California History journal publishes Dr. Tiemann’s paper

Dr. Tiemann’s paper on the 1855 collapse of the banking houses of Page & Bacon (St. Louis) and Page, Bacon & Co. (San Francisco) appears in the current issue of the journal California History, published by the University of California press. 

Dr. Tiemann’s essay analyzes the 1855 failures of the largest banks in Gold Rush San Francisco, arguing that the antecedents of those failures—excessive leverage, interlocking ownership, inadequate segregation of assets, and concentration of risk in non-banking enterprises—were independent of the monetary and economic regime in place at the time. Those antecedents exposed Gold Rush bankers to external risks originating in events in which they had no involvement, and over which they had no control. The specific case of Page, Bacon & Co. also shows how bankers tied Gold Rush California into the broad forces, especially changing patterns of trade in grain, driving shifts in the global economy. Their gold business gave them access to capital markets in London and New York to finance a major railroad project, the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, which stood to benefit from the grain trade. The bank collapsed when the Crimean War closed off its access to European capital markets, straining the bank’s resources to breaking. California’s hard-money economy and restrictive banking laws could not insulate bankers from global events, and in fact contributed to the chaotic nature of their failures’ aftermath.

As an introduction to publishing an article written by Dr. Tiemann about his work, Frances Kaplan, CHS Reference & Outreach Librarian wrote:

The North Baker Research Library at the California Historical Society, pre-Covid-19, has always been open to the public without appointment. Reference staff never really knew what each researcher would be looking for and what each day might bring. It was always exciting when something that had not been seen before was requested. With over 4000 manuscript collections in our holdings, this could easily happen. When Jonathan Tiemann came in to the library looking for materials related to banking during the Gold Rush, he uncovered rare documents that were new to both of us. He spent hours painstakingly photographing, enhancing, and transcribing handwritten business correspondence from an 1850 letterbook of James King of William, gathering clues from that—and other collections—until he was able to turn his findings in to articles, and his articles into a book project. I have to thank him for introducing me to this complicated chapter of California history.

To read Dr. Tiemann’s original article entitled “Golden Treasures at the North Baker Research Library,” and see official reproductions of some of the California Historical Society’s archival materials showing the archaic handwriting that Dr. Tiemann has worked to translate, click the link.

Reference: Jonathan Tiemann, “Financial Contagion 1855: How the Crimean War Felled San Francisco’s Largest Banks,” California History, Vol. 102, Number 2, pp. 22–47. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2025.102.2.22

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