USA > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco > A history of the city of San Francisco; and incidentally of the state of California > Part 17
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SEC. 128. 1857. As compared with the preced- ing eight years, 1857 in San Francisco was quiet and dull. There was no remarkable mining excitement; no great speculation or panic in business; no great crime against life or property; no revolt of the people against their rulers. The city government, installed by the people's party, was extremely economical. Thieves and murderers stayed away for fear that the vigilance committee might resume power. Business continued to suffer under the depression that began three years before. Broderick having secured a ma- jority of the members of the legislature in the state election of 1856, in January took the prize of the federal senatorship, and then holding the power, gave the other senatorship to Dr. Gwin.
Some adventurers from the city joined Crabb's party, which started on the twenty-first of January, to conquer Sonora, and perished with it. The claim of Santillan for several thousands of acres of land be-
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tween California street and Mission creek, was con- firmed by the United States district court in April, but the decision was not final, and general confidence was felt that it would be finally overthrown. The first savings bank was opened with success from the start, and the first industrial fair of the Mechanics' Institute was held in a building erected for the pur- pose on the site now occupied by the Lick House. The greater part of the state debt having been de- clared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, was ratified at the election in September, by the peo- ple who thus accepted the legal responsibility for its payment, and did much to strengthen the credit of the state at home and abroad.
The sinking of the " Central America," in Septem- ber, off the coast of Florida, on her way to New York, with passengers and treasure from California, was one of the notable events of the year. The steamer having sprung a leak in a fearful hurricane, the water rose slowly for thirty-three hours, until she sank. At three o'clock in the afternoon of the second day, when it had become evident that she must go down before the next morning, a brig, which had suffered in the storm, came near and offered to receive the passengers; but as she was not very manageable, or near, the sea was rough, and the only conveyances were three small boats, the transfer went slowly. When night came on all the twenty-six women and twenty-seven children, besides four adult male pas- sengers, had reached the brig, leaving more than five
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hundred men behind to what appeared almost inevit- able death. Though many were armed and nearly all were rough in appearance, they were content that the women and children should be saved first; and if here and there a grumble was heard, it received little en- couragement. Never did so many men face death near at hand more quietly or decorously. About eight o'clock in the evening the ill-fated steamer gave a final plunge and disappeared forever, carrying down with her into the vortex of the sea many of her pas- sengers, and leaving others afloat, supported by life- preservers or pieces of wood from the wreck. Of these, more than one hundred were picked up the next day, out of five hundred and eighty-two persons on board, four hundred and nineteen were drowned. A commercial panic caused or greatly intensified in the Atlantic states by the loss of one million five hundred thousand dollars in gold dust with the steamer, was a startling proof of the dependence of the business of the nation on the mines of California.
SEC. 129. Crabb. Walker was not the last Cali- fornian to undertake a quixotic conquest in Spanish- America. Henry A. Crabb, a resident of Stockton, a prominent man in the whig party of California, a lawyer and public speaker of decided ability, an offi- cial of experience and good repute, and an ardent advocate of slavery, was the husband of a lady who had been born in the state of Sonora, and had rela- tives still living there. It was through the relatives of his wife that he received an invitation from a de-
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feated chieftain in that state to bring an armed force for the purpose of overthrowing Governor Gándara, who had long been master there. He accepted the invitation, collected a force of one hundred men, on the twenty-first of January sailed from San Francisco to San Pedro and thence marched to Sonora, where he was met near the line, attacked, defeated, and com- pelled to surrender at discretion, after twenty-five of his men had been killed in battle. He and fifty-eight companions were promptly executed. Nearly a hun- dred men who were on their way to aid him heard of the catastrophe before reaching Sonora. Those natives of that state who had invited him made no attempt to assist him. They expected that he would appear with a much larger force, and said it was useless for them to come out openly in his favor when there was no hope of success. The disasters and tragical deaths of Raousset, Walker and Crabb were serious discour- agements to filibustering, and twenty years have now gone by without any new enterprises of that kind.
SEC. 130. 1858. The most notable feature of 1858, in the history of the city and state, was the Fraser fever, of which more will be said in a subse- quent section. An overland mail, connecting San Francisco with St. Louis, by the southern route through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, was estab- lisheg in September; and though the time from New York was not less than by Panama, yet the mail had the great advantage of being semi-weekly, whereas the steamer mail came only once in a fortnight.
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Water was brought into the city in an aqueduct from Lobos creek, and was carried round in carts until pipes could be laid. As they were supplied, the carts upon which the city had previously depended gradu- ally disappeared. At the election in September the slavery extension wing of the democracy elected more than two thirds of the legislature. The docu- ment submitted to the courts by Limantour as a grant for about six thousand acres within the limits of the city was proved to be a forgery, and the claim was finally defeated. The privilege of collecting tolls on the Mission and Folsom street plank-roads having expired, the roads became free. The fare on the ferry-boat to Oakland previously fifty cents, was re- duced to twenty-five cents; and the construction of the San Bruno turnpike gave a new and nearly level road much of the way along the shore of the bay from the Mission to the plain of San Mateo, offering the first pleasant drive on the peninsula in the vicin- ity of the city and outside of its limits.
The supreme court was subjected to much ridicule on account of a decision in the case of the negro Archy, brought as a slave to California from Alabama by Mr. Stovall, who supposed the negro would follow and obey him anywhere. Archy used his freedom; the master applied to the supreme court, and P. H. Burnett, the chief justice, rendered his opinion that the applicant was not entitled to the custody of Archy under the law, but as Stovall "was a young man traveling mainly for his health," and the court
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was "not disposed to rigidly enforce the rule for the first time," therefore he might take Archy; but fair notice was given in the opinion that in all future cases, the court would decide the other way. "The law was given to the north and the nigger to the south." Joseph Baldwin, who succeeded Burnett as chief justice, prepared a syllabus of the decision, in- ferring that the constitution does not apply to young men traveling for their health; that it does not apply the first time; and that the decisions of the supreme court are not to be taken as precedents. Ludicrous as this decision was when considered from a legal stand- point, and lamentable in its disregard of personal right and public policy, it was written by a man who had previously been the governor of the state, and has since been the president of a bank in San Francisco; and perhaps no man in California has a higher reputa- tion for kindliness and integrity. His blunder is an example of the great wrong that may result from con- fused logic combined with amiable weakness, if such name could properly be given to a motive in which there was no malice, and more regard for the claims of one class than for the rights of another.
SEC. 131. Mining Excitements. Regions contain- ing extensive placer mines are peculiarly subject to sudden migrations of the miners to districts reported to be richer. The more abundant the gold, the more unsettled the population. They who are doing well, instead of being attached by their prosperity to their claims, are the more ready to move because they have
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money to spare. They will not wait till the value of the new diggings has been conclusively proved, for fear that before such proof can be furnished all or nearly all the best claims have been taken up, and then the discovery would be of no benefit to them. They would abandon a good claim for the chance of getting a better one. Such conduct may appear in- comprehensible to men who have never seen a placer mining community, but it was common among the gold hunters of California before 1860. They did not understand the geological laws under which gold was distributed through the gravel beds of living or dead rivers, and they had seen such wonderful deposits of it, and many of them were so ignorant that no rumor of its abundance seemed incredible to them. There were many intelligent and prudent men among them, but these could not prevent the others from being car- ried away by excitements.
Many of the reported new discoveries which at- tracted hundreds or even thousands of adventurers from gold diggings, and never paid them for their trouble, were on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada and were reached by the miners without passing through San Francisco, and the influence of the excitement in such case was scarcely felt here.
The first rush that affected the city was that to Gold Bluff on the beach of Humboldt county, in January, 1851. The secretary of a mining company, which had a claim there (and hundreds of others equally good could be taken up), published a state-
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ment that according to the representation of persons who had examined the ground, it would yield four hundred and thirty million dollars to each member of the company. On the eleventh of January eight vessels were advertised to sail for Gold Bluff, but before they departed, the exaggerations were exposed, the applicants for passage drew back, and the mem- bers of the millionaire company never received a cent of dividend from their claims.
Three years later wonderful stories were published in the Panama journals about rich placers on the head waters of the Amazon in eastern Peru, and one thousand adventurers from California were astonished on landing at Callao to find that nobody there knew anything of such mines. Several parties having come so far, thought they might as well do some prospect- ing on the eastern slope of the Andes, and after making the journey at great expense and trouble, they found nothing.
In February and March, 1855, a number of letters full of falsehoods, about extensive and rich placers in the basin of Kern river were published in the Stock- ton and Los Angeles papers, and five thousand per- sons started for the new Eldorado. Many of them abandoned good claims or profitable employment, and ten thousand more were getting ready to follow very soon, when letters came back that there was not work for more than one hundred men.
SEC. 132. Fraser Fever. These rushes were mere trifles, however, as compared with the Fraser fever,
18
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which prevailed from April till September, 1858. Gold had been found in the banks and bars of Fraser river in British Columbia, about one hundred miles from the ocean, and some sanguine miners there, sup- posing that there must be a large and rich placer mining region in the basin of the stream, converted their inferences into assertions in letters which were given to the public. Many thousands of the Cali- fornian miners, unwilling to adapt themselves to the relative impoverishment of the diggings of the Sierra Nevada, received with joyous credulity the rumors of great gold fields in what was then known to the law and to the map-makers as "New Caledonia." The first adventurers generally were men who had money enough to go to Fraser river, and return in comfort even if they should find nothing there; and they went as other parties have gone to examine every district reported to have much precious metal within the limits of our continent. Their reports were that there was no doubt of the existence of gold in the bars of the river, and that the stream was much larger than any of the rich Californian rivers, but that the water was too high to permit as yet of profit- able work in the bars or in the river bed, or even of any thorough prospecting.
All this was true literally, and did not mean much directly, but most extravagant deductions were drawn from it, then accepted as a proper basis for action, and confirmed by the writers of sensational letters, some of whom may have been paid by the owners of
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the steamships, which reaped a rich harvest from the excitement. So great was the rush that California seemed in danger of being depopulated. The custom- house records say that between the twentieth of April and the ninth of August, the limits of the Fraser fever, fifteen thousand and eighty-eight passengers left San Francisco in one hundred and twelve vessels for the new Eldorado; but the " Prices Current," a carefully edited commercial journal, said the number of adven- turers was twenty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-eight, the reports to the custom-house being greatly below the truth in many cases. In the mid- dle of August only two thousand three hundred per- sons had returned. The twenty-three thousand five hundred who went to Fraser river were six in a hundred of the entire population of the state, a very large proportion to leave within four months; and they were relatively fifteen times as many as left the Atlantic slope for California in 1849, when the world was astonished at the magnitude of the migration, and when all the business relations of the country were disturbed. Not only did one in sixteen of the men in California start for Fraser river, but one third of the others were preparing to go when the folly of the excitement became clear to the common com- prehension. For a time, fears had prevailed that the state would be depopulated, and that San Francisco would be stationary for many years, while Victoria, the chief port of the gold mines of British America, would become the metropolis of the coast. Real es-
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tate lost half its market value; lots on Montgomery street, between Bush and Sutter, were offered at two hundred dollars a front foot, and found no takers, though since in demand at eighteen hundred to two thousand dollars; and Blythe's gore, between Market and Geary, for which according to common report an offer of one million and a half dollars was rejected in 1876, was considered dear at thirty thousand dollars.
For several months California appeared to be on the verge of dissolution under the influence of the Fraser river. Some of the mining towns lost half their in- habitants. Placer claims that yielded ten dollars per day, net, to the man, were almost unsalable. Seats in the stages from the mining towns to Sacramento and Stockton were engaged for weeks in advance. Real estate fell in many places eighty per cent. in market value. In San Francisco, through which all the emigrants passed, and to which they paid a large tribute in many ways, there was a ruinous decline. Bankers, lawyers, wholesale merchants and real estate speculators began to make arrangements for transfer- ring their business to Victoria. The confident belief that New Caledonia would produce as much gold, and would be as lively in business as California had been in 1849, was extensive if not general; and to be in the midst of such another storm of gold dust would well be worth the sacrifice of a few thousand dollars. Before the middle of July, the credulous acceptance of the stories about the mineral wealth of the Fraser basin was seriously discredited by the failure to find
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any extensive diggings; early in August the excite- ment had become a subject of ridicule; and in Sep- tember the people wondered how they could ever have believed that there was any reason for an excitement.
It was calculated that the adventurers who went to Fraser river lost nine million dollars in the aggregate, including sixty dollars fare, sixty days time and one hundred dollars for outfit and freight money for each man on an average. The estimate was probably ex- travagant for the direct loss, but the indirect loss was much greater, especially in the depreciation of prop- erty in the mining districts. San Francisco, however, gained far more than she lost. The panic which threatened her with disaster, and for a few months caused many serious losses to individuals, soon re- acted, and made busines more active than before. The Fraser fever was really a turning point in the fortunes of the city. The money wasted by the miners had gone into the pockets of San Franciscan owners of steamers, stages, hotels and supplies. Here the adventurers all stopped, purchased outfits and paid passage money to transportation companies. The
shipping of the port, which had been decreasing for five years, now began to increase. The report of the excitement attracted many people from the Atlantic states, and the gain of population by sea was thirteen thousand, whereas it had been only five thousand annually, on an average, for the three preceding years. The temporary decline in city lots caused severe loss to individuals, but there was an equal profit for others;
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and as the disappointed miners generally declared when they got back, many of them having in the mean time traveled through the basins of the Colum- bia and Frazer rivers and Puget sound, that they would never leave California again, whatever mines might be discovered at a distance-these were the men who called this "God's country "-there was a heightened feeling of confidence in the permanent prosperity of the state. Before the end of the year, real estate in San Francisco was in more demand than it had been since 1855.
SEC. 133. 1859. The large increase in the pro- duction of wheat and wool, the extensive plantings of fruit trees and vines, the conviction, now taking strong hold of the public mind, that California had wonder- ful resources for agriculture, especially in its horticul- tural department, and a growing disposition on the part of many of the people to regard the state as a desirable place for permanent homes, contributed in 1859 to strengthen the era of prosperity that had its beginning in the previous year. The settlement of the titles of many large Mexican ranchos, and the belief that all the large claims to land in the city or its settled districts would be defeated, had favorable influences. Land rose in value, and building again became active. The Hayes tract of one hundred and fifty acres, south of Turk street and west of Larkin, including Hayes Valley, was sold at auction, bringing about one hundred and fifty dollars on an average for lots twenty-five feet in front by one hundred and ten
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feet deep. Several manufacturing establishments were erected, including a woolen mill and a glass fac- tory. The steam-paddy, which had been idle for six years, resumed work. Foreign coin was thrown out by the banks, thus excluding it from common cir- culation. The first reports of the discovery of the silver deposits of the Comstock lode were published in the summer, and before the end of the winter, forty tons of the ore, worked at San Francisco, had yielded one hundred thousand dollars net, after paying five hundred dollars per ton for transpor- tation and reduction. The political campaign of the year was very bitter. The people at the polls, by a large majority condemned the conduct of Mr. Brod- erick as senator, and a few days later he was mortally wounded in a duel.
SEC. 134. Early Politics. There had been no organization of political parties in California before its admission into the Union. But most of the citi- zens had brought with them from the East their old partisan opinions and prejudices, and were ready to unite or divide on party lines whenever opportunity should occur. The two national parties at that time were, in California at least, nearly agreed upon most of the questions which had agitated the country for ten years before, save the extension of slavery; and even in reference to that, the difference was under- stood rather than explicitly defined. Its most ardent advocates were all democrats; its most active oppon- ents, as a class, were whigs. Because of the pro-
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hibition of slavery in her constitution, the admission of California had been resisted by the democrats in Congress, and thus the people of the state were much offended, and driven towards the whig party, whose representatives had been the steadfast friends of the new state, and to whose support she mainly owed her triumph over the slavery men. But the favor which the whig party gained on account of democratic hos- tility to the admission of California, was more than counterbalanced by the blunders of the whig admin- istration in its treatment of her. Congress, absorbed with slavery and questions incidental to it, neglected the new state, which, on account of rapid growth, needed great attention. President Fillmore recom- mended the taxation of the mines, and thus irritated her people. The chief federal officials instead of be- ing selected from the old residents, were strangers sent out to take the honors and profits after others had faced the danger and done the work of pioneer life; and these "carpet-bag politicians," as their class was afterwards called, proved themselves in many cases incompetent and corrupt.
Thus it was that in all legislatures and in most of the counties, until the middle of 1854, the democrats had the majority. In 1851 they elected to the gov- ernorship John Bigler, a man who had neither the capacity, the education, nor the manners to grace the position. But as a good fellow with the multitude, he was an available candidate. The better democrats were ashamed of him, and especially the southern
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men, who could not pardon his coarseness, though they could have overlooked the unscrupulous manner in which he abused his official power for the benefit of his political friends. It was necessary that there should be a contention in the party for its control, and it divided into two nearly equal factions; the chivalry, or men from the slave states, in one, and the Tammany, or foreigners and natives of the free states, in the other. The line of separation was not dis- tinctly drawn; that is, there was no authoritative declaration of principles on either side, but a strong antagonism had broken out so early as 1852.
SEC. 135. Broderick. Among the pioneer citizens of California who arrived in 1849 was David C. Broderick, then about thirty years old, who, though a native of the national capital, had spent most of his years in New York City, where he had kept an ale house, had been a member of a fire company, had learned that he could manage men, and had acquired such popularity with a considerable proportion of voters that he had been a candidate for congress. His defeat in a district in which his party had fifteen hundred majority, and the public criticisms upon his career and associations, contributed to dis- gust him with his position in New York, and he was glad when he saw the prospect of commencing life again in California.
He made his home in San Francisco, and again got into politics through the fire department. He was a leader in the organization of the first fire company,
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but he took care to avoid the mistake of putting him- self on a level with all his fellow members. Though his early education had been limited, he had given much time to reading, and not without profit to him- self. The reward soon came. He had been in San Francisco but a few months when, with the help of the "boys" who had known him in New York, and his skill in partisan management, he was chosen state senator to represent the city.
Neither lawyer, statesman, nor orator, he attracted little attention in the first session of the legislature, when an entire code of laws had to be enacted. It was observed, however, that he was versed in parlia- mentary law; he could well explain those matters with which he was familiar; all his knowledge was ready at his tongue's end whenever required, and he had a character that gave him authority, influence, and the promise of political preferment. Governor Burnett having resigned and having been succeeded by John McDougal, when the senate met in 1851 it had to elect a president, who thus became lieutenant- governor. Broderick was chosen for the placc.
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