Failure of McDonald Bros. - 1891

MCDONALD

Posted By: cheryl moonen (email)
Date: 5/28/2017 at 23:26:02

The Clinton Daily Age, Clinton, Iowa, January 5, 1892

River News

“I am very sorry to know of the misfortune that has fallen the McDonald Brothers," said a river man the other day, alluding to the recent failure of the big lumber firm of LaCrosse. “Dan McDonald had been well known to me for years. He and I almost grew up side by side on the river. I remember when he was a raft pilot and used to steer the floaters down the Mississippi with old obsolete sweeps of long ago. He was a worker and a gentlemen, and he rose fast. But after his rise he struck a streak of pure misfortune. You can’t call it mismanagement or bad business, for it was neither. It was simply luck, if there is any such thing in this world. His rafts went against bridges and were torn to pieces and lost. The same thing happened to other rafts, but McDonald Bros.’ seemed to catch it out of all proportion. He had steamers blown up or otherwise destroyed. He had fires and other losses. They were not so bad singly, that they would have hurt him, but they came one on top of another and they swamped the firm. There never was a pair of business men who made more heroic or more intelligent effort to rise above misfortune, but this has been one of the cases where there have been more ill fortune than man could overcome.”