29. From the Small Time to the Big Leagues
David Jack, who later added an S to his last name to make it Jacks, was born in Scotland in 1822. He emigrated to America when he was twenty years old or so, and worked for seven years as a US Army contractor in Virginia and New York. When news of the California Gold Rush arrived, he sold everything he had, which netted him $1400, and invested it in revolvers for resale in California. He reached San Francisco in 1849, flipped his firearms for $4000 in just two days, then headed to the gold mines, but failed to hit a mother lode.
So Jacks returned to San Francisco, got a job in the Custom House, and put his $4,000 to work by lending some of it out at interest. The following year he moved to Monterey, then a small town of 1,000 people, where for years he dabbled in a few failed enterprises until 1859 when his fortunes dramatically improved. That year, as seen below, he and a lawyer named Delos Rodeyn Ashley cooked up a shady scheme to swindle Monterey out of 30,000 acres – an awful move that instantly transformed David Jacks into a land baron.
