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Despite the rumors about Cisco that had circulated for days, the announcement took Wall Street by surprise. Cisco and Son was still known as a conservative house, not given to rash speculation. The New York World wrote the following day: “The fact that the firm did not do a speculative business to any great extent, that it received very large deposits from innumerable persons and corporations, that it had acted as fiscal agent for several railroads and as correspondent for many out-of-town bankers; that it did a large business in issuing letters of credit to travelers in Europe, made the failure a more than ordinary disaster.”

Bankers, investors, and financial reporters around lower Manhattan immediately began looking for the villain responsible for bringing the house of Cisco to its knees. As it turned out, there were several possibilities. They turned their anger and resentment first on Collis P. Huntington, the leader of the Houston and Texas Central. To anyone with more than a passing interest in the affair, the railroad’s failure to make the bond payment looked less like financial distress than a calculated and insidious plan by Huntington and his associates to marginalize outside bondholders and consolidate control of the company. No sooner had the bonds plummeted in value than the Huntington group started buying them up at bargain prices from distressed bondholders. It was the sort of act that today might earn Huntington and his cronies at the very least a hot seat before the Securities and Exchange Commission, various Senate and House committees, and an intimate examination by the Justice Department, if not jail time.

In the wilder and woollier nineteenth century, the average investor could do little but gnash his teeth in anger as Huntington himself pleaded ignorance and mild surprise at the whole controversy. In a self-serving letter to the New York Daily Tribune two days after the Cisco failure, Huntington wrote that his Southern Development Company had acquired the Houston and Texas Central indirectly, as part of a much larger acquisition of industrialist Charles Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas Railroad and Steamship Company. Huntington claimed that since he had neither built the railroad nor issued the bonds, he was not responsible for paying interest on them. “I have been and am wholly unable to bring myself to the conclusion that any legal or moral obligation existed for my payment from my own resources the maturing coupons upon bonds of a railway company with which I have become connected only in the indirect way which I have mentioned.” As for his subsequent eagerness to buy the depressed securities, Huntington explained that he did so only as a favor to investors who felt themselves “inconvenienced” by holding nonpaying bonds.

Two other obvious culprits in the episode were John A. Cisco and Frederick W. Foote. Their crime was one not of malice but of gross naivete. As one anonymous investor wrote the day after Huntington’s letter appeared: “The Messrs. Cisco were the financial agents of the Texas Railroad Company for a long series of years, and ought to have known precisely what was its financial condition.” What the letter writer didn’t say is that Cisco and Foot should also have been more wary in dealing with Huntington, whose reputation for devious tactics was already well established.

Within a few days of the collapse, the press and the financial community had identified a new villain. The headline in the New York World of January 18 stated it succinctly:

HETTIE GREENS MILLIONS

HOW SHE CAUSED THE RECENT FAILURE OF

JOHN J. CISCO & SON

“John J. Cisco & Son have nearly eight hundred creditors,” the article began. “The report in yesterday’s WORLD that Mrs. Edward H. Green was the heaviest of these received further confirmation in Wall street yesterday. The amount of her deposit in the bank is about $475,000 [sic]. Curiously enough while she is a creditor of the firm her husband is its principal debtor.” The World’s story explained the crux of the