and financial holdings were scattered from Canada to Peru. They included Indian Motorcycle Co. He financed lead, zinc and coal mines, street railways, and handled the sensational Midvale Steel financing during the War when the stock rose from 290 to 500. He promoted the great Nipissing silver deposit at Cobalt, Ontario, Canada for the Guggenheims and reaped a quick million dollars return. He refinanced American Woolen Co. and Tobacco Products Co., launched Cuba Cane Sugar Co., got control of Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Co., organized Submarine Boat Corp. and the Wright-Martin Aeroplane Co. He was a director of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. By the 1920s he was a director of Sinclair Oil and promoter of Gulf Sulphur, but all these were diversions from his main interest in mining copper. In 1925, when planning to scout mining properties in South Africa, he became ill and returned home halfway through the trip, his last, lingering illness. Rotund, good-natured, bald, a tireless worker, a devoted family man, Thompson chewed tobacco, underpaid his employees (though equivalent to pay given by his contemporaries) and, as one of the greatest gamblers of his time, discharged them for gambling. He was prominent behind the scenes in the Republican party, a presidential elector, party chair, as well as served on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1914 to 1919 and was twice (1916 and 1920) a delegate to the Republican National Convention. In 1921, he declined nomination for a cabinet post under president Warren G. Harding. He was head of and principal supporter of the President Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association from 1919 until his death. In 1912, he built the W. B. Thompson Mansion at Yonkers, New York. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. During the 1920s, near Superior, Arizona, he built his winter mansion, Picket Post House, overlooking the beautiful desertscape and gardens he created at what is now the magnificent Boyce Thompson Arboretum State Park. The Mediterranean style home is occasionally open for tours through the arboretum. In 1925, Thompson ordered a luxuriant private railroad car, named the Alder, from the Pullman Company. The car was later used by ASARCO and in 1971 was owned by the National Railways of Mexico. Thompson died from pneumonia in 1930 and was buried at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. A 1935 biography of Boyce-Thompson, The Magnate, by Herman Hagedorn, the presidential biographer