Adapted from: A Century of Democratic Unionism, the San Francisco Typographical Union Centennial book celebrating the 100th birthday of San Francisco #21 and the 1972 International Typographical Union Convention, held in San Francisco.   Gold Rush Beginnings The town was flooded by goldseekers heading for the camps, and by a counter-tide of disappointed prospectors returning from the mines with the few who had struck it rich. Millions of dollars of gold poured from the Mother Lode and the new San Franciscans found countless ways to dip into the stream. They supplied the mines and the miners. They built. They graded streets, leveled hills, filled great chunks of the Bay. They unloaded ships, carried passengers and goods between ships and shore, between the city and the mines, outfitted both the newcomer and the departing visitor. They speculated in every commodity at hand. They drank and ate in every language and they gambled endlessly. Land values climbed to spectacular heights. A lot that once sold for $12 soared to $6,000 under the first impact of the Gold Rush, then on up to $45,000 a few months later. Merchants paid $1,000 to $6,000 for stores. In 1848, one man remembered paying six dollars for his breakfast -- ham and eggs and coffee -- and $4 for a haircut with dull shears and a shave with a razor stropped on the barber's boot. Good board ran as high as $8 a day. Men threw away dirty clothes; it was often cheaper than having them washed. Heavy boots cost $30 to $40 a pair. One newcomer paid $25 a week for a cot in a garret. The living was high, supplies of most commodities scarce, demand large and insistent and often backed by goodly stores of gold. In the first, hectic years, every man willing to work could find work. Where men had once been willing to work for one or two dollars a day, though, they now gravitated to work paying them six or ten times as much. One contemporary observer noted: "The common laborer, who had formerly been content with his dollar a day, now proudly refused ten; the mechanic who had been glad to receive two dollars, now rejected twenty dollars." In the fall of 1849, $12-a-day house carpenters in San Francisco and Sacramento struck for a $4-a-day raise; they settled for an immediate $1 raise, another dollar later. In 1850, sailors struck in an effort to stave off a cut in their wages; disappointed goldseekers gladly took over their jobs in return for passage home. Musicians asked the committee in charge of celebrating California's admission to the Union for a raise. The committee refused and the celebration went on without music. Teamsters organized an association in an effort to protect their share of the city's drayage. Stevedores, coal heavers, bakers were among the other crafts who organized for common goals. Observed labor historian Lucille Eaves: "There are evidences of such early trade-union activity in San Francisco that one is tempted to believe that the craftsmen met each other on the way to California and agreed to unite." Still, it was the printers who put together the first trade union on the Pacific Coast. They had been among the early arrivals on the Bay. A newspaper in 1847--a year before gold was discovered, a year after the Americans took over--counted a population of five hundred souls. It included twenty-six carpenters, thirteen clerks, five grocers, four tailors, six inland navigators, one school teacher (but no school), a minister, a doctor, a lawyer, twenty-seven shops, and seventy-nine buildings, including two printing offices (the preferred term for a printshop) and six printers. Next page previous page

 

San Francisco nine years later, 1856