- Charles Baker'sprovision list
- San Antonio,Texas: 1853
Pork, 11 cents/lb
Bacon, 12 1/2-15 cents/lb
Salt beef, 8 1/2-9 cents/lb
Fresh beef, 4 1/2-5 cents/lb
Flour, 4 /14 cents (superfine)-5 cents (extra fine)/lb
Hard bread, 9-10 cents/lb
Beans, 10 1/2cents/quart
Rice, 8-10 cents/lb
Coffee, 12 1/2 (Rio) to 18 (Java) cents/lb
Sugar, 7 1/2-8 cents for "Louisiana brown"/lb
Vinegar, 6 1/4 cents/quart"
---The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1947 (p. 170) - Madison, Wisconsin: 1861
Grains
During the last week bushels of little wheat has come in and prices have ranged a cent or two lower They are now quoted at 63@65 cents. In ournext we expect to be able to quote higher prices, as the foreign demand is disclosing an urgentness that must have a stimumlating effect on the American grain markets.
Wheat, 63-65 cents (per cwt, 100 pounds)
Rye, 40-45 cents
Oats, 16-20 cents
Barley, 40-45 cents
Indian corn, shelled, 30-35 cents
Indian corn in cobb, 20-25 cents
Flour and meal (per cwt, 100 pounds)
Wheat flour, 2.25-2.50
Rye flour, 2.25
Corn meal, 1.50-2.00
Bran & shorts, 60 cents
Family markets
Eggs, 16-18 cents/dozen
Butter, 16-18 cents/lb
Green apples, 2.00-3.25/barrel
Potatoes, 18-23 cents/bush(el)
Lard, 12 cents/lb
Common salt, 2.20/bbl (bushel barrel)
Hams, 12-14 cents/lb
Cheese, 12-14 cents/lb
Codfish, 5-6 cents/lb
Whitefish, 3.20/half barrel
Table salt, 20-25 cents/sack
Brown sugar, 7-9 cents/lb
White sugar, 10-14 cents/lb
Coffee, 15-20 cents/lb
Tea, 50-75 cents/lb
Molasses, 40-50 cents/gallon
Vinegar (cider), 25 cents/gallon
Dried apples, 9 cents/lb
Dried peaches, 20 cents/lb
Cranberries, 12 cents/quart
Hubbard squash, 1.00/cwt
Raisins, 12-20 cents/lb
Honey, 25 cents/lb
Lemons, 2-3 cents/each
Sweet potatoes, 2.00/bushel
Squashes, 2-3 cents/each
Lake Mich(igan) trout, 8 cents/lb
Currants, 12 cents/lb
Meat (per cwt, 100 pounds)
Lambs, 2-2.35/cwt
Beef, 2.50-3.00/cwt (live weight)
Hobs, 5.50-6.00/cwt
Veal calves, six weeks old, 3.00/cwt
---SOURCE: Weekly Wisconsin Patriot, February 9, 1861 (p. 7)
How much would these provisions cost today?
Very doable, but not as easy at is seems. This assignment is one of those tasks that appears simple: compare prices then & now. In reality, the task before you is more complicated. For starters, 19th century America (all 100 yars) witnessed the beginnings of a new monetary system, fledgling prosperity, rampant inflation, the Civil War, the Industrial revolution and massive wealth accumulation. Also, prices are determined by supply and demand. Plentiful New England eggs fetched far different prices from their rare commodity counterparts along the Oregon Trail.Prices, in this context, can take two meanings:
- If you were outfitting a 19th century American westward wagon, how much money would that be in *today's* dollars?"
Use this inflation calculator to find out. - If you had to outfit a classic wagon-train with provisions today, how much would it cost today?
This requires you find today's retail prices for everything on the list. Keep in mind some items (coffee, wool) are actually cheaper today than back in the 19th century. Some items (wagons) might be really hard to find. Some items (butter, pillows) were generally made at home and/or bartered back then. If you want a Conestoga wagon today, you will either have to make it yourself or commission a craftsman. Of course, it is possible you could find one on EBay.
Current food prices
Excellent excuse for a little primary supermarket research or use national average data.
Current clothing/household goods prices
Mall trip or shop online.
Livestock
US Dept. of Agriculture (& meat industry assoiations) report this data. Prices are not reported by animal, but by age & weight of animal. In addition to finding out price per 100 weight, you'll need to get the average weightof a marketable/grown animal. General encyclopedias may be useful here. Get out your calculators!
PERIOD RECIPES MODERNIZED RECIPES
---modernized recipes with history notes
The foods and recipes of Gold Rush California were as diverse as the people who lived in that placeand time. It was a convergence of cultures (Anglo-American, Spanish, Chinese, Mexican etc.) andeconomic status: sparkling rich to dirt poor. Folks venturing into towns could sample thefinest Victorian fare or drink themselves into oblivion on cheap whisky. Camp fare was similar towhat the pioneers ate on the Oregon trail: belly-filling foods made with local ingredients (freshlyshot game, fruits & vegetables) and store-bought provisions (coffee, beans & bacon). As timeprogressed, so did the food. Sourdough bread was a staple of the forty-niners.Hangtown fry was the culinary icon.
"With the discovery of gold, California...abruptly changed character. The territory had launched itself upon an agriculturalcareer, but with the gold strike California's farms were abandoned, and so were its towns. As ships from the East Coast reachedCalifornia, their crews promptly deserted and went gold hunting too; by July 1850, the harbor of San Francisco was clogged with five hundred vessels becalmed for want of crews. San Fransico was promoted from a small village named Yerba Vueina, "good herb,"for a local plant with a mint-like flavor, to a thriving, bustling metropolis of 25,000 citizens, mostly miners. In 1849, eightythousand new gold seekers entered California...Three-quarters of the gold hunters were Americans, bringing with them Anglo-Saxoneating habits destined to overwhelm Spanish-Mexican ideas. The same phenomenon already encountered on a frontier inhabited bya society with no women in the kitchen was now repeated, strengthening the American tendency to neglect culinary niceties: women madeup only eight percent of California's new population, and in the mining areas only two percent. The successful prospectors wereheavy spenders; they had to be when it came to food, which was outrageously expensive. Since nobody in California wanted to raise it,everything had to be imported. Nevertheless, for unsuccessful, or not yet sucessful prospectors, San Francisco developed, in the 1850s, relatively modest hotels and boarding houses, whose prices were reasonable in their context. Everybody sat down at a commontable, and the food was hearty. Meanwhile, for epicurians among those who had struck it rich, a surprising number of French restaurantswere opened. The first important one was named Le Poulet d'Or...For the moment, the spectacular potentiality of California as a grwoer of food was neglected. Its new-found riches served chiefly, in this domain, to further developments of Oregon as a food-supplyingstate, catering to the California gold-rush population."
---Eating in America: A History, Waverley Root & Richard de Rochemont [William Morrow:New York] 1976 (p. 176-7)
"Hundreds of the accounts of westward migration speak either of near-starvation or of having to make do with whatever might beat hand. A forty-niner, writing in his journal, described a meeting with another wagon train: "Their sugar, rice, beans & flour were also out & they had been living on nothing but hard tack & coffee, & coffee and hard tack. They had no shot guns and & ofcourse took no game. This reconciled us, I assure you, & we censured ourselves for our past time growling, & find, insteadof suffering, we have been feasting." His group, in fact, had been varying a diet of salt pork with "Jack Ass" rabbits on which, thejournal says, "we fared sumptuously."
---American Heritage Cookbook and illustrated History of American Eating & Drinking, [American Heritage Publishing Co.:New York] 1964 (p. 57)
" 'A party recently left Joe's store at Mormon Bar for the Valley, and a friend of the Star furnishes the following statistiics--showing the amount of "the necessaries of life" which is required for an eight day's trip in the mountains:
8 lbs potatoes.
1 bottle whiskey.
1 bottle pepper sauce.
1 bottle whiskey.
1 box tea.
9 lbs onions.
2 bottles whiskey.
1 ham.
11 lbs crackers.
1 bottle whiskey.
1/2 doz. sardines.
2 bottles brandy, (4th proof.)
6 lbs sugar.
1 bottle brandy, (4th proof.)
1 bottle pepper.
5 gallons whiskey.
4 bottles whiskey. (old Bourbon)
1 small keg whiskey.
1 bottle of co*cktails , (designed for a "starter.")
From Hutchings' California Magazine, 1860'"
---ibid (p. 59)
Retail food prices, 1849. Compare with Australia's gold rush [Ballarat, Victoria] & Klondike gold [Alaska].
FOOD AVAILBILITY, RETAIL PRICES & GROCERY STORES
"No characteristic of gold rush California is so well known as the astronomical prices at which everything seemed to sell. Beefs seven or eight dollars a head in February 1848, sold for twenty-five to one hundred dollars by the summer. A year later, "little of itwas to be had, and then only jerked, at correspondingly high prices." Flour, eight dollars a barrel before Marshall's discovery, soared by the summer of 1849 to fifty dollars in San Francisco and eighty-five at Sutter's Fort. The year 1849 also saw bay oysters and eggs available from established californios going at a dollar apiece. In Sacramento potatoes and onions sold at a dollar and a half a pound, and in the mines at least a few of those changed hands for a dollar each, "entirely out of reach as anarticle of food." In Placerville a plain slice of bread sold for a dollar, a buttered one for two. The Sonora hospital counted outfive dollars in gold dust for each six-ounce bottle of lime juice that was purchased. Canned fruits were marked up 2000 percentover retail rates on the eastern seaboard. For dinner at Sacramento on Christmas day, 1849, Catherine Haun paid two and a half dollars for a grizzly bear steak and another dollar for a side of cabbage...Almost all the forty-niners expressed bemusem*nt thatvegetables should sell by the pound rather than by the bushel...On September 21, 1849...Dr. Charles Frederick Winslow wrote to associates back east...'Canistered provisions and vegetables and all sorts of fruit are first rate but very expensive in thiscountry.' Flour came from Oregon and Australia. Chile sent beans, China sent rice. Argentina shipped jerky...In July 1850 a shiparrived from Boston loaded with ice that sold for eighty cents a pound...As early as January 1, 1850, well-intergrated grocery companieslike Warren & Co. tacked broadsides on pines and oaks of the Sierra slope to announce the opening of such emporia as "the Excelcior tentat Mormon Island." Inside...included 'Pork, Flour, Bread, Beef, Hams, Mackeral, Sugar, Molasses, Coffee, Teas, Butter & Cheese, Pickles, Beans, Peas, Rice, Chocolate, Spices, Salt, Soap, Vinegar, &c,' as well as 'Every variety of Preserved Meats andVegetables and Fruits [more than eighty different kinds], Tongues and Sounds; Smoked Halibut, Dry Cod Fish; Eggs fresh and fine;Figs, Raisins; Almonds and Nuts; China Preserves, China Bread and cakes; Butter Crackers, Boston Crackers, and many other very desirable and choice bits. No doubt the prices at the Excelsior were as fabulous as those already described. The California dream was,after all, a fortune overnight...Therein lies the clue to the nature of the retail economy of 1849 that is too little recounted in the histories. The provisions market on the California frontier--and on other metal mining frontiers to follow--was notcharacterized so much by dizzying high prices as by a crazy instability. Prices of every edible from wheaten flour and salt porkto oranges and canned caviar did not start at sky-high levels and only eventually decline to merely high levels. From the beginningthey swung widly from absurdly high to (for the merchants) dishearteningly low."
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier, Joseph R. Conlin [University of Nevada Press:Reno]1986 (p. 90-95)
FRESH FRUITS & VEGETABLES?
Our research indicates fresh fruits and vegetables were highly prized by some, but not all, miner diners. Local historians generally agree the first commercial enterprises in mining towns centered on food: saloons, makeshift restaurants, boarding houses, and grocery stores. One of the passages below describes a miner who decided his fortune would be better made in fruits and vegetables. The evidence we examined suggests fresh fruits and vegetables (local grown, in season only) were sold both indoors (grocery stores) and outside (fresh from the farm, off a wagon). We find no evidence supporting actual stands/structures constructed specifically for this purpose. Wagons full of fresh produce might have gathered at the edge of town, in sort of farmer's market style. Baskets/crates of fresh produce might have been available both inside and outside grocery stores, depending upon space availability. Not that it would have been any cooler in those days! Then, as today, farmers markets sometimes also sold home-made fresh baked goods and preserves.
"It is a common misconception about the history of American food habits that we only recently began to eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. In part this error is due to the fact that it was indeed just yesterday, after the discovery of vitamins early in the present century, that professional dieticians began to tout them. During the decades just before the discovery of vitamins...the same professionals crusaded against fruit and vegetable eating, particularly among the poor, because fruit and vegetables were a relatively expensive way to fuel up in calories. But the generation of 1849 was not burdened by the counsels of professional dieticians. They made do with their mothers' judgement...Among foods 'discovered' by Americans of the post-World War I period that were common fare during the 1840s were broccoli and artichokes. Other vegetables, of which there are numerous off-handed recipes in the cookbooks and references in the market reports were asparagus, lima beans, haricot or string beans, cucumber, eggplant, mushrooms, okra, rutabagas, salsify, and spinach, as well as tomatoes. It is true that our forebears were inclined to cook their vegetables into a sodden mess, but eating greens and other vegetables raw seems not to have been uncommon. Indeed, whereas the typical European salad of the time was made up exclusively of greens (dressed with oil and vinegar), the common American salad was adventurous by comparison, 'composed' of a variety of vegetables and dressed with sweetish mayonnaise-based liquor much like the substance contemporary bottlers sometimes label 'French Dressing.' The most strident warning against eating 'too many juicy vegetables, such as melons, salads, radishes, etc.' found in the literature of the gold rush is in a traveler's manual written in German...The there were the preserved vegetables and fruits, the supernumerary varieties of preserves, conserves, pickles, relishes, catsups, 'sasses,' jams, and jellies...Commercially preserved foods were making their appearance in 1849...by 1855, the Mills B. Espy Company of Philadelphia was annually canning twenty thousand pounds of cherries, ten thousands pounds of strawberries, and four thousand bushels of pears, tomatoes, and peaches. The California market for these goods proved to be one of the most lucrative..."
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines, Joseph R. Conlin [University of Nevada Press:Reno] 1986 (p. 15-17)
"...George Perasich's store on Carson Street [Carson City, NV] [sold] apples, bananas, oranges, berries, nuts as well as celery, lettuce...The fresh fruits and vegetables were received daily during their seasons from tropical, California, and local Nevada sources."
---Bacon, Beans (p. 79) [NOTE: this text captions an itemized grocer store bill of sale dated May 1, 1877.]
"In September 1849 [Edward Austin] wrote his brother to send him seeds for radishes, early cabbage, and head cabbage, early white turnip...'curley lettuce,' carrots, beets, squash, melon, spinach, peas of several varieties, celery, and other garden truck. Overly impatient, he wrote again within a few weeks to say: 'I am not too sanguine when I say I can get off of 10 acres of land at the present prices of vegetables 80,000$.'"
---Bacon, Beans (p. 93)
"[1883] Fresh vegetables from the valley of the Carson are brought daily in their season to the mines...on the market stands of Virginia City...strawberries, apricots, pears, peaches, grapes, apples, figs and all other products of the luxuriant gardens and vineyards which are the boast of the Pacific seaboard cover the counters of the open stalls in luscious heaps."
---Bacon, Beans (p. 103)
COMMON MINING CAMP COOKERY
Food historians confirm average '49ers did not cook. These male-dominated make-shift communities were served by a variety of inexpensive publiceateries.
"Neither Kenoffel's Spokane Cafe nor Truax's English Kitchen claimed, as so many miners' restaurants did, to be the "one and only,"the old original "Delmonico's of the West," "only beter." Like the large majority of mining camp eating houses, they unpretentiouslyprovided ordinary everyday all-American meals fo bacons and eggs, soups, stews, steaks, roast beef, chops, potatoes, --and almostalways oysters, of course--and the like for reasonable prices. There never was a day on which an argonaut could not get a substantialfill in San Francisco for a dollar. A full meal in Virginia City could run as little as fifty cents, one dollar for both breakfastand dinner if paid in advance. In rawer camps like Telluride, one-dollar to two-fifty-a-plate was the list price...Saddle RockRestaurant advertised a dinner for a quarter. The mining towns teemed with cheap eateries. In fact, San Francisco and the rawest campsof the Sierra slope teammed with homey eating houses (or tents). They were "numerious, plentious, inviting and even cheap."Restaurants were among the very first businesses at the scene of every strike. Keeping a public tables was one of the first nonmining occupations to be found in a hundred "No Name cities." A "restaurant rush" followed closely on--when it did not lead in!--the provisions rush. There are more than a few examples of "starving" forty-niners and Pike's Peakers who allayed their faminenot by grubbing on wild plants, snaring beasts, seeking charity, or by fortuitiously buying a sack of flour, but by throwing theirweary legs under a table at a not-too-distant restaurant. The reason for this is not obscure. In a society in whichdomestic cooking remaied woman's work, the first flood of population in every mining region was overwhelmingly male...'Therewas no such thing as a home to be found. Scarcely even a proper house could be seen. Both dwellings and places fo busines were tihercommon canvas tents, or small rough board shanties, for frame buildings of one story...Meals were taken at eating houses, of which there was an immense number in every protion of the town. They were of every descrption, good, bad, and indifferent, and kept by everyvariety of people...'"
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier, (p. 152-153)
FINER DINING OPTIONS
Although historians tell us the "grand hotels" of the west were not established in the 1870s there isevidence of "grand dining" in western mining regions prior to this time. The larger the city, the moreelegant the dining options. In 1849, however, most Gold Rush towns were just springing onto the map.Saloons, boarding house meals, and crude camp cooking were the norm.
"Hotels and resorts sprang up, crude at first, but by the 1880's such elaborate affairs as the Del Monte inMonterey, the Raymond in Pasadena, and Coronado in San Diego, all models of Atlantic elegance. Thistransition began sometime in the early 1870's, although there were traces of it a half-decade before."
---Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915, Kevin Starr [Oxford University Press:New York] 1973(p. 175)
""So completely was California inundated with taverns, boarding houses, etc.," wrote an English lady in 1851, that the GoldenState could as aptly have been named "the Hotel State."...A miner who arrived in 1849 remembered that "there were anynumber of eating houses and hotels" in Coloma, where it all began. Red Dog, a camp of only two hundred people in Nevada County,California, had a restaurant featuring "Choice Meals served up at al hours, day or night, in the best style." Indian Bar's HotelHumboldt added dinner music...meals of oysters...salmon...roast beef, mince pie and pudding and Madiera, claret, andchampagne...At Placerville's Cary House, hangtown fry was invented. At its El Dorado Hotel, the fare included beef under specialsspecies, veal, peas, potatoes, sauerkraut, bacon, and hash...As the gateway to the goldfields, San Francisco established early onits enduring reputation as a restaurant city. Hall McAllister and Sam Ward were so disgusted with ship's food when theydisembarked from the steamer Panama on June 4, 1849, that they foreswore digging for gold and instead opened a restaurant on Telegraph Hill. At first pork and beans were the only improvement on the Panama's galley they could manage. By December...nearby competitorsat the Ward house...had improvised an ingenious menu from available ingredients that included baked trout with anchovy sauce($1.50), curried sausages ($1), and bread pudding ($.75). Johann Knocke ran another typical restaurant for miners. He opened at five each morning and closed at eleven at night, featuring fishballs (dried fish and boiled potatoes) and "hot cakes donebrown" as his specialties...What Cheer served four thousand meals daily. Each day diners consumed twelve hundred eggs, one hundred pounds of butter, five hundred pounds of potatoes, four hundred quarts of milk...In the mining towns, a finerestaurant was one of the ems by which hosts demonstrated to eastern or European guests...that, despite their geographicalisolation, they where thoroughly cosmopolitan."
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines (p. 138-148)
Bill of Fare, What Cheer Restaurant, San Francisco California, mid-19th century
[NOTE: this was a popular & economical dining room]
Boiled mutton with oyster sauce, 10 cents
Roast beef with lima beans, 10 cents
Pig's feet, soused or in batter, 10 cents
Beefsteak and onions, with fried potatoes, 10 cents
Stewed mutton with bread, butter and potatoes, 5 cents
Buckwheat cakes with honey, 5 cents
Clam chowder, 5 cents
Cup of chocolate (hot chocolate), 5 cents
Chicken pot pie, 20 cents
Porterhouse steak, 25 cents
Baked apples, 5 cents
Stewed prunes, 5 cents
Mammoth glass of Mason Celebrated Beer, 5 cents
Roast turkey and currant jelly, 25 cents
Hot oatmeal mush, 10 cents."
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines, (p. 141)
Bill of Fare, Ward House (restaurant), San Francisco California, December 27, 1849:
[NOTE: this was an upscale dining facility.]
Ox tail soup, 1.00
Baked trout, white and anchovy sauce, 1.50
Roast beef, Stuffled lamb or mutton, 1.00
Pork & apple sauce, 1.25
Curried sausages, 1.00
Stewed Kidney, Sauce de Champagne, 1.25
Beef stewed with onions, 1.25
Tenderloin lamb, green peas, 1.25
Baked sweet potatotes, boiled Irish (white) potataoes, cabbage, squash, .50 (each)
Bread pudding, mince pie, apple pie, cheese, stewed prunes, .75 (each)
Brandy peach pastry, rum omelette, jelly omelette, 2.00 (each)
Wine (bottle): champagne, 5.00; Pale sherry, 3.00; Old Madeira, 4.00; Claret, 2.00; Champagne
cider, 2.00; Ale, 2.00
How did the '49ner's celebrate July 4th?
ETHNIC CULINARY INFLUENCE
"Given the miners' adventurousness in adopting la cuisine francaise, and the innovation of the free lunch, it is curious that theydid not take a keen interest in most of the other "ethnic" foods and modes of prepration to which they were exposed. The argonautswho traveled by sea to California sometimes commented, even favorably now and then, on the way people ate in the Caribbean and in the Latin American ports...But the typical notice of edibles in their diaries dwells on the abundance, lushness, and cheapness offruits in Sao Paolo, Valparaiso, Acapulco, or whatever. With the occasional exception of the man who prepared "chili" for hist mates, and the appearance of the odd enchilada on the free lunch bars...despite the fact that Chileans and Mexicans were numerous in California--South American and Mexican foods and styles of prepration had little impact on the Californians...To be sure, groups ofnon-Americans that were large enough on the mining frontier to create the sustain and ethnic community clung to familiar foodsand forms of cookery...Italian gold miners...shunned regulation biscuits, cornbread, and sourdough in favor of the classicloaves of their homeland, even though this meant taking considerable pains to construct the beehive oven required to bake themproperly...Forty-niners from South Wales had their "dampers"--flour water, and salt dough covered with hardwood coals--which were said to have been durable for a week...Mexicans manning a pack train...cooked tortillas on a hot sheet of iron, frijoles...and "charui fried in hotmantequilla."...eating places considered best in the mining country were run by Germans, French, or Italians, it may be that theirmenus reflected the national cuisines of their proprietors...Any number of boarding restaurants were well known at the timeto cater to specific groups...With the exception of the French...and the Chinese, the Cornish almost alone among mining countryethnic region. Cornish women were reputed to be excellent cooks, peerless in the use of citron, jellies, raisins, currants, and saffron...the enduring popularity of the pasty...in...mining districts is exceptional...On the face of it, the cocina of the californios,the Hispanics who had California almost to themselves in 1848, should have had a great deal of influence on the arrival of forty-niners...Californio cookery failed to influence the new Californians because few of the latter vistied in the homes of the formerand fewer yet were invited...Nor did the somewhat different foodways of the Mexicans who swarmed to California have much effecton the habits of other forty-niners. Even those American gold-seekers who crossed Mexico on their way to California...tended to cling to their own diet and modes of preparation and shun that of the Sonorans. This is worth remark because...some Mexicanfoods were better adapated to life in the mines that were their American equivalents. Whereas baking saleratus biscuit orsourdough bread required considerable time and a makeshift oven, tortillas could be cooked in a minute on a sheet of iron orflat rock. Refried beans were more easily whipped up than a crock of baked beans...The Americans and at least the English-speaking forty-niners from abroad despised the Mexicans for, among other things, their poverty. They "ate French" because cusinesfrancaise represented to them what the rich ate back East. By the same principle, they were unlikely to adopt the foodways of apeople whom they had just defeated in war..."
---Bacon, Beans, and Galantines (p. 180-186)
"Boring diet gave miners appetite for eating out",Sacramento Bee
