at a rate in the neighborhood of three dollars for
each man, woman and child of the population.
The grand total would have been twice as large, but
the streets were very narrow, and hundreds who wanted
to bid could not get within a block of the stand,
and could not make themselves heard. These grew
tired of waiting and many of them went home long before
the auction was over. This was the greatest
day Virginia ever saw, perhaps.
Gridley sold the sack in Carson city and several California
towns; also in San Francisco. Then he took it
east and sold it in one or two Atlantic cities, I
think. I am not sure of that, but I know that
he finally carried it to St. Louis, where a monster
Sanitary Fair was being held, and after selling it
there for a large sum and helping on the enthusiasm
by displaying the portly silver bricks which Nevada’s
donation had produced, he had the flour baked up into
small cakes and retailed them at high prices.
It was estimated that when the flour sack’s
mission was ended it had been sold for a grand total
of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in greenbacks!
This is probably the only instance on record where
common family flour brought three thousand dollars
a pound in the public market.
It is due to Mr. Gridley’s memory to mention
that the expenses of his sanitary flour sack expedition
of fifteen thousand miles, going and returning, were
paid in large part if not entirely, out of his own
pocket. The time he gave to it was not less than
three months. Mr. Gridley was a soldier in the
Mexican war and a pioneer Californian. He died
at Stockton, California, in December, 1870, greatly
regretted.
There were nabobs in those days—in the
“flush times,” I mean. Every rich
strike in the mines created one or two. I call
to mind several of these. They were careless,
easy-going fellows, as a general thing, and the community
at large was as much benefited by their riches as they
were themselves—possibly more, in some
cases.
Two cousins, teamsters, did some hauling for a man
and had to take a small segregated portion of a silver
mine in lieu of $300 cash. They gave an outsider
a third to open the mine, and they went on teaming.
But not long. Ten months afterward the mine
was out of debt and paying each owner $8,000 to $10,000
a month—say $100,000 a year.
One of the earliest nabobs that Nevada was delivered
of wore $6,000 worth of diamonds in his bosom, and
swore he was unhappy because he could not spend his
money as fast as he made it.
Another Nevada nabob boasted an income that often
reached $16,000 a month; and he used to love to tell
how he had worked in the very mine that yielded it,
for five dollars a day, when he first came to the
country.
The silver and sage-brush State has knowledge of another
of these pets of fortune—lifted from actual
poverty to affluence almost in a single night—who
was able to offer $100,000 for a position of high official
distinction, shortly afterward, and did offer it—but
failed to get it, his politics not being as sound
as his bank account.
