William M. Stewart

Stewart was born in Wayne County, New York, on August 9, 1825. As a child he moved with his parents to Trumbull County, Ohio. As a young man he was a mathematics teacher in Ohio. In 1849 he began attending Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but left in 1850 to move to the Far West to California. during the famous California Gold Rush of 1848–1852. He arrived in San Francisco, California, and soon left to begin prospect mining near Nevada City, California. In 1903 he was reputed to be one of the richest men in the United States Senate (with an estimated fortune of some $25 million and ownership of several gold and silver mines in California and Nevada) and the oldest member at that time of the upper chamber of the Congress. According to the book Reminiscences of William M. Stewart (published 1908), in May 1905 he moved with his new wife and her daughter to the Bullfrog Mining District (Nevada), of Bullfrog, Nevada where he started a law firm and law library. ==Political career==

California '' edited by George Rothwell Brown, published 1908 In 1849, Stewart ran for governor in California's first gubernatorial election, but placed 5th with 4.36% of the vote and lost to Peter Hardeman Burnett. Later, in 1851, he ran for sheriff of Nevada County, California, and the next year, in February, he was at the Whig State Convention in Sacramento, where he was named a delegate to the party's national convention. Stewart accused the three Nevada territorial judges of being corrupt, and he barely escaped disbarment. United States Senate In 1864, Stewart was named by the Nevada State Legislature to the United States Senate as a Republican. He served in the U.S. Senate for a decade from 1865 until 1875, when he retired and moved back west to practice law again in Nevada and California. In 1873, Stewart's palatial residence, nicknamed Stewart's Castle, was built in the federal. national capital city of Washington, D.C., and became a center of the city's social scene. He was elected to the Senate again by the Nevada Legislature in 1887 and reelected by them in 1893 and subsequently once more in 1899. During the 1890s however, he left the then post-war dominant Republican Party to join the small independent minority third party of the short-lived Silver Party (1892–1911), which was supported by many Westerners who were in favor of the Free Silver movement, a major political and economic issue in the United States during the late 19th century and generally also favored by the then minority opposition Democratic Party, led by three-time presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), of Nebraska. In 1871, 18th President Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885, served 1869–1877), offered Stewart a seat as an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. Stewart however declined. Stewart was also involved in an international scandal where he promoted the sale of a worthless worked out pit of the Emma Silver Mine at Alta, Utah for millions of pounds sterling to unsuspecting British subjects (citizen) overseas in the United Kingdom (Great Britain / England) in Europe. In 1899, Republican-affiliated journalist and diplomat William Eleroy Curtis (1850–1911), detailed Stewart's reputation amongst his colleagues, describing as follows: In 1902, Senator Stewart was in The Hague of the Netherlands in Europe, in connection with the Mexican-American arbitration case, when his wife Annie, the daughter of former Confederate States Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi was killed in an early automobile / motor-car accident back in America on the West Coast in Alameda, California. ==Post-political career==

Stewart retired from the Senate in 1905. He was a co-founder of the city of Chevy Chase, Maryland, along with Francis G. Newlands, a fellow Senator from Nevada. Stewart remained in Washington, D.C., and died there four years later. He was cremated, and his ashes were originally kept in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco before being moved to Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. ==In popular culture==

The film / television actor Howard Negley (1898–1983), portrayed Stewart in the March 31, 1953 episode (season 1, episode 15), "The Bandits of Panamint", of the syndicated television anthology series, and Western program Death Valley Days, hosted then by Stanley Andrews (the "Old Colonel"). In the story line, Stewart enters into an agreement to gain pardons for two bandits, played by actors Rick Vallin and Glase Lohman, who accidentally stumble upon a rich silver strike. Stewart, however gains ownership of the mine. Actresses Sheila Ryan and Gloria Winters played young women with romantic interests in the silver miners / outlaws. In another episode also in 1953, of Death Valley Days, "Whirlwind Courtship", Michael Hathaway, who appeared only twice on television, played Stewart as a young, up and coming Nevada lawyer determined to wed Annie Foote, a real-life daughter of a former U.S. Senator representing Mississippi, and Governor of Mississippi, Henry S. Foote (1804–1880), who himself had relocated to the American western frontier, after his political career during the 1850s in the South and Washington, D.C. ==See also==