I heard a long time ago that there was such a shortage of women during the San Francisco gold rush that miners would routinely ship their clothes across the pacific ocean to be laundered and then shipped back. I did some googling on this recently and found inconclusive and conflicting results.
So, was this a thing that actually happened or an urban legend?
Ridiculous. “Shortage of women”? Is there some anatomical reason why men can’t wash clothes?
What’s the gold miner’s equivalent of Paul Bunyan?
Laundry was nearly universally done by Chinese immigrants at the time, but they definitely weren’t shipping it back home!
This piece from The Examiner seems to support that it happened while this discussion from alt.urban.folklore believes it was passed around as a joke that became believed as truth.
When Fred Armisen is on the road, he Fedexes his dirty underwear home to be laundered.
It looks to me like the situation being described in the first link is that in the very earliest days of the gold rush, it cost too much to do laundry and so the miners would just sell their soiled clothes to the ships that were heading back after dropping off supplies (which included clean clothes.) I’m not sure I’d exactly call that “sending your laundry to be cleaned” abroad, even if maybe some of the clothes might have made a round trip.
At any rate, I don’t think the above situation would have persisted very long since the Chinese laundries were established fairly soon after the '49 rush.
In the days of sail the turn around time would have ben months. And the miners would not know when the ship that took their dirties would return.
To quote from a newspaper article from July 1849
Another newspaper article from Dec. 1849–
Another from June of 1849–
I vote urban legend factoid.
that was the earliest start of nudism in the area.
On the other hand, a lot of those old miners only changed their clothes once a year, so it’s plausible.
Today 90% of clothing donated to charity in the U.S. gets shipped to Africa and other parts of the Third World:
I don’t know if this is urban legend, but when I was in Manaus, Brazil, the museum claimed that the rubber barons would ship their clothing back to Europe to be laundered.
When a website displays headlines like the following, I tend to doubt anything it claims:
But why FedEx, instead of the slightly slower but cheaper USPO? Is there some rush about getting his dirty underwear home?
I had no idea that Brazil had elastic nobility. :o
LOL, but just in case of whoosh, they really were rubber barons, not “robber barons” or some such. (They might have been robber barons too I guess, IDK.)
Also worth noting that the miners weren’t even in San Francisco - they were 100+ miles to the east in the Sierra foothills. I suspect they washed their own clothes in the river, when they washed them at all.
He touched on that: