TWHP


William Sharon, 1821-1885   

California can claim no more fascinatingly ambiguous a character than William Sharon. The Ohio native entered adulthood as a lawyer, practicing at one time with Edward Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War. Abandoning law to open a store in Illinois, Sharon followed the gold seekers in 1849, establishing himself in mercantile business in Sacramento. By 1850, he was dealing real estate in San Francisco, where he accumulated a small fortune, lost in bad mining investments in the early 1860s. It was then that William Ralston, after founding the Bank of California in 1864, recruited Sharon to represent the institution in Virginia City, site of the very mining investments that ruined the man in the first place. Credit was tight in the Comstock Lode; the mines weren't producing because the deeper they went, the more problems cropped up, typically having to do with flooding. Sharon proved to be a generous and enthusiastic lender, who just as expeditiously foreclosed on the mine owners indebted to him. Then he figured out how to overcome the difficulties of hard rock mining and extracted all the wealth possible. The Bank of California came to control many of the Nevada mines and almost all significant industries associated with them; Sharon earned the moniker "King of the Comstock." The flow of wealth fueled growth in San Francisco, and the Bank seemed to dominate that city as well. When Ralston's schemes faltered in the summer of 1875 and word got out, mining stocks took a tumble, threatening the Bank even more. Enter William Sharon, who started selling his own shares off, resulting in ruin of his partner Ralston and the Bank they'd built. According to some accounts, Sharon was merely trying to raise money to help bail his friend out. Others suggest that Sharon engineered the run on mining stocks and the Bank in order to take control in a grand conspiracy with Ralston's competitors. In any case, Sharon ended up in charge of the Bank, moved into Ralston's palatial home at Belmont, and took over most of his erstwhile partner's properties, including the Palace Hotel, the Ralston masterwork that opened just months after his death. William Sharon, of course, presided. By 1880, he was the richest man in California, said to be worth almost a hundred million dollars. His progeny, Flora and Fred, married into great English and American families, respectively, while Sharon himself cavorted with beautiful young mistresses in the wake of his widowerhood. He spent his last days fighting a lawsuit brought by Althea Hill, who claimed they'd been secretly married, entitling her to half his fortune. Sharon was dead by the time the court found in his favor, and it's surely a coincidence that the judge involved lived in a free room at the Palace.


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