"I got to be a millionaire afore I know'd it hardly," remarked the Wall Street financier Daniel Drew (1797-1879).

An uneducated farm boy from Putnam County, New York, he became in turn a successful cattle drover, a circus clown, tavern keeper, a shrewd Hudson River steamboat operator, and an unscrupulous speculator. As the colorful "Uncle Daniel" of Wall Street-his whiskered face seamed with wrinkles and twinkling with steel-gray eyes -- time and again he disrupted the financial markets with manipulations whereby he either won or lost millions of dollars.

Having "got...