A history of California and an extended history of its southern coast counties, also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I, Part 29

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1184

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dust and nuggets exhibited had made the trip from San Francisco to Victoria and back. But they were silenced by the assurance that the transportation company was preparing to double the number of its vessels on that route. Com- modore Wright was too smart to run his steam- ers on fake reports, and thus the very thing that should have caused suspicion was used to con- firm the truth of the rumors. The doubters doubted no more, but packed their outfits for Frazer river. California was played out. Where could an honest miner pan out $100 a day in California now? He could do it every day in Frazer; the papers said so. The first notice of the mines was published in March, 1858. The rush began the latter part of April and in four months thirty thousand men, one-sixth of the voting population of the state, had rushed to the mines.

The effect of the craze was disastrous to busi- ness in California. Farms were abandoned and crops lost for want of hands to harvest them. Rich claims in old diggings were sold for a trifle of their value. Lots on Montgomery street that a few years later were worth $1.500 a front foot were sold for $100. Real estate in the interior towns was sacrificed at 50 to 75 per cent less than it was worth before the rush began. But a halt was called in the mad rush. The returns were not coming in satisfactorily. By the mid- dle of July less than $100,000 in dust had reached San Francisco, only about $3 for each man who had gone to the diggings. There was gold there and plenty of it, so those interested in keeping up the excitement said: "The Frazer river is high; wait till it subsides." But it did not subside, and it has not subsided since. If the Frazer did not subside the excitement did, and that suddenly. Those who had money enough or could borrow from their friends got away at once. Those who had none hung around Victoria and New Westminster until they were shipped back at the government's ex- pense. The Frazer river craze was the last of the mad, unreasoning "gold rushes." The Washoe excitement of '59 and the "Ho! for Idaho of 1863-64" had some of the characteristics of the early gold rushes, but they soon settled down to steady business and the yield from these fairly

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recompensed those who were frugal and indus -. trious.

Never before perhaps among civilized people was there witnessed such a universal leveling as occurred in the first years of the mining ex- citement in California. "As the labor required was physical instead of mental, the usual supe- riority of head workers over hand workers dis- appeared entirely. Men who had been gov- ernors and legislators and judges in the old states worked by the side of outlaws and con- victs; scholars and students by the side of men who could not read or write; those who had been masters by the side of those who had been slaves; old social distinctions were obliterated; everybody did business on his own account, and not one man in ten was the employe and much less the servant of another. Social distinctions appeared to be entirely obliterated and no man was considered inferior to another. The hard- fisted, unshaven and patch-covered miner was on terms of perfect equality with the well- dressed lawyer, surgeon or merchant; and in general conferences, discussions and even con-

versations the most weather-beaten and strongly marked face, or, in other words, the man who had seen and experienced the most, notwith- standing his wild and tattered attire, was lis- tened to with more attention and respectful con- sideration than the man of polished speech and striking antithesis. One reason of this was that in those days the roughest-looking man not infre- quently knew more than anybody else of what was wanted to be known, and the raggedest man not infrequently was the most influential and sometimes the richest man in the locality."*

This independent spirit was characteristic of the men of '48 and '49. Then nearly everybody was honest and theft was almost unknown. With the advent of the criminal element in 1850 and later there came a change. Before that a pan of gold dust could be left in an open tent unguarded, but with the coming of the Sydney ducks from Australia and men of their class it became necessary to guard property with sedu- lous care.

* Hittell's History of California, Vol. III.

CHAPTER XXVI. SAN FRANCISCO.

I N 1835 Capt. William A. Richardson built the first house on the Yerba Buena cove. It was a shanty of rough board, which he replaced a year later with an adobe building. Ile was granted a lot in 1836 and his building stood near what is now the corner of Dupont and Clay streets. Richardson had settled at Sausalito in 1822. He was an Englishman by birth and was one of the first foreigners to settle in California.

Jacob P. Leese, an American, in partnership with Spear & Hinckley, obtained a lot in 1836 and built a house and store near that of Captain Richardson. There is a tradition that MIr. Leese began his store building on the first of July and finished it at ten o'clock on the morning of July 4, and for a house warming celebrated the glorious Fourth in a style that astonished the natives up and down the coast. The house was sixty feet long and twenty-five broad, and, if

completed in three days, Mr. Leese certainly de serves the credit of having eclipsed some of the remarkable feats in house building that were performed after the great fires of San Francisco in the early '50s. Mr. Leese and his neighbor, Captain Richardson, invited all the high-toned Spanish families for a hundred miles around to the celebration. The Mexican and American flags floated over the building and two six- pounders fired salutes. At five o'clock the guests sat down to a sumptuous dinner which lasted, toasts and all, till I0 o'clock, and then came dancing: and, as Mr. Leese remarks in his diary: "Our Fourth ended on the evening of the fifth." Mr. Leese was an energetic person. He built a house in three days, gave a Fourth of July celebration that lasted two days, and inside of a week had a store opened and was doing a thriving business with his late guests. He fell in love with the same energy that he did busi-

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ness. Among the guests at his 4th of July celebration were the Vallejos, the nabobs of Sonoma. Leese courted one of the girls and in a few months after the celebration married her. Their daughter, Rosalie Leese, was the first child born in Yerba Buena. Such was the be- ginning of San Francisco.

This settlement was on a crescent-shaped cove that lay between Clark's Point and the Rincon. The locality was known as Yerba Buena (good herb), a species of mint to which the native Cal- ifornians attributed many medicinal virtues. The peninsula still bore the name that had been applied to it when the mission and presidio were founded, San Francisco. Yerba Buena was a local appellation and applied only to the little hamlet that had grown up on the cove. This settlement, although under the Mexican government, was not a Mexican town. The foreign element, the American predominating, had always been in the ascendency. At the time of the conquest, among its two hundred inhab- itants, were representatives of almost every civ- ilized nation on the globe. It was a cosmopol- itan town. In a very short time after the con- quest it began to take on a new growth and was recognized as the coming metropolis of Califor- nia. The curving beach of the cove at one point (Jackson street) crossed the present line of Montgomery street.

Richardson and Leese had built their stores and warehouses back from the beach because of a Mexican law that prohibited the building of a house on the beach where no custom house ex- isted. All houses had to be built back a certain number of varas from high-water mark. This regulation was made to prevent smuggling. Be- tween the shore line of the cove and anchorage there was a long stretch of shallow water. This made transportation of goods from ship to shore very inconvenient and expensive. With the advent of the Americans and the inaugura- tion of a more progressive era it became neces- sary for the convenient landing of ships and for the discharging and receiving of their cargoes that the beach front of the town should be im- proved by building wharves and docks. The dif- ficulty was to find the means to do this. The general government of the United States could

not undertake it. The war with Mexico was still in progress. The only available way was to sell off beach lots to private parties, but who was to give title was the question. Edwin Bry- ant, February 22, 1847, had succeeded Washı- ington Bartlett as alcalde. Bryant was a pro- gressive man, and, recognizing the necessity of improvement in the shipping facilities of the town, he urged General Kearny, the acting governor, to relinquish, on the part of the gen- eral government, its claim to the beach lands in front of the town in favor of the municipality under certain conditions. £ General Kearny really had no authority to relinquish the claim of the general government to the land, for the simple reason that the general government had not perfected a claim. The country was held as conquered territory. Mexico had made no concession of the land by treaty. It was not certain that California would be ceded to the United States. Under Mexican law the gov- ernor of the territory, under certain conditions, had the right to make grants, and General Kear- ny, assuming the power given a Mexican gov- ernor, issued the following decree: "I, Brig .- Gen. S. W. Kearny, Governor of California, by virtue of authority in me vested by the Pres- ident of the United States of America, do hereby grant, convey, and release unto the Town of San Francisco, the people or corporate authorities thereof, all the right, title and interest of the Government of the United States and of the Territory of California in and to the Beach and Water Lots on the East front of said Town of San Francisco included between the points known as the Rincon and Fort Montgomery, excepting such lots as may be selected for the use of the United States Government by the senior officers of the army and navy now there; provided, the said ground hereby ceded shall be divided into lots and sold by public auction to the highest bidder, after three months' notice previously given; the proceeds of said sale to be for the benefit of the town of San Francisco. Given at Monterey, capital of California, this Ioth day of March, 1847, and the seventy-first year of the independence of the United States."

S. W. KEARNY,

Brig .- Gen'l & 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 prophiet.

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- vond 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

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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 I; 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 I, seventy-eight buildings have been crected, 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 made 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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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 sca 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 honses, 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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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 10 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.

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A history of California and an extended history of its southern coast counties, also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I, Part 29

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918 Publication date: 1907 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1184

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1184