Which Way to the Wild West? by Steve Sheinkin Page B

puzzling place it was!” Leonard Kip said soon after stepping ashore. “A continual stream of active population was winding among the casks and barrels, which blocked up the place where the sidewalks ought to have been.”
    Kip was amazed by the diversity of the crowds: white and black Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, Germans, Chileans, Irish, Native Americans, Hawaiians—all with different styles of hair and dress, speaking different languages, racing between stores, bars, music halls, and gambling houses. “The town seems running wild after amusement,” he said.
    And wild after money too. By the time travelers got to San Francisco they were so feverish to find gold that some started digging for it right in the streets of town. And they often found it! What they didn’t know was that the streets had been “salted,” or secretly sprinkled with gold dust. This was done by creative store owners who wanted to get people excited, then sell them mining gear at shockingly high prices.

    Another clever merchant heard complaints about the enormous rats that were eating (and pooping on) all the food in the city. He imported a ship full of cats from Mexico. They sold out quickly (at eight to twelve dollars each).
    Then there was the guy who declared he was a doctor and started seeing patients. No one in town was aware that he had no medical training at all—until someone he knew from back east showed up and demanded: “What do you know about being a doctor?”
    â€œWell, not much,” the man admitted. In his own defense he added: “I kill just as few as any of them.”
    Luckily for this guy, people were too busy making money to worry about small details. One such detail: the city’s dirt streets got so muddy that crates, dogs, horses, and sometimes people, actually sank under the surface and rotted beneath the stinky brown ooze. (A sign on one street warned travelers that the way was not safe for man or beast: “This street is impassable, not even jackassable.”)
    People were too busy to worry that no one nearby was growing food, and that everything had to be shipped in from thousands of miles away. The result was incredibly high prices. “Money here goes like dirt; everything costs a dollar or dollars,” said an astonished twenty-one-year-old named Enos Christman. Back home he could have bought a big bag of potatoes for a few pennies. “Today I purchased a single potato for forty-five cents.”
    But what did any of this matter when there was gold to be found? Most people stayed in town only long enough to buy supplies. Then they headed east for what they called “the diggings”—the gold-rich streams flowing down from the Sierra Nevada.
    Off to the Diggings
    A s soon as he arrived at the diggings, a hopeful miner from Britain named William Ryan ran into an old friend.
    â€œGood morning, Firmore,” Ryan said to his friend.
    â€œWhat, you!” Firmore shouted, shaking Ryan’s hand. “How did you come, and where did you start from? You are looking all the worse for wear.”
    Ryan looked over his friend—at his shredded clothes, his filthy whiskers, his face caked with dirt. “I can’t say you look quite as dapper, Firmore, as you did the day we went ashore.”
    Firmore confessed that he had been having tough times. “For several days after I got here, I did not make anything,” he explained. “But since then I have, by the hardest work, averaged about seven dollars a day.”
    William Ryan
    This surprised Ryan. Like most new miners, he knew nothing about gold mining. But he imagined it was pretty easy. You just bend down and collect the shiny nuggets, right?
    â€œAh! It’s more luck than anything,” Firmore said. “But, luck or no luck, no man can pick up gold, even here, without the very hardest labor, and that’s a fact. Some think that it is only to come here, squat down