The gold mines exerted an irresistible attraction, and for a time the town was almost deserted, except for those passing through on their way to and from the mines. By degrees, however, it became apparent to some that more gold-dust was to be collected at San Francisco in business than by digging among the mountains, and with admirable energy they set about transforming this lawless camp into a prosperous trading city. Prior to 1848, California had been for all practical purposes almost uninhabited, and now was utterly unable to provide for the needs of her vastly increased population. The newcomers produced plenty of gold, but nothing else, and they frequently found themselves on the brink of starvation. They were too busy with pick and shovel to contribute anything in the form of manufactures or supplies, so that the most ordinary articles of every-day use, to say nothing of comforts and luxuries, had to be brought from places thousands of miles distant. This precarious means of supply, together with the enormous and reckless purchasing power developed by the rapid production of gold from the mines, naturally created a speculative and artificial standard of values, and goods of every description sold for fabulous amounts: Beef, pork, and flour brought from $40 to $60 per barrel; tea, coffee, and sugar, $4 a pound; spirits, $10 to $40 a quart; playing-cards, $5 a pack; cowhide boots, $45 a pair; picks and shovels from $5 to $15 each; wooden and tin bowls from $2.50 to $7.50 each; laudanum, $1 a drop, and so on. These were by no means high prices for stevedores and laborers receiving from $20 to $30 a day, and miners who were making anywhere from $100 to $1000 a day washing dirt at the mines. An idea of the amount of gold produced may be gained from the fact that the Pacific Mail Company, whose first steamship, the _California_, arrived at San Francisco via the Straits of Magellan, February 28, 1849, had by the end of 1852 shipped gold from that city to the value of $121,766,425. The speculators and shippers of merchandise in the Eastern States were as deeply interested in the output of the mines of California as the gold diggers themselves. No one could predict how long this state of affairs would continue; with them speed meant everything; a week or even a day’s delay might result in heavy losses, or what was to them the same thing, failure to reap large profits. They could not send their goods across the continent, and the Pacific Mail Company had all that it could attend to in conveying passengers and the mails across the Isthmus; so that the only means of transportation from the Atlantic States to San Francisco was round Cape Horn. Under these circumstances one can easily understand how the rates of freight advanced to extravagant figures, and created a demand under which the California clippers came into existence.