I submitted a rough draft of a scene to my critique group last week about the transportation of gold dust from Sacramento to San Francisco in 1873. My intent was to use that gold dust as something that could be stolen. My writing partners and I got into a discussion about the weight of the gold dust and other issues surrounding the use of gold dust as a pilferable item. As a result of our discussion I’ve been looking into the history of gold as a medium of exchange in California in the 1870s in more detail. I am likely to change my scene to reflect what I have learned.
To begin with, by 1873, the Gold Rush in California was mostly over. The Gold Rush is typically dated from 1848 (when James Marshall discovered a gold nugget at Sutter’s Mill) until around 1855. After 1855, gold was still mined in California, but the operations became much more industrial and required groups of men and their investors, rather than the stereotypical loner panning for gold. Other gold finds also occurred throughout the West and around the world in the mid- to late -19th century—the California Gold Rush was one of many that have occurred throughout history.
Even after the height of the Gold Rush ended, the Californian economy—and the U.S. as a whole—used gold as currency. (Silver was also legal tender at the time.) Use of gold dust would not have been very practical, given the uncertainty of its purity and the difficulty of transporting and weighing it. (Though gold dust remained legal tender, and I’ve read an interesting anecdote in Jessie Benton Fremont’s memoir about leaving a bag of gold dust for a creditor in her hotel room.)
Various banks and jewelers and other entities created gold coins that were widely used. The San Francisco Mint opened in 1854 and began production of gold coins and ingots in 1856. The demand for gold coins overwhelmed the original mint’s capacity, and a second building replaced the original in 1874.
Here are two examples of coins privately produced in 1873, the year of my novel:
https://www.pristineauction.com/a1051983-1873-California-Gold-Indian-Round-Charm-Gold-Coin
These and similar coins would have been used during the time of my novel.
Meanwhile, the Coinage Act of 1873 took the U.S. off of a bi-metal standard in which both gold and silver were legal tender. The nation discovered that using both metals freely to create coins inevitably resulted in the higher value metal being hoarded and taken out of circulation. Thus, equivalency in value could not be maintained.
Under the Coinage Act, only gold was legal tender, and the policy of “free silver” under which miners of silver could have their silver converted into coins ended. Unfortunately, elimination of the right to convert silver into coins meant that silver mines and miners had no pre-set price for their metal, which they came to call “the Crime of 1873.”
Most of this information I learned in my research will never make it into my novel. I’m really only concerned with coming up with some good that is easily pilferable and hard to quantify. I might decide to use a sack of gold coins in lieu of the dust. But gold dust has the advantage in my story line of being less precise in its measurement and therefore harder for my heroes to determine how much has been stolen.
And now I’ve given you a clue to the plot of my work-in-progress. And also a clue into the rabbit holes of research down which authors frequently travel.
What trivia have you discovered when pursuing your own research rabbit holes?
