The hotels and lodging houses immediately became very numerous. Though
they were in reality only overcrowded bunk-houses, the most enormous
prices were charged for beds in them. People lay ten or twenty in a
single room--in row after row of cots, in bunks, or on the floor.
Between the discomfort of hard beds, fleas, and overcrowding, the entire
populace spent most of its time on the street or in the saloons and
gambling, houses. As some one has pointed out, this custom added greatly
to the apparent population of the place. Gambling was the gaudiest, the
best-paying, and the most patronized industry. It occupied the largest
structures, and it probably imported and installed the first luxuries.
Of these resorts the El Dorado became the most famous. It occupied at
first a large tent but soon found itself forced to move to better
quarters. The rents paid for buildings were enormous. Three thousand
dollars a month in advance was charged for a single small store made of
rough boards. A two-story frame building on Kearny Street near the Plaza
paid its owners a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year rent. The
tent containing the El Dorado gambling saloon was rented for forty
thousand dollars a year. The prices sky-rocketed still higher. Miners
paid as high as two hundred dollars for an ordinary gold rocker, fifteen
or twenty dollars for a pick, the same for a shovel, and so forth.
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