1. The most recent and thorough survey of these debates appears in Larry Schweikart, "U.S. Commercial Banking: A Historiographical Survey," Business History Review 65 (Autumn 1991): 606-61, as well as his introduction to The Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography: Banking and Finance to 1913 (New York: Facts on File and Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1991). Also see Benjamin J. Klebaner, American Commercial Banking: A History (Boston: Twayne, 1990), and Larry Schweikart, Banking in the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

2. See Timothy Hubbard and Lewis Davids, Banking in Midamerica (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), and R. S. Cole, "Early History of Money and Banking in Missouri" (M.A. thesis, University of Missouri, 1906).

3. For example, the experience of the antebellum North Carolina banks, in Schweikart, Banking in the American South , passim.

4. Earling A. Erickson, "Money and Banking in a 'Bankless' State: Iowa, 1846-1857," Business History Review 43 (Summer 1969): 171-91; Larry Schweikart, "Arkansas Antebellum Banks," Southern Studies , 26 (Fall 1987): 188-201; Joseph M. Grant and Lawrence L. Crum, The Development of State Chartered Banking in Texas (Austin: University of Texas, Bureau of Business Research, 1978).

5. Robert Glass Cleland, From Wilderness to Empire: A History of California, 1542-1900 (New York: Knopf, 1944), 240.

6. Lynne Pierson Doti and Larry Schweikart, California Bankers, 1848-1993 (New York: Guinn, 1994), 9.

7. Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (New York: A. L. Butt, 1840), passim.

8. Lewis E. Davids, " 'Fur' Money and Banking in the West," Journal of the West (April 1984): 7-10.

9. Dana, Two Years Before the Mast , 9.

10. Ira R. Cross, Financing an Empire: History of Banking in California , 4 vols. (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1927), vol. 1, 22.

11. William Heath Davis, Seventy-five Years in California , ed. Harold A. Small, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: John Howell Books, 1967).

12. Lynne Pierson Doti and Larry Schweikart, Banking in the American West: From the Gold Rush to Deregulation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 10.

13. Thomas Senior Berry, Early California: Gold, Prices, Trade (Virginia: The Bostwick Press, 1984), 78.

14. Robert J. Chandler, ''Integrity Amid Tumult: Wells, Fargo & Co.'s Gold Rush Banking," California History 70 (Fall 1991): 261. For the growth of San Francisco, in general, see Roger W. Lotchin, San Francisco, 1846-1856: From Hamlet to City (1973; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), as well as J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 316-17.

15. See Cross, Financing an Empire , vol. 1, 125-27.

16. The Smithsonian Museum of American History displays the Polk Collection of California's privately minted coins from many of those businesses.

17. Cross, Financing an Empire , 44.

18. See Fred R. Marckhoff, "The Development of Currency and Banking in California," The Coin Collectors' Journal 15 (May-June 1948), and Benjamin Cooper Wright, Banking in California, 1849-1910 (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1910), 15.

19. Cross, Financing an Empire , vol. 1, 41.

20. Ibid., 90.

21. Wells Fargo History Department, "Historical Highlights," pamphlet published by Wells Fargo Bank, 1982, 5.

22. Ibid.

23. W. Turrentine Jackson, "Wells Fargo: Symbol of the Wild West?" Western Historical Quarterly 3 (April 1972): 179-96. Also see his many articles on Wells Fargo, including "A New Look at Wells Fargo, Stagecoaches, and the Pony Express," California Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1966): 291-324; "Stages, Mails and Express in Southern California: The Role of Wells, Fargo & Co. in the Pre-Railroad Era," California Historical Society Quarterly 56 (1974): 233-72; "Wells Fargo Staging Over the Sierras," California Historical Society Quarterly 44 (1970): 99-133; and "Wells Fargo's Pony Expresses," Journal of the West 11 (1972): 412-17.

24. Lynne Pierson Doti, "D. O. Mills," in Schweikart, Encyclopedia of American Business History , 316-20.

25. These and other unorthodox methods of protecting money and valuables are discussed in Pierson Doti and Schweikart, Banking in the American West , 1-37, and Larry Schweikart, A History of Banking in Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), chaps. 1-2, passim.

26. Pierson Doti and Schweikart, Banking in the American West , 39.

27. Neill Compton Wilson, 400 California Street: The Story of the Bank of California, National Association, and Its First too Years in the Financial Development of the Pacific Coast (San Francisco: Bank of California, 1964), 26, 29; Dwight L. Clarke, William Tecumseh Sherman: Gold Rush Banker (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1969), 18. Sherman's building, unlike his business, survives today.

28. A good discussion of bank architecture appears in Christopher Nelson, "Bank Architecture in the West," Journal of the West 23 (April 1984): 77-87. See also "Bank Architecture in New York," Bankers Magazine , February 1855, for an appreciation of how well in tune with recent developments on the subject California bankers were, and Philip Sawyer, "The Planning of Bank Buildings," The Architectural Review 12 (1905): 24-31, for the rationale behind the floor layout of the banks.

29. These changes are detailed in Cross, Financing an Empire , vol. 1, 86-89.

30. Ibid., 52.

31. Ibid., 58-61. Also see Pierson Doti and Schweikart, Banking in the American West , 39.

32. J. Ross Browne, "Report on the Debates of the Convention of California on the Formation of the Constitution in September and October, 1849" (Washington, D.C., 1850), 108-36. Also see David Alan Johnson, Founding the Far West: California, Oregon and Nevada, 1840-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 122-25.

33. By that time, the evidence on free banking in Scotland was abundant, but the experiments in the United States were still ongoing. See Lawrence H. White, Free Banking in Britain: Theory, Experience, and Debate, 1800-1845 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); "Scottish Banking and the Legal Restrictions Theory: A Closer Look," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 22 (November 1990): 526-36, and, with George Selgin, "The Evolution of a Free Banking System," Economic Inquiry 25 (July 1987): 439-58; as well as Donald R. Wells and L. S. Scruggs, ''Historical Insights into the Deregulation of Banking," CATO Journal 5 (Winter 1986): 899-910. Several states had used general incorporation laws to establish "free banks" that had limited liability but that relied on bond deposit with the secretary of state to ensure that noteholders were reimbursed if an unscrupulous owner left town with the banks capital. Several articles by Arthur J. Rolnick and Warren Weber show that the culprit in most free bank failures was faulty drafting of the laws that did not specify market value of bonds, only par value, making it possible for an unscrupulous owner to take advantage of plunges in the prices of bonds the bank had on reserve with the secretary of state. See their "Banking Instability and Regulation in the U.S. Free Banking Era," Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review (Summer 1985): 2-9; "Free Banking, Wildcat Banking, and Shinplasters," Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review (Fall 1982): 10-19; "New Evidence on the Free Banking Era," American Economic Review (Fall 1981): 1-17; "Inherent Instability in Banking; the Free Bank Experience," CATO Journal 5 (December 1983): 1080-91; "The Causes of Free Bank Failures," Journal of Monetary Economics 14 (November 1984): 267-91; and "Explaining the Demand for Free Bank Notes," Journal of Monetary Economics 21 (January 1988): 47-71. Others have challenged elements of their hypothesis, but the structure still remains intact. See Kenneth Ng, "Free Banking Laws and Barriers to Entry in Banking, 1838-1860," Journal of Economic History 48 (December 1988): 877-89; Hugh Rockoff, "Lessons from the American Experience with Free Banking," Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 9, Series on Historical Factors in Long-Run Growth, 1989; Andrew Economopolous, "Free Bank Failures in New York and Wisconsin: A Portfolio Analysis," Explorations in Economic History 27 (October 1990): 421-41, "The Free Banking Period: A Period of Deregulation?" New York Economic Review 17 (1987): 24-31, "Illinois Free Banking Experience," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 20 (May 1988): 249-64, and his "The Impact of Reserve Requirements on Free Bank Failures," Atlantic Economic Journal 14 (December 1986): 76-84.

34. Quoted in Cross, Financing an Empire , 101.

35. Ibid., 183.

36. Ibid., 177.

37. Clarke, William Tecumseh Sherman , 17.

38. Ibid., 69-70.

39. Cecil G. Tilton, William Chapman Ralston: Courageous Builder (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1935); David Lavender, Nothing Seemed Impossible: William C. Ralston and Early San Francisco (Palo Alto, Calif.: American West Publishing Co., 1975); and Lynne Pierson Doti, "William Chapman Ralston," in Schweikart, Encyclopedia of American Business History , 398-408.

40. Pierson Doti, "D. O. Mills," 316-20.

41. James Joseph Hunter, Partners in Progress, 1864-1950: A Brief History of the Bank of California N.A. & of the Region It Has Served for 85 Years (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1950).

42. George D. Lyman, Ralston's Ring: California Plunders the Comstock Lode (New York: Scribner's, 1937), 56.

43. For material on the southern branch banking system, and branching in general, see Schweikart, Banking in the American South ; Charles Calomiris and Larry Schweikart, "The Panic of 1857: Origins, Transmission, and Containment," Journal of Economic History 51 (December 1991): 807-34, and their "Was the South Backward? North-South Differences in Antebellum Banking during Normalcy and Crisis," Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper, 1988; John Martin Chapman and Ray B. Westerfield, Branch Banking, Its Historical and Theoretical Position in America and Abroad (New York: Harper and Row, 1942); Gary C. Gilbert and William Longbrake, "The Effects of Branching by Financial Institutions on Competition Productive Efficiency and Stability: An Examination of the Evidence,'' Journal of Bank Research 4 (Winter 1974): 298-307; Paul M. Horwitz and Bernard Schull, "The Impact of Branch Banking on Bank Performance," The National Banking Review 11 (December 1974): 143-89; Shirley Donald Southworth, Branch Banking in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1928); and Eugene N. White, The Regulation and Rearm of the American Banking System, 1900-1929 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).

44. Material on Hellman appears in Robert Cleland and Frank Putnam, Isaias Hellman and the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1965), and Michael Konig, "Isaias W. Hellman," in Schweikart, Encyclopedia of American Business History , 249-60.

45. Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 205.

46. Lynne Pierson Doti, Banking in an Unregulated Environment: California, 1878-1905 (New York: Garland, 1995), 35.

47. Ibid.

48. See Lavender, Nothing Seemed Impossible , 170.

49. Wright, Banking in California , 51.

50. For a social-choice interpretation of the gold banks, see Robert L. Greenfield and Hugh Rockoff, "Yellowbacks Out West and Greenbacks Back East: Social-Choice Dimensions of Monetary Reform," Southern Economic Journal 62 (April 1996): 902-15.

51. For an assessment of the relative ineffectiveness of branching in some other states during the 1920s, see Charles Calomiris, "Is Deposit Insurance Necessary? A Historical Perspective," Journal of Economic History 50 (June 1990): 283-295, and his "Deposit Insurance: Lessons from the Record," Economic Perspectives (May-June 1989): 10-30. Also see Larry Schweikart, "A New Perspective on George Wingfield and Nevada Banking, 1920-1933," Nevada Historical Quarterly 35 (Winter 1992): 162-76.