Businessman
Littlefield did not prosper immediately after the war. His attempts at farming foundered. River floods in 1869 and 1870 took him to the brink of bankruptcy. It was not until 1871 that he speculated in the cattle market and made a profit. Over the next several years, he drove large herds of beef cattle from South Texas to Kansas. Ranches he established or owned included the LIT in the Texas Panhandle; the Bosque Grande in the Pecos River Valley and the Four Lakes on the plains, both in New Mexico; the Yellow House on the Texas South Plains; and the Mill Creek and Saline in the Texas Hill Country. At one time, his cattle branded LFD roamed over an area of Eastern New Mexico the size of the state of Rhode Island.
In 1883, he moved to Austin. He organized and served as president of the American National Bank from 1890 until 1919. The bank commonly paid an annual dividend of 20 percent to its shareholders.
Read more about this topic: George W. Littlefield
Famous quotes containing the word businessman:
“A good businessman never makes a contract unless he’s sure he can carry it through, yet every fool on earth is perfectly willing to sign a marriage contract without considering whether he can live up to it or not.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)
“The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)