George Wingfield
American
1876 – 1959
George Wingfield was a faro dealer who parlayed Tonopah gambling profits into control of Goldfield's richest mines, becoming Nevada's wealthiest man and, through his banks and political machine, the state's dominant power broker for two decades.
Biography
George Wingfield was born on August 16, 1876, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and raised in southeastern Oregon, where he worked as a cowboy before drifting into Nevada in 1899. He settled in Winnemucca, dealt faro, and won the friendship of banker and future U.S. senator George S. Nixon, who became his mentor and partner.
Wingfield followed the boom to Tonopah in 1901, running gambling concessions and investing his winnings in mining shares. When the Goldfield excitement broke, he and Nixon moved aggressively, and in 1906 they consolidated the camp's richest producers into the Goldfield Consolidated Mines Company, a venture that made Wingfield, still in his twenties, reportedly the richest man in Nevada. During the bitter Goldfield labor conflicts of 1907-08 he took a hard line against the miners' unions, and federal troops were ultimately called into the district.
In 1908 Wingfield moved to Reno, where he built an empire of banks, hotels, and ranches and a bipartisan political machine so pervasive that Nevada was said to be run from his office. He declined an appointment to the U.S. Senate in 1912, preferring power without office. His banking chain collapsed in the Depression, bankrupting him, but he rebuilt his fortune in the 1930s through the Getchell gold mine. He died in Reno on December 25, 1959, the outstanding example of a gold rush gambler turned kingmaker.