“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.
California, in fact, for a while had its own gold dollars-—paper money backed in gold.
This is dodging the point about how this specie came to be spent to buy stuff in New York.
This constant portraying of New York investors as Southron hating boogiemen seems very Bernie Sanders to me.
Where are you getting that? Are you listening to BroJoeK again while he tries to put words in my mouth?
New York was loving the South so long as the money kept flowing in from Europe. They didn't get upset until they realized the South was going to stop that money flow, and then take most of their trade with Europe away from them.
That would have been followed by a drain on population and businesses of which some would relocate to the South to resume business.
The point here is that an independent South would have been enormously costly to very wealthy men of power, and who were backers of Lincoln.