Historical and biographical record of southern California; containing a history of southern California from its earliest settlement to the opening year of the twentieth century, Part 21

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1902
Publisher: Chicago, Chapman pub. co.
Number of Pages: 1366

USA > California > Historical and biographical record of southern California; containing a history of southern California from its earliest settlement to the opening year of the twentieth century > Part 21

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But the event that promised the greatest out- come for San Diego during the decade was the establishment of an overland mail route between San Antonio de Bexar, Tex., and San Diego. The route was by the way of El Paso, Messillo, Tucson and Colorado City (now Yuma)-1,500 miles. The service was semi-monthly. The contract was let to James E. Burch, the postal department reserving "the right to curtail or discontinue the service should any route subse- quently put under contract cover the whole or any portion of the route."

The San Diego Herald, August 12, 1857, thus notes the departure of the first train : "The pioneer mail train from San Diego to San An- tonio, Tex., under the contract entered into by the government with Mr. Jas. Burch, left here on the oth inst. (August 9, 1857) at an early hour in the morning, and is now push- ing its way for the east at a rapid rate. The mail was, of course, carried on pack ani- mals, as will be the case until the wagons which are being pushed across will have been put on the line. The first train from this side left in charge of Mr. R. W. Laine, who was accompanied by some of the most active and reliable young men in the county, the party taking relay mules with them for use on the des- ert. The intention is to push on at the rate of fifty or sixty miles a day to Tucson, where, en- tering the Apache country proper, a large party

will be organized to afford proper protection as far as El Paso del Norte or further if neces- sary. The first mail from the other side has not yet arrived, although somewhat overdue, and conjecture is rife as to the cause of the delay. Until the arrival of the next express from Fort Yuma we will probably receive no tidings from the country through which the mail has to pass, but for our own part we see no reason for alarm in the case. The train leaving liere took a large number of letters for Fort Yuma, Tucson, Calabasas, El Paso, etc., in addi- tion to the regular eastern mail." The eastern arrived in a few days later and the San Diegans went wild with joy and built in imagination a city of vast proportions on the bay.

The service continued to improve and the fifth trip from the eastward terminus "was made in the extraordinary short time of twenty-six days and twelve hours," and the San Diego Herald on its arrival, October 6, rushed out an extra "announcing the very gratifying fact of the complete triumph of the southern route. notwithstanding the croaking of many of the opponents of the Administration in this state." "The first mail," so said the extra, "from San Diego had arrived at San Antonio in good style and created naturally a great excitement, the Texans taking fully as much interest in the es- tablishment of the line as the Californians."

But the triumph of the "Southern route" was of short duration. September, 1858, the stages of the Butterfield line began making their semi- weekly trips. This line came down the coast to Gilroy, then through the Pacheco Pass, up the San Joaquin valley and by way of Fort Tejon to Los Angeles; then eastward by Temecula and Warner's ranch to Yuma, then across Ari- zona and New Mexico to El Paso, where it turned north to St. Louis and Memphis, its cast- ern termini. San Diego and San Antonio werc sidetracked and the Southern route discon- tinued.

OLD TOWN AND NEW TOWN IN STATU QUO.

After this temporary spirt of enterprise, San Diego lapsed into its old poco tiempo ways. Old Town remained in statu quo and New Town did not expand. There had been rumors of a railroad in 1854 and in 1857, but the mut- tering of the coming storm between the north and the south had frightened capital and the hope of a railroad had been given up. During the Civil war, there were some troops always at the barracks, sometimes one company, some- times two or three. The soldiers stationed there did not add much to the revenue of the town. The pay of a private was $13 a month in green- backs, which, converted into coin at the rate

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of thirty to forty cents silver for a dollar cur- rency, did not give the defenders of the coun- try lavish amounts of spending money. A con- siderable amount of the supplies for the troops were landed at San Diego and sent to Fort Yuma by wagon trains. This gave employment to a number of men and teams and added to the business of the town.

The drought years of 1863 and 1864 were not so disastrous to San Diego as to some of the other cow counties. The ranges were not so heavily overstocked and there was more back country not covered by Spanish grants where cattle could be driven when the feed was ex- hausted on the other ranges.

CHAPTER XXIII. SAN DIEGO COUNTY-Continued.

THE NEW ER.1.

U P TO 1867 San Diego town and county had retained the Mexican customs and conditions of early times more nearly un- changed than any other town or county in the state. Their awakening from a Rip Van Winkle sleep, not of twenty years, but of twenty lus- trums, was the work of one man. April 6, 1867, Alonzo E. Horton landed in San Diego. He had come down from San Francisco to build a city. The outlook was not encouraging. Old Town was appropriately named; anything new in it would be out of place. It had the appear- ance of having been finished years before and then forgotten. New Town consisted of the government barracks, officers' quarters, the piles of the Davis wharf and a few houses that had escaped the "wreck of matter" the soldiers had made. Horton was not discouraged. The bay was there. The climate was there and there he determined to build a city.

Horton induced the town trustees to offer a tract of land lying east of New Town on the shore of the bay for sale. At the public sale in May, 1867, he bid off a tract of nearly 900 acres of the pueblo lands at twenty-six cents an acre, and had it surveyed and platted as Hor- ton's Addition to San Diego. The tract is now the center of the city of San Diego. He put his tract on sale. It went slowly, very slowly at first. His returns for the year 1867 were but $3.000. He gave away land to any one who would agree to make substantial improve- ments. He deeded lots to churches, for hotels and other improvements. He built a wharf, and in 1869 began the erection of the Horton House, the largest hotel at that time in Southern Cali- fornia.

The seed that he had sown now began to bear fruit. The rumor that there was a city building on the bay of San Diego had gone abroad, and people came to buy lots. Another rumor, too, had heen spread, and that was that

the long-talked-of thirty-second parallel railroad was a certainty. Tom Scott had taken hold of it and Tom Scott was a power in railroad cir- cles. In 1868, immigration had begun to drift southward and find lodgment in the coast coun- ties. In the fall of 1869, the drift was to San Diego, and it resembled an old-time "gold rush." The author has a vivid recollection of a voyage down the coast in the old Senator in the fall of '69. Every berth had been sold a week before the vessel sailed, and then the agents of the company sold standing room. The steamer's cooks and waiters commenced feeding the passengers about six o'clock in the morning and kept it up with slight interruptions till nine at night. The dining saloon was small and the crowd on board necessitated the setting of the tables many times. When all had been fed the tables were cleared, the passengers without berths bunked on the tables, under the tables, or wherever they could spread their blankets. All or nearly all were bound to San Diego to buy lots. The railroad was coming : San Diego was destined to rival San Francisco, and the lot buyers wanted to grow up with the city. Many of the speculators were old Cali- fornians who had not struck it rich, but were sure they were on the right road now. One old '49er, in the spring of 1850, had owned a lot on Montgomery street, San Francisco, and had sold it for $400; now it was worth $100,000: he would secure a lot in San Diego and hold on to it and grow in wealth as the town grew in size. And so the talk ran all day and far into the night, of bay and climate, of house lots and business blocks, of transcontinental railroads and Oriental steamships, which were sure to build up a mighty metropolis in the Southland.

August 4, 1868, Joseph Nash erected the first store in New Town. Its entire population then numbered twenty-three souls. In the spring of 1870 the city had upwards of 800 buildings, with a population of 3,000. Among its substantial improvements were two magnificent wharves,

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costing in the aggregate $80,000; a flouring mill with a capacity of 300 barrels a day ; sev- eral warehouses, half a dozen hotels, two brew- eries, a boot and shoe factory, a bank and two newspapers.

The Horton House was completed and opened October 20, 1870. It cost nearly $150,- 000 and was then "the most elaborate, attractive and spacious hotel outside of San Francisco." The editor of the Bulletin, in a two-column write-up of its attractions, classifies it with the great hotels of the world; his enumeration of the great hostelries of 30 years ago is interest- ing. Some of them have fallen from their high estate. He says: "What the Grand Hotel is to Paris; Langham's to London; the Astor, Fifth Avenue and St. Nicholas to New York; the Continental to Philadelphia; the Tremont and Parker's to Boston; Barnum's to Balti- more; St. Charles to New Orleans; the Galt to Louisville; the Southern to St. Louis ; the Sher- man and Tremont to Chicago; the Grand, Lick, Occidental and Cosmopolitan to San Francisco, and the Pico House to Los Angeles, the Horton House is to San Diego." S. W. Churchill was its first manager.

The act authorizing the construction of the Thirty-Second Parallel, the Southern Trans- Continental, the Southern Pacific, the Texas Pa- cific Railroad (for it was called by all these names) failed to pass at the session of congress in 1869-70; but at the next session it passed by a two-thirds vote on the 3d of March, 1871. Then there was great rejoicing in the city by the bay. The Bulletin says: "As we go to press our city is in a blaze of glory. Fifth street looms up like an immense conflagration. Bon-fires, fireworks, anvil firing and rejoicing are the order of the night." And they had cause to rejoice. For years they had been yearning for a railroad with that "hope deferred that maketh the heart sick"; and now their longings were soon to be satisfied by the "Greatest Railroad of the Age," as the Washington Chronicle pronounced it. That paper said: "No act of the Forty-first Congress will be longer remembered to its credit than that authorizing the construction of a great trans-continental iron highway from the eastern boundary of Texas, near Marshall, via El Paso, to the town of San Diego, on the bay of that name in the state of California." How transitory is fame! Both the railroad and the Forty-first Congress have long since been for- gotten !

The act of congress authorizing the build- ing of the railroad settled the question in the minds of the San Diegans. To doubt its build- ing was treason to San Diego. The future of the city was assured; and a brilliant future it

was-San Diego, the seaport of the Occident and the entrepot of the Orient. Branch roads were projected into the back country. San Bernardino was clamoring for railroad connec- tion with the metropolis of the south, and Tom Scott was making overtures to Los Angeles for a coast railroad from that city to San Diego. The trade of the Orient would eventually pass through San Diego to the east. There were rumors of an Oriental steamship company in thic formative stage. The Panama steamers began stopping at the port, and the Bulletin said: "We hail this event as only second to that in which is recorded the passage of the Southern Pacific Railroad bill." The prices of real estate went up; indeed, under the circumstances it would have been impossible to keep them down. The

Bulletin of March 25 says : "The real-estate transactions of the past week are larger than ever before in the history of San Diego and must appear rather nauseating to those newspapers which have been sneering at San Diego for the past year. By the way, we know a gentleman of San José who purchased a block on Fifth street two years ago for $600 and was damned by a paper of his town for so doing. He has been offered $8,000 for the same since the bill passed."

Horton sold $83,000 worth of lots in two months after the passage of the bill and a n11111- ber of real-estate agents were doing their best to supply the demand. The boomers like Sila ; Wegg dropped into poetry and a song first sung at a concert in Horton's Hall became the popu- lar ditty of San Diego. I give a few sample stanzas :

"Away to the west, where the sun goes down. Where the oranges grow by the cargo,

They've started a town, and are doing it up brown, On the bay of San Diego.

"The railroad, they say, is coming that way, And then they'll be neighbors to Chicago;

So they built a big hotel, and built it mighty well,

In the town of San Diego." *

Moral :

"Let's take an early train and haste with might and main,

By lightning express if you say-go,

Where every man's a fortune in a lot that costs him naught,

In the town of San Diego."

April 14, 1871, the postmaster-general or- dered a change of the name of the postoffice at

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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.

South San Diego to San Diego. So New Town, South San Diego and Horton's Addition became simply San Diego.

December 27, 1871, an election was held to vote upon the issue of bonds to the amount of $100,000 to be proffered to any railroad com- pany that would build a railroad connecting San Bernardino with San Diego. The bond issue was carried with an overwhelming majority. San Bernardino also held an election and voted a bond issue equal to five per cent of its taxable property for the same purpose.

The Bay Shore & Coast Road to Los Angeles met with disaster. At the election held in Los Angeles county to vote on the issue of railroad bonds, the Texas Pacific Coast Line and the Southern Pacific to Yuma were competitors. The Southern Pacific won, securing bonds and other subsidy to the amount of $610,000.

In 1872, "Father" Horton, as he was famil- iarly called, erected a large building for the Texas Pacific Railroad offices, but the employes of that corporation never occupied it. It was afterward used as a city hall. Grading was begun on the roadbed of the Texas Pacific in the latter part of 1872, but was not pushed with a great deal of vigor. About twelve miles of roadbed in all were graded.

In 1873 came a financial crash. "Black Fri- day in Wall street" was followed by one of the worst panics that ever struck the country. For- tunes crumbled, banks failed, capital hid, railroad building stopped. Enterprises that had prom- ised large returns were dropped immediately. Work on the Texas Pacific ceased and was never resumed.

San Diego during its boom had grown to be a city of 5,000 inhabitants. When work ceased on the railroad the population began to dwindle away. Building in the city ceased. There was nothing to do to earn a living. People could not live on climate, however invigorating, so they left. Father Horton, during flush times, had sold a number of lots to working men on the installment plan. They came to him and offered to give up the lots and let him retain the money paid if he would cancel their con- tracts. With a generosity unknown in real- estate deals he refunded all the money they had paid and released them of their obligations. In 1875 the population had dwindled down to about 1,500, and these were living largely on faith, hope and climate.

The Kimball brothers, owners of the Rancho de la Nacion, had, during the flush times of the early '70s, laid off a town on the bay about four miles distant from San Diego, and named it National City. It had shared in the ups and downs of the larger city.

A NEW RAILROAD SCIIEME.

In 1880 the Kimballs began agitating the project of inducing the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, that had built out into New Mexi- co, to continue its road to San Diego and National City. They met with but little encour- agement at home. For thirty years the people of San Diego had been talking Pacific railroad and their town was no nearer being the terminus of a trans-continental road in '80 than it was in '50. But the Kimballs persisted. One of the Kimball brothers went east at his own expense and presented his scheme to capitalists and rail- road men. He met with little success at first, but the offer of 17,000 acres of land on the bay for workshops and terminal grounds induced the directors of the road to investigate the propo- sition. Other parties owning land contiguous offered additional grants. The railroad company accepted the subsidy and work was begun on the road; and in August, 1882, the California Southern, as the road was then called, was com- pleted to Colton, on the Southern Pacific; and in 1884 to San Bernardino. There it stopped. The great flood of 1884 destroyed the track in the Temécula cañon and once more San Diego was without railroad connection. In 1885 the road through the cañon had been rebuilt and trains were running over it. During the same year the work of extending the California South- ern to Barstow, a station on the Atlantic & Pa- cific, was begun, and early in 1887 was con- pleted. This road and the connecting roads- the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe and the Atlantic & Pacific-formed a trans-continental system of which San Diego and National City were the western termini.

With the rebuilding of the California South- ern through the canon in 1885, and the begin- ning of work on its extension, the cloud of de- spondency that had darkened the hopes of the San Diegans began to lift a little ; as work pro- gressed and a trans-continental line became more of a certainty, capitalists and speculators came to the town to look around. The okl- timers who had loaded up with lots in the boom of 1871-72 and had held on through all the inter- vening years, simply because they could not let go without losing all, began quietly to unload on the newcomers. The old resident had faith -faith unbounded-in the future of the city. but out of charity to the lot-less he was willing to divide a good thing; and when the transfer was made he chuckled over his smartness. But when the buyer turned over his purchase at an advance of twenty-five or fifty per cent the chuckle died away into a sigh and at the next transfer, when the price ad-

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vanced a hundred per cent, the sigh increased to a groan.

As the reverberations of the boom grew louder the faithful old inhabitant turned specula- tor himself and loaded up perhaps with a single lot of the block he had formerly sold, at a price a hundred per cent higher than he had received for the entire tract. In the spring and summer of 1887, speculation ran riot in the streets of San Diego. Prices of real estate went up until it scemed as if they could go no higher; then some adventurous investor would break the rec- ord and the holders along the line would mark up the price of their holdings. Business lots, that a few years before were a drug ou the mar- ket at $25 a front foot, found buyers at $2,500 a foot. A small-sized store room rented all the way from $300 to $500 a month for business, and if cut up into stalls for real estate brokers, brought in a thousand a month. Small and poorly furnished sleeping rooms rented all the way from $25 to $50 a month, prices varying with the landlord's cupidity and the tenant's necessity. The prices of labor kept pace with speculation. Carpenters received $5 to $6 a day, bricklayers $6 to $8. Barbers asked twenty- five cents for a shave and printers earned $50 to $60 a week.

The fame of San Diego's boom spread abroad. The trains came in loaded with speculators, boomers, gamblers and bona fide home-seekers. In the wild gold rush of the early '5os it was a common saying among old Californians "that renegade ministers made the most adroit gam- blers." So in the boom of '87 the confiding home-secker often proved to be the most tin- scrupulous operator. At one time during the height of the boom it was estimated that the city had a population of 50,000 people. It was a cosmopolitan conglomeration. Almost every civilized nation on earth was represented; and every social condition, high and low, good and bad, was there, too.

The excitement was not confined to San Diego city. It spread over the county. New towns were founded. The founder in selecting a location was governed more by the revenue that might accrue from his speculation than by the resources that would build up his inchoate metropolis. It might be platted on an inaccessi- ble mesa, where view was the principal resource, or it might be a hyphenated city-by-the-sca, where the investor might while away his time listening to what the wild waves were saying and subsist on climate.

It is said that two town sites extended ont over the bay like Mark Twain's tunnel that was .bored through the hill and a hundred and fifty feet into the air. When the fever of speculation

was at its height it mattered little where the town was located. A tastefully lithographed map with a health-giving sanatorium in one corner, a tourist hotel in the other, palms lining the streets, and orange trees in the distance-add to these picturesque attractions a glib-tongued agent, untrammeled by conscience and unac- quainted with truth, and the town was success- fully founded. Purchasers did not buy to hold, but with hope of making a quick turn at an advance, while the excitement was on. Very few had confidence in the permanency of high prices, but every one expected to unload before the crash came.

The tourist crop of the winter of 1887-88 was expected to be very large, but it did not mature. As the eventful year of 1887 drew to a close and new victims ceased to appear, he who had loaded up for the tourist began to look around quietly for a chance to unload on his fel- lows. Then he discovered to his dismay that all the others were at the same game. Then the crash came. The speculator who held the last contract could not pay ; the one before hin could not meet his obligations unless the man to whom he had sold paid up; and so it went all along the line like a row of bricks set on end. The end one toppling over the one next to it starts the movement down the line, and all go down. Before the ides of March had passed every speculator was vainly trying to save some- thing from the wreck. Those who had invested recklessly in boom towns and dry lands lost all ; those who had some good unincumbered prop- erty in a town or city with a future managed to save a little out of the crash, but "capitalist" no longer followed their names in the directory.

No better criterion probably can be given for measuring the great inflation of property values during the boom than the county assessment rolls for 1887 and 1888. The valuation of all property made by the county assessor at the be- ginning of the boom early in 1887 was $22,862,- 250. The assessed value fixed early in 1888 be- fore the collapse had begun was $41,522,608, an increase of almost one hundred per cent in twelve months. In 1800 the assessment had contracted to $26,871,55 [.

But with all its wild extravagance, its reckless- ness, its gambling, its waste and its ruined "mil- lionaires of a day," the boom to San Diego was a blessing in disguise. It projected enterprises of merit as well as those of demerit. It helped to make a reality of that "back country" that for years had been a myth, and it brought about the building of a substantial city of what had before been a crude and inchoate burgh. Strange to say, too, the great enterprises projected dur- ing the boom were all carried on to completion,

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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.

notwithstanding the hard times that followed. Depression did not stop progression.

The San Diego Sun, two years after the boom, summing up what had been done since, says : "Since 1887, the Cuyamaca Railway has been built and motor lines extended at a cash outlay of $350,000; the Spreckel's Company has put $250,000 into a wharf and coal bunkers; all our business streets have been paved; a $100,000 court-house built and paid for; three fine school- houses, and all our big hotels except two con- structed. Five miles of cable road have been built and put in operation ; a fine public library has been established; a new opera-house will soon be completed. The adjacent mining regions have yielded at least $1,000,000 in gold. The great irrigating works of the Sweetwater dam and San Diego flume, involving an expense of $2,500,000, have been constructed, and water supplied at the lowest western prices. Not less than fifteen elegant business blocks have been built, and several fine churches. Over a hun- dred new residences have been built on Flor- ence Heights alone. To sum it all up, $10,000,- 000 have been invested in San Diego and its en- virons since 1887, and the back country has ob- tained and planted 600,000 fruit trees ; which, with those already out, promise to fill, seven years hence, 10,000 freight cars with merchant- able products."

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Historical and biographical record of southern California; containing a history of southern California from its earliest settlement to the opening year of the twentieth century, Part 21

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918 Publication date: 1902 Publisher: Chicago, Chapman pub. co. Number of Pages: 1366

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1902
Publisher: Chicago, Chapman pub. co.
Number of Pages: 1366