[2]: 1–4 In 1903 he was reputed to be one of the richest men in the United States Senate (with an estimated Fortune of some $25 million and ownership of several California and Nevada gold / silver mines) and the oldest member at that time of the upper chamber of the Congress.

[2]: 8 Stewart later moved to San Francisco and became a law partner with Henry S. Foote, Louis Aldrick, and Benjamin Watkins Lee.

During his many years in the Senate, Stewart drafted or co-authored several important bills of legislation, including several mining acts and laws urging land reclamation by more irrigation.

[9] In 1871, 18th President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885, served 1869-1877), offered Stewart a seat as an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court.

Stewart was also involved in an international scandal where he promoted the sale of a worthless worked out pit of the Emma Silver Mine at Alta, Utah for millions of pounds sterling to unsuspecting British subjects (citizen) overseas in the United Kingdom (Great Britain / England) in Europe.

[10] In 1899, Republican-affiliated journalist and diplomat William Eleroy Curtis (1850-1911), detailed Stewart's reputation amongst his colleagues, describing as follows: “There was an air of gloom about the Senate all to-day, as if some calamity were impending or some great sorrow had fallen upon the members.

The Superintendent told them that they must say cheerful things to the patients, and therefore when he saw a lunatic sitting astride of a table beating it with a whip and pretending to drive it with a pair of string lines, he walked up to him and said: 'That’s a fine hobby you have there, my friend.'

He was cremated, and his ashes were originally kept in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco before being moved to Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.

In the story line, Stewart enters into an agreement to gain pardons for two bandits, played by actors Rick Vallin and Glase Lohman, who accidentally stumble upon a rich silver strike.

Actresses Sheila Ryan and Gloria Winters played young women with romantic interests in the silver miners / outlaws.

[15] In another episode also in 1953, of Death Valley Days, "Whirlwind Courtship", Michael Hathaway, who appeared only twice on television, played Stewart as a young, up and coming Nevada lawyer determined to wed Annie Foote, a real-life daughter of a former U.S.

Senator representing Mississippi, and Governor of Mississippi, Henry S. Foote (1804-1880), who himself had relocated to the American western frontier, after his political career during the 1850s in the South and Washington, D.C.[16] A year later, in a third episode from 1954, of the same Western anthology television series Death Valley Days, entitled "The Light on the Mountain," the role of Stewart was played by actor Michael Colgan (1921–2006).

In the story line, characters Stewart and "Richard Corey" (played by Glase Lohman) attempt to clean up the justice system in wild and wooly frontier Nevada in preparation for statehood in 1864.