ABSTRACT
The following pages describe events in London, Western Australia, and British Columbia during the late 1890s and the early 1900s. The narrative’s central figure is Whitaker Wright. One of the best-known mining financiers of the late nineteenth century, Wright specialized in promoting mines on the London Stock Exchange and profited from the booming market in mining shares during the mid-to-late 1890s. He soon became a very wealthy man with a considerable reputation: one prominent financier remembered how ‘it was thought that everything he touched would turn to gold’. A well-known journalist recalled a guessing game over lunch at the turn of the century, when he and his companions tried to name the wealthiest person in the world. Their candidates were Carnegie, Rockefeller, Rhodes, and Wright.1 An American who had business dealings with him told a reporter that ‘Wright enjoyed the implicit confidence of the leading financial men of London … He was associated with a class of people who brought him into close touch with the highest financial circles of the British empire … a promoter pure and simple, but he operated on a gigantic scale. He would buy a mine outright, and then float it on the London market.’2 Wright seemed to be everywhere, dabbling in mines around the world, acquiring copper, silver, lead, nickel, and gold properties, although his reputation rested largely on the success of two gold mines in Western Australia.
