You could stock a clothing store with articles named after people — Wellingtons, Bluchers, Derbies, Macintoshes, Stetsons, Cardigans, even Sam Brownes — but if you wanted the world to beat a path to your door, you would have to stock Levi's, the universal garment for men, women, and children of all ages, and from the richest to the poorest. Even if you just called them blue jeans.

      And it all started with a single pair of pants carved out of a piece of tent canvas in the days of the California gold rush by an industrious young immigrant named Levi Strauss.

      Over the years, the business founded on that pair of pants has generated more wealth than any prospector ever took out of the gold fields, and the story of Levi Strauss has become a part of the folklore of mercantile America.

      In 1850, Levi Strauss, a 20-year-old German immigrant to the U.S., boarded a New York sailing ship bound for the California gold rush. He arrived in San Francisco with a small stock of dry goods, including some rough canvas he intended to sell to miners for tents and wagon covers.

      Once ashore, he met a prospector who asked Levi what he'd brought with him on the boat. Levi Strauss pointed to his roll of canvas.

      "You should have brought pants," said the miner.

"Pants? Why pants?" asked the surprised newcomer.

      "Pants don't wear worth a hoot up in the diggings," came the reply. "Can't get a pair strong enough to last."

      That's when Levi got his great idea.

      San Francisco had been settled for less than twenty years, and it had been ceded to the United States only a few months before gold was found. Within a year, the population of five or six hundred multiplied ten times; and when Levi Strauss got there, he found a turbulent lawless camp of gold-hungry men.

      There he made his first pair of pants for one nameless but now famous prospector, who was so pleased he talked up these "pants of Levi's."

      With small capital, but with a clear head, a willing and hopeful heart, he opened up the house of Levi Strauss & Company as the head and principal owner of which he remained until his death — nearly forty-nine years.

      When Levi Strauss began specializing in pants, he decided to use a famous twilled cotton cloth called serge de NÎmes, shortened to denim, which he had specially shipped in by the bale from France. And they're now called jeans from the cloth named for the city of Genoa.

      Not liking the look of it, Levi had the cloth colored with the indigo dye that had been used for centuries, even before the Christian era, for ritual coloring. The early Britons called it woad and dyed their bodies with this same blue. That could have heightened its symbolism for the mystical teenagers of the 1960s. Today it is the standard coloring for a universal garment.

      As for the famous rivets, they were the brain child of a widely traveled merchant named Jacob Davis, with whom Levi Strauss formed a business partnership in the 1870s.

      The copper rivets were protected by patents, but Levi Strauss also created their pictorial trademark of two horses trying to pull a pair of pants limb from limb. When Time Magazine marked the company's 100th anniversary on February 27, 1950, they recorded an anecdote by Walter A. Haas, husband of one of Levi Strauss's grand-nieces. "Now and then," he said, "some waggish farmer actually hitches up two horses and pulls a pair apart. Whenever that happens, I always send the farmer another pair."

      The San Francisco Chronicle boasted, "We are unable to think of any influence that radiated outward from San Francisco to be compared with Levi's."

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