Dr. Tiemann presents  a California Gold Rush talk to the Fellowship Forum

Dr. Tiemann was the invited speaker at the Fellowship Forum in Palo Alto on March 19, 2019. This is a local group that meets weekly to hear speakers on a variety of topics. Dr. Tiemann spoke about banking in early California history, both before and after the Gold Rush. His talk was entitled “Cattle Hides to the Crimean War: Banking in Early San Francisco.” In this talk, Dr. Tiemann regaled the audience with descriptions of a number of the colorful denizens of pre-Gold Rush San Francisco in the mid-1850’s. These included James King of William and William A. Leidesdorff, who was a successful San Francisco merchant who traded all kinds of goods and was obliged to keep his accounts in a combination of pesos, dollars and cattle hides. Dr. Tiemann explored evidence revealed by his research about of how banking worked during the Gold Rush and he particularly described how one of the largest of the San Francisco banks, Page, Bacon & Co., failed due to missteps in internal management which made it susceptible to external shocks dealt by the Crimean War.  Click the image below to download Dr. Tiemann’s presentation slides.

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