The Wells Fargo Bank was started in 1852 in part as a consequence of the Gold Rush in California. The company started as a banking and express company and has developed into a major banking institution in the western United States. The company survived the period of banking shakedown in the 1980s during the savings and loan scandal and the various bank failures brought about by bad loans and bad management. Wells Fargo has encountered some problems, but it has been reorganized under new leadership and seems to have weathered the storm that destroyed many other institutions either by scuttling them outright or by making it necessary for them to merge in order to survive.
The Gold Rush started in California in 1848 near Sutter's Mill outside Colema, California, and thousands of people seeking riches in gold streamed into California in the next few years. Before the Gold Rush, the Indian population stood at 150,000 and the non-Indian at 15,000, but after the rush started the latter climbed to 250,000 in four years. Two eastern businessmen, Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, had founded the American Express company in 1850. They watched the developments in California and realized that the many new immigrants to the region wanted to receive letters and packages from their homes and to send back their money earned in the mines to those homes. The settlers also wanted their gold protected and exchanged for coin, and businessmen flocking to the West to take advantage of the ready money flowing in the mining camps needed a variety of banking services, such as short-term loans to pay for their goods. Wells and Fargo believed that the West would continue to grow and prosper. They met with their associates in New York on March 18, 1852 and organized a new express and banking company called Wells, Fargo & Co. The company opened its first office July 13, 1852 at 114 Montgomery Street in San Francisco.
For fifteen or twenty years af...