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Bill Wright stayed in Ontario, living by himself in a barnlike mansion in Barrie, a small town 40 miles north of Toronto. A onetime British butcher, he served in the Boer War, got a veteran's grant in Canada, turned to prospecting when the land proved barren. During the World War he was famed as the only millionaire private in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. So rich he does not know what to do with his money, he nevertheless complains bitterly about two things: 1) having to walk downstairs to answer the telephone at night and 2) having to pay 70% of his income to the Government. For a while he dabbled with a string of race horses, has lately bought up and combined Toronto's Globe and Mail & Empire (TIME, Nov. 30). But he admits that newspapers bore him, and no one has yet discovered why he set up his broker, C. George McCullagh, as a bigtime publisher.
Not all the prospectors have prospered. Sandy Mclntyre lives on guaranteed grubstake from big Mclntyre-Porcupine, whose claims he originally staked. And Mclntyre-Porcupine is run by Jack P. Bickell, a suave, handsome bachelor who made his fortune in the city side of mining and who sports one of the show places of Toronto, where he entertains everyone from Ontario's rambunctious Premier Mitchell F. ("Mitch") Hepburn to visiting U. S. stockmarketeers like Bernard E. ("Sell 'em Ben") Smith.
Most spectacular prospector-tycoon is Jack Hammell, a onetime professional fisticuffer from the mining camps of California who quit a good brokerage house job in Manhattan to head for the Klondike. By his account he has won and lost eleven fortunes. He was among the first in the great Cobalt silver rush, but his first big money came from the Flin Flon, which he sold to the late Harry Payne Whitney. Since then he has had a hand in Pickle Crow and Red Lake. At 60, he still prospects by plane, summer and winter, is sometimes called "the gentleman adventurer of the mining world," sometimes "Crack-the-North- Open" Hammell.
Toronto still talks about the time that Jack Hammell ran a speech in a Toronto newspaper at full advertising rates, surprising the publisher if not himself when readers unanimously acclaimed it as the best feature of the day. Another Toronto millionaire prospector is Tony Oklend, an Austrian emigrant who staked Long Lac in 1926. From his pile he bought a big house in the suburbs, hired a platoon of servants headed by a butler. When the servants arrived he called them together to announce: "I don't care what you do around here but I do the cooking."
Cat. In wealth if not in prestige the open-handed Toronto millionaires are a match for Montreal's best. Richest man in Canada is Sir Herbert Samuel Holt, testy, 81-year-old Chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada. An Irishman from Dublin, he got his start in Canadian Pacific Ry., made a fortune in Montreal utilities, another fortune in textiles. Hardboiled, hot tempered, hobbyless, he has been known to pick up an inquisitive newshawk, toss him bodily downstairs.