Leading citizens, including the directors of a number of banks in Reno, made clandestine calls at my office, shook my hand, felicitated me over the stand I took, and went away. Even George Wingfield, the Senator's partner, it was reported (and I afterward corroborated this from the lips of George Wingfield himself), backed me up in the stand I had taken. The general sentiment in the State appeared to be that the threat was a lowdown trick, and that of the two I had the less to be ashamed of.
When the Senator read the article headed "Nixon a Senator with a Blackmailing Mind" it is said he telegraphed to former Governor Thomas of Colorado, his counsel, and asked him to come to Reno.
"If I don't say something in answer to this awful attack, I'll choke!" cried the Senator as he nervously walked the floor.
"Did you sign that interview which they published?" asked Governor Thomas.
"Well, then, if you say anything at all now, _they'll_ choke _you_," answered Governor Thomas.
During the course of our attacks on Senator Nixon in the _Nevada Mining News_ which followed at various intervals, the newspaper accused him of making promises of early dividends to Goldfield Consolidated stockholders which he knew he could not keep; of having been the State Agent in Nevada of the Southern Pacific Company at $150 per month during the Huntington régime when legislatures were bought; of having bilked the investing public out of millions in Goldfield; of having carved his fortune, that made possible the acquisition by him and his partner of control of the Goldfield Consolidated, out of a gambling house in Tonopah; of having gathered his first mining property and mining-stock interests in Goldfield from prospectors who lost money and surrendered their mining claims and stock certificates to the gambling house in lieu of the cash; and of being generally a financial and political freebooter of the most despicable sort. And the Senator never sued for libel nor proceeded in the courts in any way whatsoever to obtain a retraction.
About a week after the publication of the editorial headed "Nixon a Senator with a Blackmailing Mind," when Goldfield Consolidated stock had slumped to around $7, the _Nevada Mining News_ in big bold-faced type urged its readers to place their buying orders for Goldfield Consolidated at $4 a share, saying that New York mining-stock brokers advised their clients that the stock would almost certainly go down to that figure because of the Senator's mistakes in the financial management of the company. That edition contained another editorial on Senator Nixon, headed "Branding a Bilker." It accused him of saying in his annual report a few months previous that payments of dividends on a regular basis would commence within a short time, and contrasted this statement with the signed interview published in the _Nevada Mining News_, in which he said dividends would be paid "whenever the trustees thought it wise to do so _and not before_."