The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, December 11, 1898, Page 22

THE- SAN FRANCISCO CALL, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1898, ANSAS has had many meteoric careers in business and in poli- cg, but Grant G. Gillett has won the distinction of havi made the most t endous an sensational success and fallure of them all i The splendor of his living, his nabob manners, the methods by which a raw country boy imposed on:the keen busi- ne men who had been in the cattle traffic ten ti s as long as he, how he could of fast living and ex- pe t ran into hundreds of dol- lars a day make a reputation that would allow him to borrow $2,000,000, is a marvel. It is thought that he has en a fortune with him, but this is ed by the family, who say that he hard pressed when he went and had less than $500. If this is so, it case be less than “three gen- m shirtsleeves to shirt- for three years ago he was trying to get a job at $50 a month as deputy sheriff. Two years ago he counted himself worth $75,000. A year ago he said he was worth over $150,000, and was known all over the State as a cattle king, the leading shipper in the West. Three weeks ago he was still great, and by report was nearing the point of a half-millionaire. Now he is a fugitive on the earth and somebody is holding the sack for a million dollars. It is a romance of possibilites of American business life. Gillett's career dramatized would show him in the first act as a station agent and farmer at Woodbine. 1In the second act he is wearing a diamond of moderate size, and while his profits are large he needs a great deal of credit. He has found out that some people are impressed by his gem, so he invests in a larger one, in size and shape and similar to a doorknob. He wears this in act three and travels on engines oc- casionally to save time. Everybody knows that “time is money” and the { cattle dealer never fails to tell his patrons, or proteges, that that is his only reason for failing to wait for the scheduled trains. The plan works well and when the curtain rises the fourth time Gillett has improved upon it by adding cowboy band, which sounds his praises, and by investing more money in diamonds. These he carries around loose in his pocket and when ne- gotiating a loan he draws them forth and sifts them carelessly from one hand to another with an hour gl sort of a movement. This had nev en tried before it was tried at the Kansas City stock yards, and worked like a charm. It has the further advantage that “when the game is up” the diamonds form a very neat little safeguard against the proverbial rainy day. Gillett’s rainy days hove in sight a little over two weeks ago and he has tried to dodge them by disappearing. His creditors then thoroughly awakened from their dream and a wild scramble for what the cattle king had left be- hind followed. The creditors were really not to blame. There was one firm with a quarter of a million dollars of his paper; another had $200,000 worth; a third $160,000. Others followed with $125,000 and $122,000 and there were enough witht less than $100,000 apiece to bring the total up to about $1,500,000. That's pretty good borrowing for a young man from Kansas. GILLETTS * OCCUPATION _FOUR YEARS THE BLIZZARD People who have a wide knowledge of the world say they doubt whether Gillett could bcrrow anything at the stockyards now. His magnetism was something won- derful. “I tell you,” said a commission man who is heavily stuck, “in'twenty years’ experience I never saw-a man who ‘could accomplish so much as he. He had such a fascinating way and put his propositions so clearly that we gave up. One day he came to us and want- ed $56,000. I said we had enough of his ‘I am offering it to you as a I thought you wanted to do business,’” replied Gillett with a sneer. He went out and in fifteen minutes returned with a certified check, which he flashed in my face with a smile.” The commission man is smiling now. About the 1st of November he wanted to borrow $43,000 of the firm of Dake & Keeler of Denver. They knew he was having trouble, and Keeler went to the ranch to see how things looked. He spent four days and was driven around the herds and wired his partner that everything was all right. Gillett got the money, but they find out now that the cattle were mortgaged twice before they made the loan. They sold him 860 head of Oregon yearlings and have never been able to find the stock at all. Yet they have been in the business for twenty years. It was scarcely to be wondered at that a man with such pow- ers of persuasion should be able to get large credit. His methods were simple, almost no- tably so. He began well and for two years met all his paper with exemplary promptness. Then began the consum- mation of his scheme to make wealth rapidly. It is a story that bears direct- ly on the dangers of cattle paper in- vestments when made without careful and full examination. Associated with him were his brothers-in-law, those of his wife’s side and those of his sister’s marriage. Then he took up one or two young men who had no visible means of support and made them apparently rich in a few months. One young man was a poor boy, just out of a struggle to complete a law course in the State University. He sold him cattle and then bought them back again until he had made him worth $10,000. But he also has the young man’s name on pa- per to the amount of $90,000. His rela- tives had the same blind faith in him, and they tried to keep pace with him in vain. They signed papers wherever he told them, and they often had the papers in blank when they signed them, then Gillett filled them in and sold the paper to the commission men. One day. weeks ago he went to a firm in Kansas City and told them that he had a buyer for $15,000 worth of stock. The firm went out in the yards and bought the cattle, loaded them aboard the cars and took a mortgage from Gillett for the whole amount. He took the cattle to Alma., Kans., and sold them to the cus- tomer and put the money in his pock- % THAT WROUGHT GILLETT'S RUIN et instead of sending it to the commis- sion men. The firm will take the stock and leave the feeder without a dollar. Gillett used to buy big droves of cat- tle, several thousand head at a time. He invariably gave a mortgage for the purchase price, and then took the herd to Woodbine to split them up into small droves for the little feeders who had small lots of corn and roughness. The farmers flocked around him as if he were a god, and hung on his words. He would step up to one and say: ‘“Well, what do you want here?”’ ‘“Why. Mr. Gillett, I thought I would look to see if you have anything that I want” “Look, then; I have no time to talk to you,” and he would leave to see an- Tl other customer. In that way he sold the very cattle he wanted to and at his own price, usually more than the farm- er would have pald anywhere else. The farmer paid $2 to $5 a head more than Gillett did for the stock and the theory was that he would feed them and sell them at a good profit in the spring. He would give his note to Gillett, and it was supposed that Gillett would send the note to take the place of the one that he had given on the wlole lot of cattle. Often he ‘“‘overlooked” this, and of late seems to have done so intention- ally, for there are cattle mortgaged five deep. One bunch of cows in the Indian Territory is mortga. -d for $175 a head in this way. him so implicitly, but it is characteris- tic of the plunger to do just tlat sort of thing. . Gillett went to Texas on Monday be- fore Thanksgiving, saying nothing to his wife or friends—except one. In one man’s hands he left a deed of trust and bill of sale. He ate breakfast in Fort ‘Worth on the following day and was there again on Thanksgiving. Since then he has dropped out of sight. It 2/ I‘I 4, :/ ‘fl’ il J /2 was strange that a person who was so well known as he could disappear in the Lone Star State, but he did it. Three days later a telegram came from New York to his brother-in-law saying that he had just sailed for Spain. It was the general feeling that the message was a blind, and that he had sent it to take the detectives off his track. Old Mexico is more likely t.o be. hlg hiding place. KANE..S CITY, Dec. 9.—A dispatch from Chihuahua Mexico, states that Grant C. Gillett, the fugitive Kansas cattleman, has disappeared from the vicinity of <hihuahua, and is now be- lieved to be either in the City of Mexico or at Mazatlan, on the Pacific Coast, Four Ygars He Ran Up His Credit For Mlilions And Then Fled. or en route to South America. Gillett found refuge on the ranch of J. M. Fisher sixty miles south of Du- rango. Fisher is' a former Kansan, whose career in Kansas was not unlike that of Gillett. He failed in the bank- ing business at Abilene, in 1889, .nd the bank has since paid only 5 per cent on deposits amounting to $300,000. Gillett and his companion, the Texas lJawyer named Troxel, disappeared when they learned that detectives from Kansas City were close upon their trail. The dispatch states that C. A, Schaef- fer, the Kansa~ City commission man, who went South with tke detectives, succeeded in attaching several thous- and dollars which Gillett had deposited in & Mexican bank at Torreon, Mexico, and that he also attached trunks which Gillett had checked at Durango. The amount of money which Mr. Schaeffer tied up cannot be learned, but it is be- lieved to be only a'few thousand dol- lars. . —_———— The executions in Paris during recent years have revived the old question whether death instantaneously follows upon the severance of the head from. the body. Dr. Cinel asserts that de- GILLETT BEFORE s FALL, capitation does not Immediately affect the brain. He says that the blood which flows after decapitation comes from the large vessels of the neck, and there is hardly any call upon the cir- culation of the cranjum. The brain remains intact, nourishing itseif with the blood retained by the pressure of the air. When the blood remai g in the head at the moment of separation is exhausted, there commences a state, not of death, but of inertia, which lasts up to the moment when the organ, no longer fed, ceases to exist. Dr. estimates that the brain finds nourishment in the residuary blood for about an hour after decapi- tation. The period of inertia would last for about two hours, he thinks, and absolute death would not ensue till after the space of three hours alto- gether. If, he adds, a bodiless head indicates by no movement the horrors of its situation, it is because it is phy- sically impossible that it should do so, all the nerves whch serve for the transmission of orders from the brain to the trunk being severed. But there remain the nerves of hearing, of smell and sight, and he concludes that the guillotine does not cause instant death. . These Aztec wall pictures, according to the report. have always been carefully guarded from outsiders by the native. VALUABLE AZTEC PICTURES RECENTLY FOUND IN MEXICO. . MOST important collection of old paintings has just been brought to light in Old Mexico: They are of Aztec origin and throw considerable light on the culture of the aboriginal inhab- itants of the American continent. The man who has been most instrumental in studying and photographing this inter- esting coilection i3 Professor Frederick Starr of the University of Chicago. Professor Starr's attention was at- tracted by a passage in A. F. Bande- lier's book on Mexico, to the existence of some curious paintings preserved near Cholula, Mexico. They were made by artists of the Cuauhtlantzinco In- dians*in the sixteenth centurv_soon af- ter the arrival of Cortez, and are ac- native language. The report declares WORSHIPPING GOD ofF TH CUAUNTLANZINCOS COPISTLIN, THE OLD B s that the Indians ow-ing them guarded their historical treasures with great jealousy, and never allowed a white man to see them. If this remark is true, Professor Starr was more success- making public pictorial documents of great importance which otherwise would have been utterly lost; for soon after his visit a fire occurred in the town hall, and many of these invalu- ful than his nredecessors; for he was|able pictures on one of the frames were kindly received and no one forbade him | destroyed t-- the flames. It is only to to photograph the pictures which con-|be regretted”that owing to a misin- sisted of a series of forty-four sheets|formation in Bandelier’s Mexico. Pro- of about 16 by 12 inches each, pasted on two frames of stretched cotton, some fessor Starr expected to find only two | pictures, each 16 b 12 inches. and was. ten feet long and one yard high, illus- | therefore, unprepared to photograph trating the history of the tribe during the time of the conquest. all of them on separate plates, having | taken only a dozen plates 5 by 7 with It was a happy inspiration which | him. He did wha. he could under the sent Professor Starr on his mission to | circumstances, and photographed the this old Aztec village, and the humor | entire series in as large a size as the and good-naturedness for which he is noted among all his acquaintances was probably: an indispensable condition of his success and served the purpose of == INTRODUCTION OF MADONNA. WORSHIP... {p!n(es at his disposal allowed. He de- ! scribes his expedition to Cholula, and | gives detailed information concerning | the pictures in a bulletin recently pub- obtained photographs. They represent Aztec art about the very important period of the conquest of Mexico by Cortez. lished by the department of anthropol- ogy of the University of Chicago. and we here present our readers with fif- teen of the most interesting pictures, which tell their own story. The Pueblo of San Juan de Cuauht- lantzinco is situated between Puebla and Cholula, in the State of Puebla. It lies within sight of the tramway connecting these two cities, near the station o® Los Arcos, on the Interocean- ic Rallroad. The town is purely In- dlatn, and contains about 1500 inhabit- ants. The pictures referred to are a sort of allegory depicting the conquest of Mexico by Cortez, and tte conversion of the inhabitants to Christianity by Prince Sannient, the Aztec leader, who flrstd became converted to the new creed. =ear COMMENDING HIS PosT TG ING NIS PORTRAIT O AN AZTEC; CHIBP - T - TERIT CARE OF CQRTEZ:‘y Professor Frederick Starr got track of them and npever rested till he had