Are you trying to steer the conversation back to a means of transportation or something?
“Are you trying to steer the conversation back to a means of transportation or something?”
No, I’m simply pointing out that it’s pretty common knowledge how the gold rush worked. People came west to seek their fortune, and if they didn’t go bust they sent money (or gold) east. The USS Central America has already been mentioned, and anybody who’s ever seen an old western movie has seen the Wells Fargo stage carrying a strongbox full of gold with a shotgun rider up top.
Our own LS wrote about it years ago:
“The early gold dealers had provided drafts or exchange for gold, giving the prospectors a liquid and divisible medium for a less liquid and less divisible metal, or for notes from other regions that were less well known, and, therefore, less reliable. Dealers purchased gold at $8 to $16 an ounce and sold it on the East Coast for $18 an ounce. This operation allowed merchants and miners to pay local dealers in gold, and get drafts that could be more cheaply and easily transported to pay suppliers or family. Gold dealers then shipped gold in large shipments for sale on the East Coast.”
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1184&context=economics_articles
New York wound up with gold because buyers there paid for it. There were lots foreign companies investing in mining operations in California, Nevada, Colorado and Montana. Plenty of money generated in Western mines flowed across the Atlantic. This constant portraying of New York investors as Southron hating boogiemen seems very Bernie Sanders to me.