1850 American Gold Tycoon

Chapter 4 San Francisco
"Damn Brannan! Black-hearted businessman! I curse you to hell!"

Sven's hysterical roar came from Liang Yao's ears, they could have earned more.

The selling price of a frying pan at the port is $6, a shovel is $8, and a pick is $7. According to this price, after paying off all the debts, Sven will still have a lot of money left and become a small rich man .

Zhang Bingliang, the water guide who treated them coldly along the way, came to Liang Yao and exchanged pleasantries with him after he came ashore. It was nothing more than seeing Liang Yao get some gold and asking Liang Yao for advice on how to make money.

A fully loaded convoy came to the port triumphantly. A dozen gold diggers with live ammunition escorted three carriages to the port under the envious eyes of everyone, and boarded the merchant ship leaving San Francisco.

There is no doubt that they were the lucky few who managed to pan for gold and brought it out of San Francisco alive.

"As long as we work together, we can also be as rich as they are, and return to our hometown with good clothes."

Liang Yao made a big cake for the Deng family.

"Third brother, you understand the words of the ghost, and you are knowledgeable. We brothers listen to you and second uncle."

Deng Wenyu moved his fiery eyes away from the motorcade, and shot them at Liang Yao.

"How can the seniority be messed up! Liang Yao and us are of the same generation, we should listen to the elders and Second Uncle."

Deng Wenyao was dissatisfied. He was six or seven years older than Liang Yao, and why did the Deng family let Liang Yao, an outsider, decide.

Deng Yan's heart is like a mirror: "I am a rough person. I have only been a soldier and fisherman, but I have never dug gold. What Wen Yu said is reasonable. The third brother is a person who has read books and has great knowledge. Listen to me. It belongs to the third brother."

Deng Yan didn't care about the issue of seniority. San Francisco's prices are so expensive, how to gain a foothold here is the most important issue right now.

"Boss Deng!"

A weather-stained man in a worn shirt, canvas overalls, and an old windbreaker came up to him.

There was a long braid behind the man's back, which was incompatible with his attire, and seemed a bit inconsistent, at least Liang Yao thought so.

"Mingsheng."

Deng Yan was stunned for a moment before he recognized the man.

Cai Mingsheng and Deng Yan were fellow villagers. In the 1843rd year of Daoguang's reign ([-]), they were kidnapped and sold to Peru as piglets. After several twists and turns, they escaped and settled down in California.Became one of the first Chinese to go to California.

Deng Yan introduced several Deng family children and Liang Yao to Cai Mingsheng one by one. When introducing Liang Yao, Cai Mingsheng's attitude seemed a bit respectful.

When Cai Mingsheng was still in Fragrant Hills, the Liang family was a well-known official family in the local area. He didn't know that something had happened to the Liang family at this time, and the family was in decline.

Cai Mingsheng invited everyone to stay at his house first. Liang Yao, Deng Yan and others did not refuse this proposal. The prices in San Francisco are extremely high, and the cost of board and lodging in hotels is beyond their affordability.

After leaving the port, San Francisco will be much deserted, and there are not many people on the streets.Most people have gone to the mining area to pan for gold, and there are only a few scattered pedestrians on the street, and these people are basically men.

As for the women, you can only see some women dressed up and attracting customers when passing by a few brothels.Next to the brothel is the casino, which provides one-stop services for gold diggers.

Of course, these are all Brannan's properties, and he wants to squeeze every grain of gold out of every gold prospector's pocket.

Although California has experienced explosive population growth in the past two years, most of the influxes into California are young and middle-aged men, and the population structure is extremely unreasonable.

Only [-]% of the population is female, and except for a small number of family members, the rest of the female population are all prostitutes.

These prostitutes only need a week or two in California to earn money that prostitutes in the eastern United States cannot earn in a lifetime.This unreasonable population structure is likely to cause a series of security problems, not to mention that this is a remote gold mining area, and the security situation can be imagined.

Walking past the brothel and casino, Liang Yao passed through a piece of scorched ruins. Apparently, a fire had just happened here, and a wave of heat rushed towards his face, making one feel extremely sweltering.

The gold diggers put the black scorched earth into buckets, then poured the scorched earth on a large canvas, and lifted the canvas vigorously so that the lighter, gold-free scorched earth would float away with the wind, and then formed a circle, where the remaining Look for gold in the scorched earth below.

And a few steps away from them was a charred corpse that was still emitting smoke.

"Gold! Gold! I found gold!"

Soon, someone in the crowd picked up a soybean-sized gold grain and shouted excitedly.The gold diggers around him cast unfriendly glances at him in unison.

"The most important thing in the gold rush area is to keep a low profile. It's hard to say whether this person will survive tonight." Cai Mingsheng shook his head regretfully.

"Is there a fire here?"

Looking at the scorched earth and the desolate city of San Francisco, Deng Yan asked in bewilderment.

"There are gangsters setting fire to houses here every day. This is just a small fire. Last year, there were four or five fires in the city of San Francisco. Last month, when foreigners celebrated the Chinese New Year, there were five or six fires in the city a day. Fires are not uncommon."

Cai Mingsheng said indifferently that he had been used to this phenomenon for a long time.

"The gold content of these scorched earth is even higher than the gold content of the mining soil." Liang Yao knew that this was the so-called San Francisco Fire in later generations. Then burn through.

Gold can bring out the darkest side of human nature here.

"Mr. Liang was born in a family of officials, and the joints are obvious." Cai Mingsheng said quite approvingly.

"This is where people eat people!"

Rao Deng Yan, who had seen blood as a soldier, also had a creepy feeling after seeing this scene, for fear that he would also become a nameless charred corpse here that day.

"It's lawless. Does the foreigner's court care about it?"

Deng Wenyao said angrily, but Cai Mingsheng didn't know how to answer Deng Yan's question.After all, the imperial court of foreigners is quite different from that of the Qing Dynasty.

Relying on his carpentry skills, Cai Mingsheng settled down here, married an Indian woman, and had a pair of children. His life was neither good nor bad.

At this time, the Chinese Exclusion Act had not yet been promulgated, and California was still an extralegal place in the United States.Of course, the international prestige of the Qing Dynasty has not plummeted at this time, and he has not been particularly severely discriminated against here.

After finishing a fairly sumptuous meal, Liang Yao took out a one-ounce piece of gold and handed it to Cai Mingsheng.

Cai Mingsheng refused to accept, Liang Yao pulled Cai Mingsheng's callused hands, and slapped the gold on Cai Mingsheng's palm.

"If Uncle Cai refuses to accept gold from the younger generation, the younger generation will feel embarrassed to ask Uncle Cai for help when encountering any difficulties in the future."

Liang Yao talked about this point, and Cai Mingsheng was too embarrassed to refuse, so he accepted Liang Yao's gold.

Liang Yao asked Cai Mingsheng about the recent situation in California.

According to Cai Mingsheng, after nearly two years of mining, the gold-producing areas near San Francisco are almost exhausted, and the gold production is getting less and less. In 1848 and the first half of 1849, there were lucky gold rushes every now and then. Customers dug up dog's head gold, even gold the size of a fist.

By the second half of 1849, such news had almost disappeared.After Christmas, some gold prospectors have already made up their minds to go to the new mining area in the Sacramento area more than [-] kilometers away.

When mentioning California, people of later generations first think of San Francisco (that is, San Francisco. After gold was discovered in Melbourne, Australia in 1851, Chinese immigrants called it Xinjinshan, and San Francisco, which discovered gold earlier, called it San Francisco. This book At present, San Francisco (or San Francisco, Jinshan) is used to call San Francisco), Los Angeles and other familiar international metropolises, but Sacramento, the capital of California, is not well-known.

Mention Sacramento without mentioning a man who is closely related to California's gold rush.

That was John Sutter, the planter, and James Marshall, who discovered gold in the American River and the Sierra Nevada, was a carpenter at Sutter's sawmill.

It's a pity that God gave Sartre a chance, but Sartre didn't have Brannan's mind.

After discovering gold, Sartre worried that the gold rush would destroy his local industry. Of course, Sartre wanted to make a fortune by himself. He tried to block the news and try to monopolize the gold by himself. Can it be blocked?

Although Brannan forcefully bought Liang Yao's supplies, and Liang Yao hated Brannan very much, he had to admit that Brannan was indeed a very smart speculator.

Brannan and Sartre, the vision and pattern of the two are not at the same level.This also doomed the ending of the last two.

"Sartre is also my former employer. He has a lot of land in Sacramento. The governor of Mexico granted him a lot of land. The land is bigger than our Fragrant Hills.

It's just that those gold diggers now think that these lands are unclaimed lands.Those gold diggers also stole things from my former employer every now and then. A few days ago, they even stole two cows from my former employer and slaughtered them for food.The life of my former boss is not as good as every year. "

Cai Mingsheng couldn't help but sigh with emotion, when he fled all the way north from the silver mine in Peru, his former employer finally took him in.His Indian wife was also Sartre's hired worker.For Sartre, Cai Mingsheng is still somewhat grateful.

Everyone was amazed to hear that Sartre alone owned a land bigger than Xiangshan.Even in Guangdong, there are only a handful of such big landlords.It's just that the big farms in the western United States and the big landowners in China at this time are not the same concept.

Although the United States had a population of 19 million in the middle of the [-]th century (the population was only slightly smaller than the population of the United Kingdom at the same time), more than [-]% of the population was concentrated in the eastern seaboard of the United States.The vast western region is sparsely populated, even if the Indians are counted, the land is sparsely populated.

The Louisiana area, which was purchased from Napoleon for US$1200 million during the Jefferson period of the United States, has been underdeveloped and sparsely populated until now, let alone California, which was snatched from Mexico two years ago and is farther east. area.

Although every gold digger here thinks that the land in the west is unclaimed land, Liang Yao still thinks that he should take precautions and obtain a piece of land with legal ownership first.

In this way, even if the big conglomerates from the eastern United States settle in California soon, he and his compatriots can have a legal place to stay.

Of course, he also wanted to make a fortune before the arrival of those big eastern consortiums.

Wait until those large consortiums with advanced gold mining machinery and technology and strong capital arrive in California.Those gold diggers who dig with shovels and shovels must not be able to compete with those big consortia.

At that time, the gold digging legends of individuals and small teams will be swept into the dustbin of history.

Liang Yao, who had worked on Wall Street for several years, knew all too well what kind of face those capitalists had. Compared with them, Brannan was a kind-hearted person who was willing to do good.

In San Francisco under Brannan's control, the gold diggers can at least have something to drink. After all, no matter how powerful Brannan is, he is only an individual and a relatively small interest group with limited control. He also needs gold diggers Help him dig the gold out of the soil.

Therefore, the gold diggers can at least have a sip of soup. When those big consortiums settle in California, the gold diggers probably don't even want to smell the soup.

(End of this chapter)