would you pay $56 for 2 slices of buttered bread?
or a breakfast of bread, cheese, butter, sardines and two
bottles of beer with a friend and receiving a bill for $1,200! but fantastic as
it might seem these were the prices adjusted to take into account inflation
that people were paying in the Californian Gold Rush of 1849, Bayard Taylor
arrived in San Francisco by ship in the summer of 1849 and feared that nobody
would believe him when he wrote about the Gold Rush economy in his dispatches
for the New York Tribune, when the average wage for a laborer in New York might
be one or two dollars a day, he was astounded to discover that individual hotel
rooms were rented to professional gamblers for upwards of $10,000 a month, the
equivalent today of about $300,000, Edward Gould Buffum (1820-1867), a New York
journalist, came to California as an officer in the 7th Regiment of N.Y.
Volunteers during the Mexican War, He stayed on to seek gold and edit a
California newspaper before returning east to become Paris correspondent of the
New York Herald, whilst in the gold fields he wrote Six Months in the Gold Mines, a fascinating read,
while some miners did strike it rich in the early days,
those that made most money were the ones who 'mined the miners', imagine the
joy of the woman who made $18,000 by baking and selling pies in the gold
fields, or of the foresighted man who arrived in San Francisco in July 1849
with 1,500 old newspapers which he sold to miners, hungry for news from back
east, for a dollar each, some of America’s best known businesspeople also began
this way: Philip Armour was just 19 when he began selling meat to forty-niners
in Placerville California (then called Hangtown); Levi Strauss, a Jewish
emigrant from Germany, identified the need for tough clothing in the gold
fields; Henry Wells and William Fargo made millions by setting up banking
services in San Francisco; and John Studebaker’s automobile empire began with
him making wheelbarrows for California miners, but back to looking at those
prices, a couple of dollars for breakfast does not seem so bad now.
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