"Prescott in his "History of Peru" tells us that gold was found so plentiful by Pizarro that it fell in value to an enormous extent. The natives did not use it for money as their trading was all by barter, article for article. One of the Spanish soldiers traded a hatchet for his two handfuls of gold and the native ran away for fear the man would want to trade back.
Says Prescott: "A quire of paper was sold for ten pesos-de-oro, eleven dollars and sixty-seven cents of our money. Therefore, the quire of paper exchanged for $116.70 in gold, reckoned in our money of today.
A bottle of wine was sold for sixty pesos-de-oro, a sword for fifty, a cloak for a hundred and sometimes more, a pair of shoes for forty, a good horse for seventy-five hundred."
Figuring in our money it would look so:
A bottle of wine $ 700.20
A sword 466.80
A cloak 167.00
A horse 29,175.00
A pair of shoes 350.10
All payable in gold and silver."
--Fabius Melton Butler, Lincoln Money Martyred, 1935
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