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Cost of living in
1851 The
cost of living in Gold Rush San Francisco was higher than in most
American or European cities. Prices escalated with the sudden influx of
thousands of fortune seekers into a town that was less than 20 years old
and in which food and accommodation were scarce. This, apparently,
caused little hardship for most people because they could earn more
money here than anywhere else. The standard form
of currency in the town was
gold dust valued at $16 per ounce. Albert Benard de Russailh arrived
from Paris in March 1851 and he recorded the following in his journal. At
the time of my arrival in San Francisco the cost of ordinary living was
very high, but it is only fair to add that one could earn enough to pay
one's expenses. In March,1851, a fairly good dinner without wine cost
$2.00, a bottle of wine, $1.50, which brought the price of an ordinary
meal to $3.50 a person. For this amount, at Vefond's or at the Trois Frères
Provençaux, I could have had an excellent dinner and the best wines. At
the same period one could rent a corner of a bedroom for $1.50. You were
given a blanket and had the right to wrap up in it and stretch your
weary bones on the floor. Daily expenses ran up to $5.00. Everything
else was in proportion: laundries charged $9.00 a dozen to do up shirts,
although a new shirt cost only $2.00. The bootblacks working in front of
the El Dorado, the Parker House, and the Union Hotel earned from $10.00
to $15.00 a day each. The negroes and other workmen who were always
hanging around the Wharf charged $3, $4, or $5 to carry a trunk or two.
A musician could earn two ounces [of gold] by scraping on a squeaky
fiddle for two hours every evening, or by puffing into an asthmatic
flute.
You
had to give one of the girls in a bar about as much to come and sit with
you an hour or two, and if you wanted anything more from these nymphs,
you had to pay 15 to 20 ounces [$240 to $320]. But to make up for this,
every kind of work was extremely well-paid. Almost any small business
deal would eventually bring in very handsome profits. You earned money
in proportion to what you spent, and you quickly got used to paying $3
or $4 for your dinner and no longer hesitated to spend five times as
much as in France for a drink in the middle of the day.
There
is a great bustle all day long. Men hurry about doing their business;
deals are put through easily and quickly, even when they amount to
$100,000 or $150,000, and they are helped along by drinks of brandy in
any one of the numerous bars of the city. Practically all transactions
are discussed and closed with a few drinks, which is the recognized
method of coming to an agreement. When buyer and seller have once drunk
together, the bargain is definitely concluded. Wagons and carriages
crowd along through the ruts of the street, and the docks are packed
with all kinds of goods, brought by ships from the ends of the earth, to
be traded for gold dust. By evening everything changes and the
night-life begins. Business-men and merchants, who work so hard during
the day, can think of nothing better to do right after dinner than to
push into the innumerable stuffy gambling-houses where in a flash they
lose everything they have earned. A few of them, but not very many, go
to the theatre to enjoy subtler emotions. The above is an extract of an
account in Malcolm E.
Barker's book, San Francisco
Memoirs 1835-1851: Eyewitness accounts of the birth of a city (Londonborn
Publications, San Francisco, 1994. |