Imagine that it’s 1849, you’re a 20 yo male, with average schooling and intelligence, and you live somewhere in Northern California (so there’s no cross country travel to worry about) when you hear that gold has been found in the Sierra foothills. You do a some reading on “modern” gold mining practices and fortunately have the money for mining equipment and the necessary financial resources to spend two or more years looking for gold.
Assuming your luck is as good as anybody else’s, and you don’t squander what you find, what are the odds that you get rich? Remember, at the time the stories were that gold nuggests were abundant in the streams and rivers.
I realize that there’s no real factual answer to a hypothetical, but what I’ m wondering is of the people that headed off into the hills what percentage probably struck it rich? 2%? 10%? More? Much less?
Is that really true? Think about it. In order to sell $50 eggs you have to find someone with $50 in his pocket to buy them. Since the people who went looking for gold weren’t by and large rich already then they had to have found something or they couldn’t have afforded it.
I agree that the “Levi Strauss” model was the best way to get rich and that most of the miners squandered what they found… but did really nobody come back with sacks of gold other than the professional mining companies that soon moved in?
Given the number of people looking, and the amount of time searching, it couldn’t have been that hard to find gold? Or was gold not as plentiful as one is led to believe?
Prices rose to remove any gold in the hands of the miners. If you are convinced that you’ll go back in the hills and find more gold you don’t mind spending $50 for an egg. When your luck runs out you have nothing.
There were rather few folks living nearby - most had to come from a long way off. So I’d have the big advantage of getting there early. (In a typical rush for placer gold, the latecomers don’t find much.)
If you were one of the first few dozen there and the first few dozen to leave, you
could have left with a small fortune. It was the leaving early part that was the more difficult.
Why didn’t most of the early dotcommers stop when they were way ahead? It was the same thing, mania over easy money.
