The wealth from the gold of the Sierra Nevada and the silver from the Comstock Lode of Nevada poured into San Francisco, making it one of the richest cities in the country with one of the highest number of millionaires per capita. By 1890, there were twenty-six banks in the city, controlling $114 million in assets.
The city’s millionaires were larger-than-life figures who continue to be remembered today. The most prominent were the Big Four, the builders of the western half of the transcontinental railroad: Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. They all built enormous mansions on the top of Nob Hill as an expression of their wealth.
The Silver Kings hit it rich in Nevada’s silver mines. James C. Flood and William O’Brien were saloon keepers before they became partners with mining engineers John McKay and James G. Fair. Their Consolidated Virginia mine gleaned $400 million of silver ore in just five years.
William Ralston, the head of the Bank of California, built the gleaming Palace Hotel, which still stands today on Market Street. His 100-room mansion in Belmont on the San Francisco peninsula was modeled after the Palace of Versailles and featured a mirrored ballroom, crystal chandeliers and more than 300 gaslights. Ralston’s dinner parties were legendary. Guests included Mark Twain and the presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant.
Hellman moved to San Francisco in 1890 to take over the Nevada Bank and immediately joined the ranks of the upper class. He bought a house on Franklin and Sacramento streets in the heart of the city’s fashionable Western Addition (now known as Pacific Heights). Just a block away was Van Ness Avenue, a broad street shaded by a double row of trees.Many of the city’s richest men 
had mansions there, including Claus Spreckles, who made a fortune in the sugar business, David Walter, whose home furnishings firm D.N. & E. Walter was one of the largest on the Pacific Coast, and Louis Sloss and Lewis Gerstle, whose Alaska Commercial Company held the monopoly on Alaskan seal skins.