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Before there were wolves on Wall Street, there was “Bet-a-Million Gates”—the barbed wire baron who gambled big, lived lavishly, and left behind a fortune that shaped American industry and philanthropy for generations. In this gripping biography, Bentz resurrects the full story of the man history books left behind—and the heir who vanished along with him. 

Once dismissed as a bumbling Midwestern farm boy and ridiculed as a flamboyant gambler, Gates was, in truth, a visionary capitalist: a steel magnate, art collector, and financial speculator 

who helped define the Gilded Age. Through meticulous research, long-lost family memoirs, and newly uncovered letters and photographs, Bentz reveals a complex figure who went toe-to-toe

with J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller—and often won.

Building upon and condensing the only prior biographies (published in 1932 and 1948), this definitive new account traces Gates’ journey from the barbed wire boom of 1874 to his final

financial battles in New York and the start of Texaco Oil. It also introduces a companion narrative: the remarkable and little-known story of his only son, Charles Gilbert Gates. Nicknamed “Spend-a-Million,” Charles inherited his father’s vast wealth—and just as quickly, disappeared from history.

This is more than the story of a fortune. It is the rediscovery of two lives that helped shape the speculative culture of modern American capitalism—and the surprising legacy they left behind.