USA > California > Los Angeles County > Los Angeles > A history of California and an extended history of Los Angeles and environs : also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I > Part 28
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S. W. KEARNY,
Brig .- Gen'I & Gov. of California.
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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.
In pursuance of this decree, Alcalde Bryant advertised in the Californian that the ground described in the decree, known as Water Lots, would be surveyed and divided into convenient building lots and sold to the highest bidder on the 29th of June (1847). He then proceeds in the advertisement to boom the town. "The site of the town of San Francisco is known by all navigators and mercantile men acquainted with the subject to be the most commanding com- mercial position on the entire western coast of the Pacific ocean, and the Town itself is no doubt destined to become the commercial em- porium of the western side of the North Ameri- can continent." The alcaldes' assertions must have seemed rather extravagant to the dwellers in the little burgh on the cove of Yerba Buena. But Bryant was a far-seeing man and proved himself in this instance to be a prophet.
It will be noticed that both General Kearny and Alcalde Bryant call the town San Francisco. Alcalde Bartlett, the predecessor in office of Alcalde Bryant, had changed its name just be- fore he was recalled to his ship. He did not like the name Yerba Buena, so he summarily changed it. He issued a proclamation setting forth that hereafter the town should be known as San Francisco. Having proclaimed a change of name, he proceeded to give his reasons: Yerba Buena was a paltry cognomen for a cer- tain kind of mint found on an island in the bay; it was a merely local name, unknown be- yond the district, while San Francisco had long been familiar on the maps. "Therefore it is hereby ordained, etc." Bartlett builded better than he knew. It would have been a sad mis- take for the city to have carried the "outlandish name which Americans would mangle in pro- nouncing," as the alcalde said.
The change was made in the latter part of January, 1847, but it was some time before the new name was generally adopted.
The California Star, Sam Brannan's paper, which had begun to shine January 9, 1847, in its issue of March 20, alluding to the change, says: "We acquiesce in it, though we prefer the old name. When the change was first at- tempted we viewed it as a mere assumption of authority, without law of precedent, and there-
fore we adhered to the old name-Yerba Buena."
"It was asserted by the late alcalde, Washing- ton Bartlett, that the place was called San Francisco in some old Spanish paper which he professed to have in his possession; but how could we believe a man even about that which it is said 'there is nothing in it,' who had so often evinced a total disregard for his own honor and character and the honor of the country which gave him birth and the rights of his fel- low citizens in the district?" Evidently the edi- tor had a grievance and was anxious to get even with the alcalde. Bartlett demanded an inves- tigation of some charges made against his ad- ministration. He was cleared of all blame. He deserves the thanks of all Californians in sum- marily suppressing Yerba Buena and preventing it from being fastened on the chief city of the state.
There was at that time (on paper) a city of Francisca. The city fathers of this budding me- tropolis were T. O. Larkin and Robert Semple. In a half-column advertisement in the Califor- nian of April 20, 1847, and several subsequent issues, headed "Great Sale of City Lots," they set forth the many advantages and merits of Francisca. The streets are eighty feet wide, the alleys twenty feet wide, and the lots fifty yards front and forty yards back. The whole city comprises five square miles."
"Francisca is situated on the Straits of Car- quinez, on the north side of the Bay of San Francisco, about thirty miles from the mouth of the bay and at the head of ship navigation. In front of the city is a commodious bay, large enough for two hundred ships to ride at anchor, safe from any wind." * * * "The entire trade of the great Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, a fertile country of great width and near seven hundred miles long from north to south, must of necessity pass through the narrow chan- nel of Carquinez and the bay and country is so situated that every person who passes from one side of the bay to the other will find the nearest and best way by Francisca." Francisca, with its manifold natural advantages, ought to have been a great city, the metropolis of Cali- fornia, but the Fates were against it. Alcalde
12
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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.
Bartlett, probably without any design of doing so, dealt it a fearful blow when he dubbed the town of the good herb, San Francisco. Two cities with names so nearly alike could not live and thrive in the same state. Francisca became Benicia. The population of San Francisco (or Yerba Buena, as it was then called) at the time that Captain Montgomery raised the stars and stripes and took possession of it probably did not exceed two hundred. Its change of masters accelerated its growth. The Californian of Sep- tember 4, 1847 (fourteen months after it came under the flag of the United States), gives the following statistics of its population and prog- ress: Total white male population, 247; female, 123; Indians, male, 26; female, 8; South Sea Islanders, male, 39; female 1; negroes, male, 9; female 1; total population, 454.
Nearly every country on the globe had repre- sentatives in its population, and the various vo- cations by which men earn a living were well represented. Minister, one; doctors, three; lawyers, three; surveyors, two; agriculturists, eleven; bakers, seven; blacksmiths, six; brew- er, one; butchers, seven; cabinetmakers, two; carpenters, twenty-six; cigarmaker, one; coop- ers, three; clerks, thirteen; gardener, one; grocers, five; gunsmiths, two; hotel-keepers, three; laborers, twenty; masons, four; mer- chants, eleven; miner, one; morocco case maker, one; navigators (inland), six; navigator (ocean), one; painter, one; printer, one; sol- dier, one; shoemakers, four; silversmith, one; tailors, four; tanners, two; watchmaker, one; weaver, one. Previous to April 1, 1847, accord- ing to the Californian, there had been erected in the town seventy-nine buildings, classified as follows: Shanties, twenty-two; frame buildings, thirty-one; adobe buildings, twenty-six. Since April 1, seventy-eight buildings have been erected, viz .: Shanties, twenty; frame buildings, forty-seven; adobe buildings, eleven. "Within five months last past," triumphantly adds the editor of the Californian, "as many buildings have been built as were erected in all the pre- vious years of the town's existence."
The town continued to grow with wonderful rapidity throughout the year 1847, considering that peace had not yet been declared and the
destiny of California was uncertain. According to a school census taken in March, 1848, by the Board of Trustees, the population was: Males, five hundred and seventy-five; females, one hundred and seventy-seven; and "children of age to attend school," sixty, a total of eight hundred and twelve. Building kept pace with the increase of population until the "gold fever" became epidemic. Dr. Brooks, writing in his diary May 17, says: "Walking through the town to-day, I observed that laborers were employed only upon about half a dozen of the fifty new buildings which were in the course of being run up."
The first survey of lots in the town had been inade by a Frenchman named Vioget. No names had been given to the streets. This sur- vey was made before the conquest. In 1847, Jasper O'Farrell surveyed and platted the dis- trict extending about half a mile in the different directions from the plaza. The streets were named, and, with a very few changes, still retain the names then given. In September the coun- cil appointed a committee to report upon the building of a wharf. It was decided to con- struct two wharves, one from the foot of Clay street and the other from the foot of Broadway. Money was appropriated to build them and they had been extended some distance seaward when the rush to the mines suspended operations. After considerable agitation by the two news- papers and canvassing for funds, the first school- house was built. It was completed December 4, 1847, but, for lack of funds, or, as the Star says, for lack of energy in the council, school was not opened on the completion of the house. In March the council appropriated $400 and April 1, 1848, Thomas Douglas, a graduate of Yale College, took charge of the school. San Francisco was rapidly developing into a pro- gressive American city. Unlike the older towns of California, it had but a small Mexican popu- lation. Even had not gold been discovered, it would have grown into a commercial city of con- siderable size.
The first effect of the gold discovery and the consequent rush to the mines was to bring everything to a standstill. As Kemble, of the Star, puts it, it was "as if a curse had arrested
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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.
our onward course of enterprise; everything ' wears a desolate and sombre look; everywhere all is dull, monotonous, dead." The return of the inhabitants in a few months and the influx of new arrivals gave the town a boom in the fall of 1848. Building was only limited by the lack of material, and every kind of a makeshift was resorted to to provide shelter against win- ter rains. From the many attempts at describ- ing the town at this stage of its development, I select this from "Sights in the Gold Regions," a book long since out of print. Its author, T. T. Johnson, arrived at San Francisco April 1, 1849. "Proceeding on our survey, we found the streets, or, properly, the roads, laid out reg- ularly, those parallel with the water being a succession of terraces, and these ascending the hills or along their sides being in some instances cut down ten or twelve feet below the surface. Except a portion of the streets fronting upon the cove, they are all of hard-beaten, sandy clay, as solid as if macadamized. About three hun- dred houses, stores, shanties and sheds, with a great many tents, composed the town at that period. The houses were mostly built of rough boards and unpainted; brown cottons or calico nailed against the beams and joists answered for wall and ceiling of the better class of tenements. With the exception of the brick warehouse of Howard and Mellus, the establishments of the commercial houses of which we had heard so much were inferior to the outhouses of the country seats on the Hudson; and yet it would puzzle the New York Exchange to produce * merchant princes of equal importance." * * "We strolled among the tents in the outskirts of the town. Here was 'confusion worse con- founded,' chiefly among Mexicans, Peruvians and Chilians. Every kind, size, color and shape of tent pitched helter-skelter and in the most awkward manner were stowed full of everything under the sun."
In the first six months of 1849 fifteen thou- sand souls were added to the population of San Francisco; in the latter half of that year about four thousand arrived every month by sea alone. At first the immigrants were from Mexico, Chile, Peru and the South American ports gen- erally; but early in the spring the Americans
began to arrive, coming by way of Panama and Cape Horn, and later across the plains. Europe sent its contingent by sea via Cape Horn; and China, Australia and the Hawaiian Islands added to the city's population an undesirable element. A large majority of those who came by sea made their way to the mines, but many soon returned to San Francisco, some to take their departure for home, others to become resi- dents. At the end of the year San Francisco had a population of twenty-five thousand. The following graphic description of life in San Francisco in the fall of'49 and spring of '50 I take from a paper, "Pioneer Days in San Francisco," written by John Williamson Palmer, and pub- lished in the Century Magazine (1890): "And how did they all live? In frame houses of one story, more commonly in board shanties and canvas tents, pitched in the midst of sand or mud and various rubbish and strange filth and fleas; and they slept on rude cots or on soft planks, under horse blankets, on tables, coun- ters, floors, on trucks in the open air, in bunks braced against the weather-boarding, forty of them in one loft; and so they tossed and scratched and swore and laughed and sang and skylarked, those who were not tired or drunk enough to sleep. And in the working hours they bustled, and jostled, and tugged, and sweated, and made money, always made money. They labored and they lugged; they worked on lighters, drove trucks, packed mules, rang bells, carried messages, 'waited' in restaurants, ‘marked' for billiard tables, served drinks in bar rooms, 'faked' on the plaza, 'cried' at auc- tions, toted lumber for houses, ran a game of faro or roulette in the El Dorado or the Bella Union, or manipulated three-card monte on the head of a barrel in front of the Parker House; they speculated, and, as a rule, gam- bled.
"Clerks in stores and offices had munificent salaries. Five dollars a day was about the small- est stipend even in the custom house, and one Baptist preacher was paid $10,000 a year. La- borers received $1 an hour; a pick or a shovel was worth $10; a tin pan or a wooden bowl $5, and a butcher knife $30. At one time car- penters who were getting $12 a day struck
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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.
for $16. Lumber rose to $500 per thou- sand feet, and every brick in a house cost a dollar one way or another. Wheat, flour and salt pork sold at $40 a barrel; a small loaf of bread was fifty cents and a hard-boiled egg a dollar. You paid $3 to get into the cir- cus and $55 for a private box at the theater. Forty dollars was the price for ordinary coarse boots, and a pair that came above the knees and would carry you gallantly through the quag- mires brought a round hundred. When a shirt became very dirty the wearer threw it away and bought a new one. Washing cost $15 a dozen in 1849.
"Rents were simply monstrous; $3,000 a month in advance for a 'store' hurriedly built of rough boards. Wright & Co. paid $75,000 for the wretched little place on the corner of the plaza that they called the Miners' Bank, and $36,000 was asked for the use of the Old Adobe as a custom-house. The Parker House paid $120,000 a year in rents, nearly one-half of that amount being collected from gamblers who held the second floor; and the canvas tent next door used as a gambling saloon, and called the El Dorado, was good for $40,000 a year. From IO to 15 per cent a month was paid in advance for the use of money borrowed on substantial security. The prices of real estate went up among the stars; $8,000 for a fifty-vara lot that had been bought in 1849 for $20. A lot pur- chased two years before for a barrel of aguar- diente sold for $18,000. Yet, for all that, every- body made money.
"The aspect of the streets of San Francisco at this time was such as one may imagine of an unsightly waste of sand and mud churned by the continual grinding of heavy wagons and trucks and the tugging and floundering of horses, mules and oxen; thoroughfares irregu- lar and uneven, ungraded, unpaved, unplanked, obstructed by lumber and goods, alternate lumps and holes, the actual dumping-places of the town, handy receptacles for the general sweepings and rubbish and indescribable offal and filth, the refuse of an indiscriminate popu- lation 'pigging' together in shanties and tents. And these conditions extended beyond the actual settlement into the chaparral and under-
brush that covered the sand hills on the north and west.
"The flooding rains of winter transformed what should have been thoroughfares into treacherous quagmires set with holes and traps fit to smother horse and man. Loads of brush- wood and branches of trees cut from the hills were thrown into these swamps; but they served no more than a temporary purpose and the in- mates of tents and houses made such bridges and crossings as they could with boards, boxes and barrels. Men waded through the slough and thought themselves lucky when they sank no deeper than their waists."
It is said that two horses mired down in the mud of Montgomery street were left to die of starvation, and that three drunken men were suffocated between Washington and Jackson streets. It was during the winter of '49 that the famous sidewalk of flour sacks, cooking stoves and tobacco boxes was built. It extended from Simmons, Hutchinson & Co.'s store to Adams Express office, a distance of about seventy-five yards. The first portion was built of Chilean flour in one hundred pound sacks, next came the cooking stoves in a long row, and then followed a double row of tobacco boxes of large size, and a yawning gap of the walk was bridged by a piano. Chile flour, cooking stoves, tobacco and pianos were cheaper material for building walks, owing to the excessive supply of these, thian lumber at $600 a thousand.
In the summer of '49 there were more than three hundred sailing vessels lying in the harbor of San Francisco, from which the sailors had deserted to go to the mines. Some of these ves- sels rotted where they were moored. Some were hauled up in the sand or mud flats and used for store houses, lodging houses and sa- loons. As the water lots were filled in and built upon, these ships sometimes formed part of the line of buildings on the street. The brig Euphemia was the first jail owned by the city; the store ship Apollo was converted into a lodging house and saloon, and the Niantic Hotel at the corner of Sansome and Clay streets was built on the hull of the ship Niantic. As the wharves were extended out into the bay the space between was filled in from the sand hills
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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.
and houses built along the wharves. In this way the cove was gradually filled in. The high price of lumber and the great scarcity of houses brought about the importation from New York, Boston, Philadelphia and London of houses ready framed to set up. For a time im- mense profits were made in this, but an ex- cessive shipment like that of the articles of which the famous sidewalk was made brought down the price below cost, and the business ceased.
The first of the great fires that devastated San Francisco occurred on Christmas eve, 1849. It started in Denison's Exchange, a gambling house on the east side of the plaza. It burned the greater part of the block between Wash- ington and Clay streets and Kearny and Mont- gomery streets. The loss was estimated at a million and a quarter dollars. The second great fire occurred on May 4, 1850. It burned over the three blocks between Montgomery and Dupont streets, bounded by Jackson and Clay streets, and the north and east sides of Ports- mouth square. The loss was estimated at $4,000,000. It started in the United States Ex- change, a gambling den, at four o'clock in the morning, and burned for seven hours. The fire was believed to be of incendiary origin and sev- eral suspicious characters were arrested, but nothing could be proved against them. A num- ber of the lookers-on refused to assist in arrest- ing the progress of the flames unless paid for their labor ; and $3 an hour was demanded and paid to some who did.
On the 14th of June, 1850, a fire broke out in the Sacramento House, on the east side of Kear- ny street, between Clay and Sacramento. The entire district from Kearny street between Clay and California to the water front was burned over, causing a loss of $3,000,000. Over three hundred houses were destroyed. The fourth great fire of the fateful year of 1850 occurred September 17. It started on Jackson street and destroyed the greater part of the blocks be- tween Dupont and Montgomery streets from Washington to Pacific streets. The loss in this was not so great from the fact that the district contained mostly one-story houses. It was esti- mated at half a million dollars. December 14
of the same year a fire occurred on Sacramento street below Montgomery. Although the dis- trict burned over was not extensive, the loss was heavy. The buildings were of corrugated iron, supposed to be fireproof, and were filled with valuable merchandise. The loss amounted to $1,000,000. After each fire, building was re- sumed almost before the embers of the fire that consumed the former buildings were extin- guished. After each fire better buildings were constructed. A period of six months' exemp- tion had encouraged the inhabitants of the fire- afflicted city to believe that on account of the better class of buildings constructed the danger of great conflagrations was past, but the worst was yet to come. At II p. m. May 3, 1851, a fire, started by incendiaries, broke out on the south side of the plaza. A strong northwest wind swept across Kearny street in broad sheets of flame, first southeastward, then, the wind changing, the flames veered to the north and east. All efforts to arrest them were use- less; houses were blown up and torn down in attempts to cut off communication, but the en- gines were driven back step by step, while some of the brave firemen fell victims to the fire fiend. The flames, rising aloft in whirling volumes, swept away the frame houses and crumbled up with intense heat the supposed fireproof struc- tures. After ten hours, when the fire abated for want of material to burn, all that remained of the city were the sparsely settled outskirts. All of the business district between Pine and Pa- cific streets, from Kearny to the Battery on the water front, was in ruins. Over one thou- sand houses had been burned. The loss of prop- erty was estimated at $10,000,000, an amount greater than the aggregate of all the preceding fires. A number of lives were lost. During the progress of the fire large quantities of goods were stolen by bands of thieves. The sixth and last of the great conflagrations that devastated the city occurred on the 22d of June, 1851. The fire started in a building on Powell street and ravaged the district between Clay and Broadway, from Powell to Sansome. Four hundred and fifty houses were burned, involving a loss of $2,500,000. An improved fire department, more stringent building regulations and a bet-
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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.
ter water supply combined to put an end to the era of great fires.
After the great fires of 1851 had swept over the city there was practically nothing left of the old metropolis of the early gold rush. The hastily constructed wooden shanties were gone; the corrugated iron building imported from New York and London, and warranted to be fireproof, had proved to be worthless to with- stand great heat; the historic buildings had dis- appeared; the new city that, Phoenix-like, arose from the ashes of the old was a very different city from its predecessor that had been wiped from the earth by successive conflagrations. Stone and brick buildings covered the former site of wooden structures. The unsightly mud flats between the wharves were filled in from the sand hills and some of the streets paved. The year 1853 was memorable for the rapid progress of the city. Assessed property values increased from $18,000,000 to $28,000,000. Real estate values went soaring upward and the city was on the high tide of prosperity; but a reaction came in 1855. The rush to the mines had ceased, im- migration had fallen off, and men had begun to retrench and settle down to steady business habits. Home productions had replaced im- ports, and the people were abandoning mining for farms. The transition from gold mining to grain growing had begun. All these affected the city and real estate declined. Lots that sold for $8,000 to $10,000 in 1853 could be bought for half that amount in 1855. Out of one thou- sand business houses, three hundred were va- cant. Another influence that helped to bring about a depression was the growing political
corruption and the increased taxation from pec- ulations of dishonest officials.
The defalcations and forgeries of Harry Meigs, which occurred in 1854, were a terrible blow to the city. Meigs was one of its most trusted citizens. He was regarded as the em- bodiment of integrity, the stern, incorruptible man, the watch-dog of the treasury. By his upright conduct he had earned the sobriquet of Honest Harry Meigs. Over-speculation and reaction from the boom of 1853 embarrassed him. He forged a large amount of city scrip and hypothecated it to raise money. His forger- ies were suspected, but before the truth was known he made his escape on the barque America to Costa Rica and from there he made his way to Peru. His forgeries amounted to $1,500,000, of which $1,000,000 was in comp- troller's warrants, to which he forged the names of Mayor Garrison and Controller Harris. The vigilance committee of 1856 cleared the political atmosphere by clearing the city, by means of hemp and deportation, of a number of bad characters. The city was just beginning to re- gain its former prosperity when the Frazer river excitement brought about a temporary depres- sion. The wild rush carried away about one- sixth of its population. These all came back again, poorer and perhaps wiser; at least, their necessities compelled them to go to work and weaned them somewhat of their extravagant habits and their disinclination to work except for the large returns of earlier days. Since 1857 the growth of the city has been steady, unmarked by real estate booms; nor has it been retarded by long periods of financial depression.
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