The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield Read Online Free PDF

gambling parlor or a dog pit; the marble Cupid in the center should be a Midas, some say, turning everything to gold and starving in the process.
    The latest innovation is a mechanical indicator of the current price. A large arrow responds immediately to rises and falls in the dollar value of gold. On the morning of Friday, September 24, the arrow rests at 143, indicating that 143 greenbacks are required to purchase 100 gold dollars. When the Gold Room opens at ten, the arrow likely will creep upward, as it has been creeping upward since the first of September. Gould’s quiet purchases of gold have boosted the price; market watchers and players, including speculators who have climbed on the Gould bandwagon and become gold bulls, expect the rise to continue.
    Yet something strange is afoot. Gold brokers have crowded the curb outside the Gold Room since dawn, and transactions are already taking place. A broker bids 145; his offer is accepted. Another bids 147; also taken. By the time trading officially begins, the price has topped 150. The gold arrow leaps the 5 percent—a large amount in this context—all at once.
    And it keeps moving upward. Violent emotions surge across the Gold Room: the money lust of the gold bulls, who see their speculation nearing success and shout for the price to go still higher; the incipient panic of the gold bears, who have bet on a fall and now stare ruin in the face.
    Amid the maelstrom stands Jim Fisk. His cherubic face beams with the pleasure of a child at play, an image rendered a bit incongruous by the cigar with which he punctuates his shouts at the brokers. In the stifling atmosphere of the Gold Room he is sweating profusely; the salty rivulets have plastered his strawberry ringlets to his forehead and caused the waxed ends of his moustache to droop. Fisk loudly and belligerently leads the charge of the gold bulls against the bears. As the price rises past 150, he bawls to his brokers: “Take all you can get.”
    The price leaps upward again; the big arrow on the gold indicator lurches to 155. The Gold Room explodes in shouting, arm waving, and rushing to and fro. The anarchy sloshes next door to the stock exchange, where share prices have been heaving up and down on the hopes and fears of the gold men. One broker, more agitated than most, vows mortal harm to a nearby gold bull, promising to shoot him dead if he persists in driving gold up. The bull responds by tearing open his shirt and inviting the bear to fire. Fisk roars with delight and goads the bears further. “Take all you can get at 160!” he shouts above the din.
    The bears see their end fast approaching. Most are already insolvent; their only hope is that the corner will break and the price fall before their creditors can catch them. This last hope fairly vanishes when the price jumps again, to 162.
    And then …
    The weak link in the golden chain of Gould and Fisk has always been the gold reserve of the government. Should this gold be released on the market—should the government in Washington even signal an intent to release it—the corner will be broken. This is why the partners have urged the president to keep the government out of the market, and why they have cultivated Butterfield as a lookout in the Treasury Department.
    Grant has withheld the government’s hand till now, not wishing to intervene in a contest among the capitalists. But the wailing of the bears has carried to Washington by telegraph, and finally the president becomes alarmed, fearing that a gold corner will trigger a financial collapse. Shortly before noon on this Friday, he orders the Treasury to sell.
    The order, relayed to New York, hits the Gold Room like a thunderclap. At noon, by the first chimes from the steeple of Trinity Church, the neighborhood outpost of Episcopalianism, where winning brokers offer thanks and losers pray for deliverance, the gold arrow hovers in the 160s; only moments later, before the echoes of the last of the dozen