You 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

You 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.