One of the useful, and reliable, series of books that are mentioned often in CAS City are the Time-Life series THE OLD WEST, -with individual titles pretty much divided by occupations, i.e The Cowboys; The Soldiers; The Railroaders; The Rivermen, etc.
Quickly scanning through some of the volumes tonight turned up these bits of information.
From The Railroaders: pp. 182-189, describing the jobs of a typical Brakeman, Fireman and Engineer on a railroad engine crew in the late 1870’s:
(describing if the Brakeman caused damage to a train wheel by applying brakes so hard it caused the wheel to lock and slide along the rail):
“The price of the wheels, usually about $45.00 apiece, was deducted from his paycheck - and at that time a brakeman’s pay was exactly $45.00 a month.”
(as to the Fireman):
“No American ever worked harder for $2.40 a day than a fireman on the Western railroads.”
(later on down the same page a clue that an Engineer earned $4.00 a day):
“A malicious or incompetent engineer, sitting on ‘the four-dollar (a day) side of the cab’, could make the job a lot harder for the $2.40 side.”
From The Rivermen: p 149, it shows a steamship’s company ledger from the time after the railroads had started to take away some of their business:
“Pilots were earning $125.00 a month, compared with $725.00 in the flush 1860’s”
The same ledger shows the various jobs and wages paid in a month, such as:
the steamship engineer earned $100.00
the watchman earned $35.00
the mate and cook each earned $50.00
the many ‘rousters’ or stevedores, each earned $30.00
From The Miners: p. 27, talking about panning for gold during the heyday of some of the boomtowns:
“In a long day spent squatting in a cold mountain stream, a miner could process about 50 panfuls of sand, and he would make ends meet at high boomtown prices if he averaged 10 cents worth of gold per pan. In rich placers, miners sometimes washed panfuls of sand worth $50.00 each, and on rare claims in the Klondike, individual pans yielded as much as $800.
Another very informative book is PEDDLERS and POST TRADERS; The Army Sutler on the Frontier by David M. Delo, 1998, Kingfisher Books. The post trader often sold goods to the surrounding civilian and Indian populations at any given post, in addition to his army contracts.
Here are some snippets:
p. 173
“He freighted supplies and hired out teams of horses to the army. (Two four-horse teams for a three week period went for $252.” [This in 1886]
p.177
“Peck of Durfee & Peck told an 1876 congressional investigating committee that the gross value of goods sold to soldiers at Fort Sully came to between $50,000 and $75,000 per year - $250 per man. When it was pointed out that the per-man amount was more than twice what a soldier made, Peck said he meant sales to everyone at the post.” [my italics]
p. 178
“In 1870, the army used 125,762 cords of wood. Prices per cord, which ranged from $111 at Fort Sedgewick in 1865 (but only $67 per cord in 1867) to a low of $8 at Forts Fetterman and Washakie, Wyoming Territory, in 1880, reflected the cost of transportation."
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