James Fisk (financier)

James Fisk, Jr. known variously as Big Jim, Diamond Jim, and Jubilee Jim was an American stockbroker and corporate executive who has been referred to as one of the robber barons of the Gilded Age.

Fisk was born in the hamlet of Pownal, Vermont, in Bennington County in 1835. After a brief period in school, he ran away in 1850 and joined Van Ambergs Mammoth Circus amp Menagerie. Later, he became a hotel waiter, and finally adopted the business of his father, a peddler. He applied what he learned in the circus to his peddling and grew his fathers business. He then became a salesman for Jordan Marsh, a Boston dry goods firm. A failure as a salesman, he was sent to Washington, D.C., in 1861 to sell textiles to the government. By his shrewd dealing in army contracts during the Civil War, and, by some accounts, cotton smuggling across enemy lines in which he enlisted the help of his father he accumulated considerable wealth, which he soon lost in speculation.

Source: Wikipedia