3 ms·
It's just possible, as now, folks of yore also liked to exaggerate and brag.
by IndySun 3y ago
It's just possible, as now, folks of yore also liked to exaggerate and brag.
- saalweachter 3y agoYou exaggerate and brag to your friends at the bar, not in an encrypted note precisely detailing the contents of a vault. It's also just barely at the edge of possible you could trade silver for $13,000 in St Louis in 1819. The population was somewhere between 1600 (1910 pop) and 5000 (1930 pop) [by 1880, nearer when the pamphlet was written, St Louis was the 6th largest in the US]. 3000 people in a frontier city isn't a lot to find jewels worth ten years of a skilled Craftsman's wages, but two of those people were the sons of the fur trader who founded St Louis, whose estates were worth > $100,000 a few years later. I'm not sure they'd have $13,000 worth of jewels lying around, but hey, not completely impossible.