Nevada last week celebrated the 68th anniversary of its admission to the Union. No celebrant, however, was lank Governor Frederick Bennett Balzar, onetime railroad conductor, onetime six-shooting sheriff of Mineral County. He was in Washington, D. C. begging the R. F. C. to lend Nevada $2,000,000. Most of the banks of his arid State were at an impasse. When the loan did not come through, Governor Balzar communicated with his Lieutenant Governor Morley Griswold. As a result of that communication, Nevada's 91,000 citizens awoke from their celebration to find' 19 of their 26 banks closed, $20,000,000 of their $30,000,000 in bank deposits tied up. Lieutenant Governor Griswold had proclaimed a 12-day moratorium on all obligations except taxes, had urged every bank to take ad vantage of it. The seven banks which decided to face all comers included Reno's First National which sent to San Francisco for $1,500,000 in cash and announced it stood ready to pay $3,000,000 over its counter. When this halted an incipient run President Richard Kirman beamed at depositors and cried, "Come and get it tomorrow, there is plenty of it!" Also open were two banks in busy Las Vegas. nearest railroad town to the Hoover Dam operations.
Not one of the twelve banks owned by George Wingfield opened. It was this chain's weakness which precipitated all the trouble. Banker Wingfield is a tall, powerful man with a shock of black hair shot with grey. He was born in Fort Smith, Ark. in 1876, the year of the Custer Massacre. Before he was old enough to enter a saloon he struck out for Nevada. In Winnemucca he learned faro, poker, bird-cage and 21. He was soon called "The Boy Gambler" and banked his own faro. He was in Goldfield during the 1906 boom, made a million dollars in mining stocks. His contemporaries in those days included the late Tex Rickard, who was running a gambling hall, and Charles Victor Bob, engineer-promoter. His gambling halls grew so large that his cashiers began handling $5,000,000 a year. Nevadans regard him as one of the best friends their sagebrushy State has ever had, for he remained there after having grown rich on its resources. The Nevada-mined fortunes of John W. Mackay, James G. Fair. George Hearst, James C. Flood, William G. Sharon and William S. O'Brien were mostly spent and banked in other States.