Background
William Cornell Greene was born on August 26, 1852 at Chappaqua, Westchester County, New York. His restless temperament showed itself early and sent him, still in his teens, westward in quest of adventure.
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William Cornell Greene
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated at private schools and at the Chappaqua Mountain Institute in Chappaqua, New York.
Career
Greene spent some desultory years as a government contractor in Kansas and then in Colorado, and in 1877 became a cowpuncher on the frontier rim of Arizona, finding at length the adventure he had sought in repelling the raids of the Apache Indians and the depredations of cattle rustlers. Because of his skill in improvising a volunteer force for these expeditions and his exploits at their head the title he acquired of “Colonel Bill” became the symbol of a far-spread border reputation for prowess.
Since, however, cowpunching offered more adventure than profit, Greene prospected for a mine in the Bradshaw Mountains and when the boom came to Tombstone, Arizona, at the turn of the decade he went there and worked as a miner.
In the nineties he became convinced that a fine tract of grazing land in the state of Sonora, known as La Cananea, contained mineral deposits. He filed mining claims and, with the aid of some Arizona capital, obtained possession of this land, which at the time an American syndicate was using for ranching.
On May 26, 1899, he formed the Cobre Grande Copper Company and succeeded in selling a block of 31, 000 shares of its stock to J. H. Costello, a Pennsylvania capitalist, who was placed in charge of operations. Several months later Greene ousted Costello by means of a Mexican court order, and formed a new company, the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, a Mexican corporation, to which he transferred the property.
He then persuaded a group headed by Thomas W. Lawson, who at that time was organizing the Amalgamated Copper Company, to give him financial backing. Lawson was to honor drafts by Greene on short-term notes up to $1, 000, 000 for the development of the property, and was to receive in return an option on a controlling block of shares in the newly formed Greene Consolidated Copper Company, at one-third of par. It was Greene’s contention later that Lawson, after honoring drafts for $135, 000, refused to honor any more and called in the outstanding notes. Greene narrowly avoided losing his property, and the experience embittered him against Lawson and against the Eastern money power which the latter symbolized.
In 1900 Greene moved to New York with his second wife, Mary Proctor, and set up his offices in Wall Street somewhat in the grand manner. With a capacity to persuade such Wall Street leaders as Gates, Hawley, Huntington, and Weir to sit on his boards of directors he combined a knowledge of promoting methods which would appeal to the small investor. His talent for writing prospectuses amounted to genius. For several years his fortunes prospered. In 1903 the Gates-Hawley interests made a systematic attack on Greene Consolidated stock, but Greene withstood the onslaught and several months later copper ore estimated at $100, 000, 000 was discovered on his properties.
He immediately extended his corporate organization and in 1904 formed additional companies to capitalize the Cananea bonanza - the Greene Gold-Silver Company and the Greene Consolidated Gold Company.
He bought a large section of Sonora for cattle ranching; bought mines and holdings in the Sierra Madre Mountains, organizing the Sierra Madre Land & Lumber Company; secured control of a railroad tapping the Sierra Madre holdings, and built one to his Cananea holdings.
At about this time the Cananea mining camp was producing copper to the value of $10, 000, 000 a year. At the height of his prosperity, Greene was at the head of companies with a capitalization of $100, 000, 000, of which it was estimated that his personal holdings amounted to something less than half. In the general decline of stock values during the “Lawson panic” of 1904 he was severely affected, however, since he had been speculating heavily in the securities of his companies. In addition to the general effect of market conditions it seems clear that in several quarters in Wall Street there were groups who were not unwilling to aid in his fall, although his own belief that there was an organized conspiracy of Eastern financiers bent on defeating him, an impetuous Westerner untrained in the artifices of the Stock Exchange, seems too laborious an interpretation of the situation.
His aggressiveness and the informality of an outsider which characterized his actions, while they had won him support at first, finally invited attack. He carried over into Wall Street the Wild-West characteristics of bluff heartiness, braggadocio, and gun-toting which he had found effective in Arizona, where he had once shot a man on the street whom he suspected of having done him an injury. A remark that Lawson had made about him in his articles in Everybody’s entitled “Frenzied Finance” precipitated a sequence of accusation and recrimination carried on through paid advertisements in the newspapers, in which each spared no epithets and even threatened personal violence when he should meet the other. Greene’s border reputation as a gunfighter made Wall Street uneasy for the safety of Lawson, but an actual meeting of the two in Boston was anticlimactic and resulted in reconciliation. Greene’s financial situation, however, responded neither to bluster nor reconciliation.
His fall, once begun, was extremely rapid. A group intent upon getting control of the Cananea properties did its best to keep him from repairing his losses by borrowing. Finally in 1906, he capitulated to Thomas F. Cole, John D. Ryan, and the Amalgamated Copper interests, which had already acquired the Cananea Central mine.
The result was the formation of the Greene- Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, with an authorized capitalization of $60, 000, 000, the Greene stock being exchanged for the new at 1: 1R2 shares. Greene was to remain the head of the new company, but within three months after its formation he was divested of all actual power, and in February 1907 he was dropped from the board of directors. The panic of 1907 disposed of most of the rest of his fortune. He made a trip to Japan in a last effort to obtain new capital but failed and returned to Cananea. He was still the owner of several large Mexican cattle ranches and in managing them he spent the last years of his life. He died at Cananea.
Achievements
Connections
After the boom he married and bought a small ranch in the San Pedro Valley near Hereford. His wife never recovered from the loss of her daughter and died in Los Angeles in 1899 from ovarian-surgery complications. Greene married Mary Benedict a few years later.
