Edward Dallam Melillo
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780300206623
- eISBN:
- 9780300216486
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300206623.003.0006
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Economic History
This chapter focuses on Henry Meiggs, a Yankee engineer who profited from the California gold rush before becoming the Golden State's most notorious debtor. When his high-stakes financial gambles ...
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This chapter focuses on Henry Meiggs, a Yankee engineer who profited from the California gold rush before becoming the Golden State's most notorious debtor. When his high-stakes financial gambles collapsed in 1854, Meiggs fled San Francisco for South America, where he built an extravagant new life replete with a million-dollar mansion and an entourage of devoted followers. He traveled to Peru, where he pioneered the enganche debt peonage system and coordinated an unprecedented geographical rearrangement of Latin American commerce, demography, and mobility. As the so-called Yankee Pizarro of Latin America, Meiggs reshaped Chile's working class by recruiting and relocating thirty thousand Chilean workers to build the first railroad lines across the Andean Cordillera. A majority of the debt peons who toiled on these high-altitude engineering projects eventually migrated to Chile's Atacama Desert, where they mined the sodium nitrate that fertilized California's turn-of-the-century citrus bonanza. Meiggs was thus a human vector, precipitating both exchanges and influences between California and Chile.Less
This chapter focuses on Henry Meiggs, a Yankee engineer who profited from the California gold rush before becoming the Golden State's most notorious debtor. When his high-stakes financial gambles collapsed in 1854, Meiggs fled San Francisco for South America, where he built an extravagant new life replete with a million-dollar mansion and an entourage of devoted followers. He traveled to Peru, where he pioneered the enganche debt peonage system and coordinated an unprecedented geographical rearrangement of Latin American commerce, demography, and mobility. As the so-called Yankee Pizarro of Latin America, Meiggs reshaped Chile's working class by recruiting and relocating thirty thousand Chilean workers to build the first railroad lines across the Andean Cordillera. A majority of the debt peons who toiled on these high-altitude engineering projects eventually migrated to Chile's Atacama Desert, where they mined the sodium nitrate that fertilized California's turn-of-the-century citrus bonanza. Meiggs was thus a human vector, precipitating both exchanges and influences between California and Chile.
