handwritten will that seemed to convey exactly what his kids always wanted, they were like, yes, this woman is the real deal. And then when she was like he also left me two very big rental properties, they were like, wait a minute. And then she was like, and I'm his common law wife, They're like hold the phone, and it became like a whole big, crazy thing. But as the Craven issue receded, numerous other claimants to Fair's life and fortune emerged. Multiple women claiming to have been engaged or common law married to James Fair came forward, as well as a number of people claiming to be his children. The nineteenth century passed into the twentyth century before this will was settled and the Fair children finally got their inheritance. So, really, a lot of people liked him. He was capable of being friendly with pretty much everybody, even making people he had never met before feel like they were his old friends. His career in mining had been so successful in part because he treated everybody the same, regardless of whether they were a wealthy executive or a worker down in the mine. But that was only one side of his personality. The other side is a Fair that was fairly conceited about his own skills and intellect. So in some ways it kind of seems like he treated most people equally because he saw everyone as equally less impressive than himself. He was not above taking advantage of someone that he thought was foolish In business, and he would later crow about business deals that were far more favorable to him than the other involved party. He was shrewd and manipulative even with his family members. At one point, he gave a fake tip to his wife about a stock, knowing that she would not only buy her own personal savings, but also tell other people about it. And when all of those people started buying and the stock was hot, Fair sold his shares and made a profit. His wife ended up losing her life savings, and he was not especially sympathetic about that loss, which might be another reason that she wanted to divorce him, and another thing that would be in ethics class. Yes, that ability to ingratiate himself to other people and just charm them to pieces was very real, though, and it was something that he really used to his advantage. A lot of his most successful business dealings were built around relationships that he had fostered with this very genial side to his personality. Yeah, he was definitely two men in one. The obituaries that appeared in various papers after James G. Fair died all noted what an accomplished man he was, how astute his business mind was, and how incredibly skilled he was mechanically, but they didn't really paint a rosy picture of the man. A lot of them said a lot of bad things about him as well. In one of his acquaintances described Fair as a master mechanic, a shrewd financier, and quote from early childhood, more interested in the affairs of James G. Fair than any other soul on Earth. Oh, James Fair, you self involved bees. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the ihea Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
