Miners, Milkers & Merchants by Marilyn L. Geary

Author:Marilyn L. Geary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Life Circle Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Camilla Urso, 1883

As a fundraiser and promotion for the lottery, the world-famous violinist Camilla Urso donated her services to produce a three-day grand music festival. The renowned Urso served as main attraction, financier and producer. She planned to put on the largest musical extravaganza ever held on the Pacific Coast, a “monster concert” to rival Boston’s 1869 Grand National Peace Jubilee celebrating the end of the Civil War. Such enormous productions drew throngs of participants with big-name performers, thousands of singers and massive orchestras.

Holding her concerts over three afternoons in February, Urso performed at the Mechanics’ Pavilion on Union Square, possibly the largest wooden building then standing in America, covering two and one-half acres.18 She supervised the remodeling of this enormous building for the concerts, including a deluxe private viewing box for which banker and financier William Ralston offered three thousand dollars and San Francisco Mayor Selby outbid him with thirty-two hundred dollars.

Urso’s agent traveled throughout the state gathering musicians. Children were released from school to rehearse and sing in the event.19 The first Grand Concert included an orchestra of two hundred instruments, a chorus of twelve hundred voices from every singing society in California, a full military band, the city militia drum corps, one hundred San Francisco uniformed firemen beating on anvils, the ringing of city fire bells and the firing of cannon. Urso gave her net profits of nearly twenty thousand dollars to the Mercantile Library Association, whose officers held a grand ball for her on the festival’s final day.20

Three fund-raising concerts led with a crescendo to the grand lottery ticket sales on June 1, when two hundred thousand lottery tickets were offered to the public at five dollars apiece, a significant amount, as schoolteachers earned about forty-five to sixty dollars per month.21 The big prize was one hundred thousand dollars, with over six hundred lesser prizes. The total of all prizes amounted to half a million dollars in gold coin.22

The prospect of winning the lottery cast a spell nationwide. Orders arrived even before the lottery office opened to sell tickets. The public became so enthused by dreams of winning that some tickets, especially those considered lucky numbers, were sold at a premium of fifty cents to ten dollars. The office received nearly one hundred and fifty orders, many by telegraph, for the ticket number 1849, the year of California’s Gold Rush, and one buyer offered a fifty-dollar bonus for it. A New York buyer ordered one thousand tickets and offered to purchase more tickets worth one hundred thousand dollars if given a suitable discount. Scalpers tried to hijack the lottery by buying all or a large portion of the tickets at a discount, then selling them at full price or a premium for a ten to twenty-five percent gain on their investment.23

A chance at the lottery promised big wins, at five dollars in gold coin per ticket, less than half the price of an annual subscription to the Daily Alta California.24 Ten thousand tickets sold on the

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