The writer 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. (All inflation estimates
are courtesy of
Westegg.com.)
Taylor wrote:
“[One] citizen of San Francisco died insolvent to the amount of
forty-one thousand dollars the previous autumn. His administrators were
delayed in settling his affairs and his real estate advanced so rapidly
in value meantime that after his debts were paid, his heirs had a yearly
income of $40,000 [$1.2 million today].
“These facts were indubitably attested; everyone believed them, yet
hearing them talked of daily, as matters of course, one at first could
not help feeling as if he had been eating ‘of the insane root’.”
According to the consumer data website Numbeo, San Franciscans today
face grocery bills and rents
about 21 percent higher than the national average. That is an
unfortunate figure, but again, it seems negligible when compared with
the prices facing shocked gold-seekers as they arrived in the early days
of the rush, when almost everything – tools, equipment food, clothing –
was in short supply.
Edward Gould Buffum, author of
Six Months in the Gold Mines
(1850), described having a breakfast of bread, cheese, butter, sardines
and two bottles of beer with a friend and receiving a bill for $43 –
the equivalent today of about $1,200.
There were reports of canteens charging a dollar for a slice of
bread or two if it was buttered, the equivalent of $56. A dozen eggs
might cost you $90 at today’s prices; a pick axe would be the equivalent
of $1,500; a pound of coffee $1,200 and a pair of boots as much as
$3,000 when today you could get a decent pair for around $120.
“Every newcomer in San Francisco is overtaken with a sense of
complete bewilderment,” wrote Taylor. “The mind, however it may be
prepared for an astonishing condition of affairs, cannot immediately
push aside its old instincts of value and ideas of business, letting all
past experiences go for naught and casting all its faculties… Never
have I had so much difficulty in establishing, satisfactorily to my own
senses, the reality of what I saw and heard.”
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.
Their equivalents today – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s
Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, and so on – have made
billions rather than millions. And, unlike most of the hapless gold
miners, their employees have reaped considerable rewards. By comparison,
their costs of living are much more bearable.
Article and images sourced from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gold-rush-california-was-much-more-expensive-todays-dot-com-boom-california-180956788/?no-ist
No comments:
Post a Comment