MCKANE, JOHN (1862-1911)

MCKANE, JOHN, banker, businessman, adventurer, sportsman, and benefactor; b. Kettle, Fife, Scotland, 25 Nov 1862, s/o George McKane and Mary Johnston, natives of Ireland; m. 1902, in San Francisco, Florence Sinclair, d/o Edward Sinclair and Jane Willard; d. San Francisco, 15 Jun 1911.

John McKane's father was a police constable who was "battered by some miscreants" in the line of duty at Carnock, Scotland, in 1871 and never fully recovered. A few years later he was posted to Dunfermline, the hometown of Andrew Carnegie, and put in charge of the police lockup.

McKane finished his education at the high school in Dunfermline and apprenticed in the bank there. Later he was transferred to Forres, as "the youngest accountant of the Bank of Scotland." In 1884, at age twenty-two, he left Scotland to pursue a banking career in Canada. He was based for a time in Summerside, P.E.I., and in Truro, N.S. He arrived on the Miramichi in November 1890 as acting manager of the Newcastle branch of the Merchants Bank of Halifax, while the manager, James Yeoman, was on sick leave. When Yeoman died in April 1891 he became manager.

Banking proved to be "too slow a business" for McKane, however, and he began to be on the lookout for business opportunities. He went to Britain with James Robinson in February 1894, and while Robinson returned a few weeks later, he did not come back until May. In 1896 news of the mining boom at Rossland, B.C., caused him to be seized by "gold fever," so he went back to Scotland to secure loans from old friends and formed an exploration company.

McKane's departure for British Columbia coincided with a fracas at a Newcastle hotel in which he and a late-night drinking companion were wounded by the pistol fire of another guest. At his trial the gunman convinced the court that he had used his weapon in self-defense. He said he had been assaulted in a violent manner by the two men after he had objected to their noisy behavior. The incident suggests why McKane, who had an "exceptionally powerful physique," was known on the Miramichi as "the wild Irishman."

McKane did not strike it rich in British Columbia, but he learned the mining business and got to try his hand at politics. In the federal election of 1900 he was the Conservative candidate in the riding of Yale-Cariboo. He conducted an aggressive campaign but failed to win the seat. He later became involved in the mining scene in Nevada and succeeded in interesting the Eastern industrialist Charles M. Schwab in the mineral potential of the state. It was announced in 1903 that Schwab and McKane had bought a group of Nevada companies, and in 1905, the gambit paid off. In the newspapers of the towns in which he was known in Scotland and New Brunswick, at least, it was McKane, not Schwab, who was heralded as the new 'Gold King', King of Tonopah, a mining camp in the Nevada desert.

As soon as riches were his, McKane wasted no time in repaying, with interest, the loans which his Scottish friends had advanced to him, and in letting the rest of the world know about, and share in, his good fortune. In October 1905 he arrived on the Miramichi for the hunting season, accompanied by his wife and secretary, in a special railway car which he had rented in Saint John. At the time, a canvass was underway for funds for the erection of St Michael's Cathedral, and he "took a thousand dollar bill out of his vest pocket" and handed it to a member of the building committee.

In 1906 McKane passed out more than £4,000 in support of various good causes in Scotland, including £2,500 for the restoration of a park in his hometown of Dunfermline which was subsequently renamed in his honor. In the same year he bought the sawmill and timber limits of his late father-in-law, Edward Sinclair, at Northwest Bridge and placed the company under hired management. That summer he erected for himself at Northwest Bridge one of the finest residences of the Miramichi and also had a network of lodges built in the woods for use in hunting and fishing.

In 1907 McKane acquired the controlling interest in The Daily Telegraph and The Evening Times, of Saint John. It was speculated that he had unfulfilled political ambitions and wished to use the papers to build a base of support for the future. Among his many personal acquisitions that year was a pair of fine horses said to have been worth $4,000, which were shipped by rail from New York accompanied by a hostler who slept in the car. Also coming by rail was a five-passenger Darracq touring car with a canopy top.

In 1909 it was reported in a Fredericton newspaper that the McKane group of companies in Nevada had been under "attachment" since 1907 because of indebtedness and that they had now been sold by the bank. McKane declared the report to be false, but the fact is that he was no longer in the mining business. He was also in the process of divesting himself of his other assets. In 1908 he parted with the Saint John newspapers. In 1909 he sold the Sinclair Lumber Co. to his brothers-in-law William and Hubert Sinclair. As though to counter any suspicion that he was bankrupt, however, he engaged in a new round of charities in 1909. Several years previously Lieut. Gov. Lemuel J. Tweedie had called his attention to the Hotel Dieu Hospital's need for a new operating room. He had demurred, but in the summer of 1909 he contacted Mary Ann Connors (Mother Kane), head of the hospital, to ask how much money would be required in total for the project. When she informed him that $10,500 would be needed he stated that he would be donating $11,000. "It's my experience," he said, "that actual expenses always exceed calculations." At the same time, he made liberal donations to the YMCA and the Miramichi Natural History Association.

During the last two years of his life McKane wandered the globe, accompanied by his wife, and sometimes by W. Max Aitken (who was not yet Lord Beaverbrook) and pursued his favorite hobbies, among which were fly fishing and the composing of songs and anthems. He had been an enthusiast with hook and line for many years, angling both in North America and Scotland. He was a guest at Camp Adams on the Northwest as early as 1892, and during a two-week stay there in July 1907 he and three companions took sixty-eight fish. The pleasure he received from composing songs and anthems was an outgrowth of a lifelong love of literature. "An omnivorous reader," he was deeply moved by the works of Shakespeare, Burns, and other poets and sometimes gave dramatic recitations of favorite scenes and passages. At a memorable "Scotch Dinner" held in Newcastle at New Year's in 1895 he sang a solo and recited a scene from The Lady of the Lake. During his spending spree in 1906 he gave £400 towards the restoration of the Auld Brig o' Ayr and $500 to the Burns Memorial Fund for the erection of the Burns statue in Fredericton. He was passionate in his love for Burns, "almost every line of whose poetry he had at heart."

McKane contracted a cold or 'flu in Los Angeles in 1911 which led to pneumonia and to his death soon afterwards in San Francisco, at age forty-five. In reporting on his passing, one of the California newspapers observed that "he had a fine scorn for most things that men sought, but what he wanted he wanted, and he usually got. Then as often as not, he would throw it away." The Saint John Telegraph, which he had recently owned, described him as "strange, impulsive, restless, and somewhat self-contradictory," and yet "a man of brilliant parts." He was survived by his wife, Florence Sinclair.