Newsboys would hawk East Coast newspapers that had arrived by steamer ship. People would pay six times the printed cost of a three-month-old newspaper to get news from “back home.”
By selling these papers, at a dollar apiece, the newsboys could earn more money than their parents could earn in a day’s work: running a store or panning for gold. The heroine of Ketchum’s novel dresses up like a boy so that she can sell papers.
