of
Gertrude AthertonÕs ÒCaliforniaÓ
ÒSpeculation
is a permanent microbe in the blood of Californians, and they are never really
happy save when they have turned it loose to multiply and run riot. After the great gold-rush, although
they speculated in whatever came to hand, they had no really terrific
excitement financially until the seventies. There was some interest in the Virginia City silver mines as early as 1863, when Ophir, Savage,
Hale and Norcross, and Gould and Curry were openedÉbut it was not until the
exploitation of the Comstock Lode,
with its fabulous and apparently inexhaustible riches, that California, and San
Francisco in particular, suddenly broke out with the most virulent form of speculation fever.
The
great silver mines of the Comstock Lode were the California, Consolidated
Virginia, Crown Point, Belcher, and Raymond and Ely. These five mines were called the Bonanzas, and practically the whole state invested in them. Women sold their jewels, and every
clerk and servant hoped to make his ÔpileÕ. The old Stock Exchange was no longer able to accommodate the
increasing number of brokers, and in January, 1872, the California Stock Exchange
was organized. Daily and hourly,
until men fell in their tracks from exhaustion, it was a scene of such frenzied
excitement that the old stampeding
days to the diggings were relegated to the storehouse of
insignificant memories. That any
one survived those years, particularly 1875, is a phenomenon that must be
explained by the climate.
Thousands did not. They
either committed suicide or crawled away to hide themselves for the rest of
their shattered lives. Only a few
tremendous fortunes were made. Several
millionaires, their reason burnt up with the speculation microbe, were ruined.
In
1872, the market value of the Nevada stocks shot up from seventeen millions to
eighty-four millions of dollars,
and the sales numbered many millions.
Business was neglected.
Even the gambling-tables
languished. People invested
all they had, all they could borrow, beg, pawn, or steal in stocks. No one talked of anything else; and
many women, known as Mudhens, sold stocks on the curb. Everybody assumed that he would be
handling money by the bushel and proclaiming that never in this life would he
do another stroke of work.Ó