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2 Colonel When Newmont Mining ­ Corporation issued its first annual report for 1925, the company looked more like a mutual fund than a mining house. It had no operations but held investments valued at $20 million in six mining and oil companies. That portfolio of assets generated $2.5 million in dividends and interest during the year, enabling the company to pay out $1.20 per share to its shareholders. There were 430,000 shares of stock outstanding, 300,000 owned by William Boyce Thompson, the company’s chairman and founder, and a handful of officers and directors, and 130,000 sold in an initial public offering earlier that year that raised $5.2 million at $40 a share. With the decision to list the company’s stock on New York’s Curb Exchange , the forerunner of the Ameri­ can Stock Exchange and the trading arena for the country’s more speculative issues of the day, Thompson added the word “Mining” to a company he had incorporated under the laws of Delaware on May 2, 1921. Newmont Corporation had been a private investment vehicle for Thompson’s collection of mining interests, but now that public shareholders were involved he wanted a more descriptive name for the company’s activities, one that would forewarn of the risks involved. Newmont’s debut as a publicly traded company was major news in the New York and Boston financial press and mining journals. The company was described as “unique,” in that it combined the attributes of a British mining house, investing in mining properties and exploration worldwide, with those of an investment trust, holding sizable shares and trading in profitable mining and oil companies. The Wall Street Journal reported that through the sale of stock “the public was permitted to share in the business judgment and investment sagacity of Colonel William Boyce Thompson” backed by “an engineering and geological corps that ranks with the best in the country.”1 While Newmont dates itself from its 1921 incorporation, that was merely Colonel 17 a reincorporation of Thompson’s earlier investment vehicle, Newmont­ Company, which had been chartered under the laws of Maine in March 1916. Before that there had been the Gunn-­ Thompson Company established in New York in 1907 to finance the exploration and development of mining properties; the W. B. Thompson Company of Boston in 1902, which bought and sold mining stocks; and the Thompson Investment Company of Butte, Montana, created in 1897 to invest in real estate and mining. With each new venture Thompson became more adroit at searching out attractive mining properties; building ties with the era’s best geologists and mining engineers to investigate and develop each prospect’s potential; forging alliances with New York’s powerful money houses for financing; and finally promoting the mines through the public sale of stock. Thompson didn’t explore; he listened. And when he heard something he liked he sent his experts to check it out. It was said he had “20/20 hearing.”2 He was instrumental in and had a major part in organizing, financing, and developing some of the most important mines and mining companies of the twentieth century, including Anglo Ameri­ can Corporation, Kennecott , Magma Copper, Texas Gulf Sulphur, and Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting. Bringing eastern money to western mines made him exceedingly wealthy. The word Newmont is a contraction for New York, where Wall Street’s canyons could be mined for money, and Montana, the home of his birth and mining heritage. Thompson was born in May 1869—a time when Indian wars were raging across the Upper Plains—in Alder Gulch, Montana, a village of log­ cabins which with neighboring Virginia City had been the site of an 1863 gold rush. Thompson’s father, one of ten thousand who converged on the area, left North Dakota with a covered wagon, four oxen, and a couple of cows. When he arrived over the Yellowstone Trail only the cows were left and the elder Thompson described them as “mostly horns and ribs.” Finding the best claims occupied, he returned east to bring back a quartz-­ crushing mill. But by the time he made his second entry into Virginia City, the gold was gone, the miners were departing, and there was no need for labor-­ saving machinery. He was broke. Thompson learned an important lesson from his father’s experience. If he had sized up the situation before leaving, the elder Thompson would have realized that the gold’s...

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