Entrepreneurs have always believed that the Golden State offers unimagninable opportunities; you only have to know how to find them.
"Col. James J. Ayers," frontispiece from Gold and Sunshine, Larger.
James J. Ayers arrived in California's gold fields in 1849. Though he never had much success has a miner, he learned a little about capitalism by observing a Calaveras shopkeeper named Fash.
. . . the denizens of "Fashville," as our camp came to be called, had their curiosity excited one morning by seeing posted in large letters in front of Fash's store the legend, "Fash's Letter Express." Inquiry elicited the fact that Fash had formed a league with an enterprising young man named Todd, who had started a letter express from San Francisco to the Southern mines, to take and deliver all the letters destined for the Calaveras camps. This was considered a very generous and popular move on the part of Fash until the first letter express arrived, when the lucky recipients of missives from home found that they were taxed two dollars on each letter delivered. Undoubtedly our thrifty friend made bushels of money that winter, but I have in late years
thought that Fash lived before his time. With his financial genius and resourceful talent for developing money-making schemes, had he flourished in the present day he would have become the president of a national bank, or the chief of a great trust, or perhaps the leading spirit in a great subsidized railroad corporation. What a team he and C. P. Huntington would have made! With Rockefeller in harness with him, I marvel at the number of universities and churches they might have endowed; and had he and Carnegie been yoked together they might have made the whole country vocal and studious with the academies of music and the book-burdened libraries they might have founded.
"Water Front, Panama City." Photograph (ND) from Panama: The Canal, the Country and the People by Albert Edwards, 1912. Larger.
If you were a forty-niner taking the long voyage from Panama to San Francisco, you'd better have brought your sea-legs with you because this was a long journey where the dangers of the open water were real and unforgiving.
A little old brigantine, the Feliz, put into the harbor from Panama, and was so densely crowded with passengers that there was absolutely no room in her for any more. She reported that Panama was literally jammed with people, and that anything in the shape of a craft was eagerly chartered for the voyage to San Francisco. In proof of this several small boats put into Realejo for water. One of these was an iron boat, about fifteen feet long, that had been carried across the isthmus. She was rigged with a mast and sails, and a party of six were thus, by short stages, making for San Francisco. [...] So eager were the crowds of Americans who had reached the Pacific coast of Central America to get to California that they hesitated at no risks to accomplish their object, and they would gladly put to sea to make a voyage of three thousand miles in a boat which, under normal circumstances, they would consider unsafe to cross a lake in.
Journalist James J. Ayers made his initial journey to California in the late 1840s. Although Gold and Sunshine was completed in 1869, it was not published until 1922.
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