Synchronics
“currents”
Something else to be aware of is to avoid standing out. So you may need to wear period clothes (including making sure that there’s no artificial fibers and the sewing looks authentic). And based on what I’ve read in time travel fiction, your dental work or other medical implants may mark you as out of time.
It’s ten times more likely that your accent, style of speaking, terminology, and mannerisms will mark you out as some weird kind of ill-bred foreigner.
Definitely. All of that is hard to mask. For example, it’s going to be hard not to say something when people express the sexist or racist attitudes of the period.
Opium?
Opium might be cheaper than it is now
Which is why I wouldn’t go to the wild west, I’d stand out too much. I would sell my luxery toiletries in New York, London and Paris where I could be a dandy and hang out with royals in high fashion. If I had to live without air conditioning I’d need a line of antiperspirant which could be very profitable.
Ah, good point! I’d been picturing the frontier, or small towns in the midwest, but a well-established Eastern city might make things easier.
And a big city would have more entertainment and better food.
Now, if only we could have a support group of time travelers there with us. We could meet for Tuesday night poker games and complain about the customs, and the smells. And share cautionary tales of how we almost got caught out…
Look, if anyone here makes it back there, do send instructions to the rest of us, okay?
Mark your calendars: Dopefest on July 6th, 1897!
How about gambling, take whatever cash you can reasonably get hold of that could be used in that time, study up on sporting results, election results etc before you go then start betting on them, you might need to start small but you’d soon build up a stake
I’m just saying that the people in those days would have been suspicious because so much more counterfeit money was circulating at the time. We have a lot more security strips and watermarks now, but it wasn’t always so. And when I visited Gettysburg many years ago, I bought some “replica” type money. It’s printed on parchment or something and the money will have state names on it. In other words, there wasn’t a unified currency so spotting a fake was harder. Here’s some obsolete Alabama currency you can buy today.
It wasn’t just that a civil war was going on…of Lincoln, the article says
He signed a bill in 1862 establishing a national currency
Quick tangent: I heard that when people got Louisiana’s money, a $10 bill had the French “dix” on it, from which we get the term “dixie.”
Anyway there were probably lots of people who would have been unfamiliar with what to look for. But I think if I were attempting to bankroll my adventure, I’d find something that wasn’t illegal. Why risk getting caught if you don’t have to?
More of the story of burying, reburying (five times?) Lincoln is in that link.
All right, so if you really want to make money, just set up a fraudulent company, sell a bunch of shares, pay executive shareholders a 200% dividend rate (eating all invested capital), and then close the damn thing. It’s the Gilded Age and stock fraud and speculation is rampant, and companies were not thought so much of as permanent entities but temporary cash generation machines which paid the shareholders as much of the companies free cash flow as possible, even if it debilitated the company.
You then take your money and you invest it in companies you know are going to succeed: Westinghouse. Standard Oil. Coca-Cola (more a 1890s investment). Hollerith Tabulating (soon to be IBM). Edison himself starts a company which becomes General Electric. Standard Oil is really the gold standard here: you want to have as many Standard Oil shares before the 1911 Supreme Court breakup, trust me, but Coca-Cola did finish the 20th-century as the most profitable company in terms of stock appreciation (of all companies which existed for the entire century).
Or, hell, if you want to change history just a little, go down to Beaumont, Texas, and discover Spindletop 20 years early:
Good luck not starving to death 
I said in the OP that gold has outstripped inflation over the years, and I assumed silver has as well. If that’s not the case, then silver would be a great choice.
Just tell people you’re a city slicker from out east.
Again, I’m asking what would be the most valuable commodity to take with you that you could spend, sell or trade from day one of the time jump.
I’d rob a train that was NOT owned by Mr. E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific railroad. Then I’d use just enough dynamite there, Butch.
Just to be different, I’m going to answer the OP’s question: Silver and/or gems.
Minor hijack. What if you go back too far and killing baby Hitler isn’t a option? Would it be moral to kill Alois Hitler as a baby? (Hitler’s daddy, IYDK)
For seed money, I think gold and/or silver is your best bet. Yeah, yeah, you’ll get screwed by how much both have outstripped inflation lately, but long-term profits from knowing what to invest in should be more than enough to overcome that. And they’re easily convertible to whatever the local cash is, easily verifiable, and untraceable. Explaining how you got it is simple: You found a good panning spot, and no, of COURSE you’re not going to tell anyone where it was.
Gems, especially sapphires, will also help, but they’re more difficult to convert (like, you might need to take a train to get to a town with a proper jeweler, and it’ll take them time to appraise them, and you’ll need multiple offers to be sure you’re not getting ripped off, and so on), and so you’re going to want some easy pocket money before you start working on cashing those in.
Well, if the answer ‘knowledge’ isn’t applicable, then ‘gold’ is the choice. Silver isn’t bad, but gold is the answer here as it literally is currency. And, IIRC, there was a general tightening of the Gold supply from 1860-1896, spurring the Silver movement, a supply shortage which wouldn’t be alleviated for America until the Klondike gold discoveries of the late 1890s.
I literally do not need to worry about inflation if I went into the 1880s with gold because I would just convert my gold into dollars and, well, buy a bunch of Standard Oil, Westinghouse, GE, and Coca-Cola stock.
Good, then. That would certainly make things simple, just to take some gold with me.
For the last time, people, no killing Hitler or any Hitler relatives! I swear, you guys would make terrible time-travel historians. I’m revoking all time-travel privileges until you spend more time dwelling on the consequences of altering established timelines. Maybe read some Bradbury and Stephen King’s ‘11/22/63’’. 
Yeah, I feel like you don’t need a ton of money, because once there you can use your knowledge of the future to make more.
I still like meds as a long-term source of money, though. Sure, start with some silver to set yourself up. But you could make a decent living as a doctor, and explain that you learned your skills (and acquired your weird accent) somewhere in the far east.
I suppose there’s a risk of saving a life that was supposed to die. But there are risks to investing in the stock market, too. Heck there are risks in killing a butterfly. If you REALLY want to be certain not to mess up the timeline, I think you need to avoid going there at all.