Perhaps it is a mile wide, that Golden Gate; and it is more bronze than
golden. A fort was on our right hand; one of those dear old brick
blockhouses that were formidable in their day, but now are as houses of
cards. Drop one shell within its hollow, and there will be nothing and
no one left to tell the tale.
Down the misty coast, beyond the fort, was Point Lobos--a place where
wolves did once inhabit; farther south lie the semi-tropics and the
fragrant orange lands; while on our left, to the north, is Point
Bonita--pretty enough in the sunshine,--and thereabout is Drake's Bay.
Behind us, dimly outlined on the horizon, the Farallones lie faintly
blue, like exquisite cloud-islands. The north shore of the entrance to
the Bay was rather forbidding,--it always is. The whole California shore
line is bare, bleak, and unbeautiful. It is six miles from the Golden
Gate to the sea-wall of San Francisco. There was no sea-wall in those
days.
We were steaming directly east, with the Pacific dead astern. Beyond the
fort were scantily furnished hill-slopes. That quadrangle, with a long
row of low white houses on three sides of it, is the _presidio_--the
barracks; a lorner or lonelier spot it were impossible to picture. There
were no trees there, no shrubs; nothing but grass, that was green enough
in the rainy winter season but as yellow as straw in the drouth of the
long summer. Beyond the _presidio_ were the Lagoon and Washerwoman's
Bay. Black Point was the extremest suburb in the early days; and beyond
it Meigg's Wharf ran far into the North Bay, and was washed by the
swift-flowing tide.
San Francisco has as many hills as Rome. The most conspicuous of these
stands at the northeast corner of the town; it is Telegraph Hill, upon
whose brawny shoulder stood the first home we knew in the young
Metropolis. After rounding Telegraph Hill, we saw all the city front,
and it was not much to see: a few wooden wharves crowded with shipping
and backed by a row of one or two-story frame buildings perched upon
piles. The harbor in front of the city--more like an open roadstead than
a harbor, for it was nearly a dozen miles to the opposite shore--was
dotted with sailing-vessels of almost every description, swinging at
anchor, and making it a pretty piece of navigation to pick one's way
amongst them in safety.
As the John L. Stevens approached her dock we saw that an immense crowd
had gathered to give us welcome. The excitement on ship and shore was
very great. After a separation of perhaps years, husbands and wives and
families were about to be reunited. Our joy was boundless; for we soon
recognized our father in the waiting, welcoming throng. But there were
many whose disappointment was bitter indeed when they learned that their
loved ones were not on board. Often a ship brought letters instead of
the expected wife and family; for at the last moment some unforeseen
circumstance may have prevented the departure of the one so looked for
and so longed for. In the confusion of landing we nearly lost our wits,
and did not fully recover them until we found ourselves in our own new
home in the then youngest State in the Union.
How well I remember it all! We were housed on Union Street, between
Montgomery and Kearny Streets, and directly opposite the public
school--a pretentious building for that period, inasmuch as it was built
of brick that was probably shipped around Cape Horn. California houses,
such as they were, used to come from very distant parts of the globe in
the early Fifties; some of them were portable, and had been sent across
the sea to be set up at the purchaser's convenience. They could be
pitched like tents on the shortest possible notice, and the fact was
evident in many cases.
Our house--a double one of modest proportions--was of brick, and I
think the only one on our side of the street for a considerable
distance. There was a brick house over the way, on the corner of
Montgomery Street, with a balcony in front of it and a grocery on the
ground-floor. That grocery was like a country store: one could get
anything there; and from the balcony above there was a wonderful view.
Indeed that was one of the jumping-off places; for a steep stairway led
down the hill to the dock two hundred feet below. As for our neighbors,
they dwelt in frame houses, one or two stories in height; and his was
the happier house that had a little strip of flowery-land in front of
it, and a breathing space in the rear.
The school--our first school in California--backed into the hill across
the street from us. The girls and the boys had each an inclosed space
for recreation. It could not be called a playground, for there was no
ground visible. It was a platform of wood heavily timbered beneath and
fenced in; from the front of it one might have cast one's self to the
street below, at the cost of a broken bone or two. In those days more
than one leg was fractured by an accidental fall from a soaring
sidewalk.
Above and beyond the school-house Telegraph Hill rose a hundred feet or
more. Our street marked the snow-line, as it were; beyond it the Hill
was not inhabited save by flocks of goats that browsed there all the
year round, and the herds of boys that gave them chase, especially of a
holiday. The Hill was crowned by a shanty that had seen its best days.
It had been the lookout from the time when the Forty-Niners began to
watch for fresh arrivals. From the observatory on its roof--a primitive
affair--all ships were sighted as they neared the Golden Gate, and the
glad news was telegraphed by a system of signals to the citizens below.
Not a day, not an hour, but watchful eyes sought that signal in the hope
of reading there the glad tidings that their ship had come.
The Hill sloped suddenly, from the signal station, on every side. On the
north and east it terminated abruptly in artificial cliffs of a dizzy
height. The rocks had been blasted from their bases to make room for a
steadily increasing commerce, and the débris was shipped away as ballast
in the vessels that were chartered to bring passengers and provision to
the coast, and found nothing in the line of freight to carry from it.
Upon those northern and eastern slopes of the Hill a few venturesome
cottagers had built their nests. The cottages were indeed nestlike: they
were so small, so compact, so cosy, so overrun with vines and flowering
foliage. Usually of one story, or of a story and a half at most, they
clung to the hillside facing the water, and looking out upon its noble
expanse from tiny balconies as delicate and dainty as toys. Their
garden-plots were set on end; they must needs adapt themselves to the
angle of demarkation; they loomed above their front-yards while their
back-yards lorded it over their roofs. Indeed they were usually
approached by ascending or descending stairways, or perchance by airy
bridges that spanned little gullies where ran rivulets in the winter
season; and they were a trifle dangerous to encounter after dark. There
were parrots on perches at the doorways of those cottages; and
song-birds in cages that were hidden away in vines. There were pet
poodles there. I think there were more lap-dogs than watch-dogs in that
early California.
And there were pleasant people within those hanging gardens,--people who
seemed to have drifted there and were living their lyrical if lonely
lives in semi-solitude on islands in the air. I always envied them. I
was sorry that we were housed like other folk, and fronted on a street
than which nothing could have been more commonplace or less interesting.
Its one redeeming feature in my eyes was its uncompromising steepness;
nothing that ran on wheels ever ran that way, but toiled painfully to
the top, tacking from side to side, forever and forever, all the way
up.
Weary were the beasts of burden that ascended that hill of difficulty.
There was the itinerant marketer, with his overladen cart, and his white
horse, very much winded. He was a Yorkshire man, and he cried with a
loud voice his appetizing wares: "Cabbage, taters, onions, wild duck,
wild goose!" Well do I remember the refrain. Probably there were few
domestic fowls in the market then; moreover, even our drinking water was
peddled about the streets and sold to us by the huge pailful.
The goats knew Saturday and Sunday by heart. Every Saturday we lads were
busier than bees. We had at intervals during the week collected what
empty tin cans we might have chanced upon, and you may be sure they were
not a few. The markets of California, in early times, were stocked with
canned goods. Flour came to us in large cans; probably the barrel would
not have been proof against mould during the long voyage around the
Horn. Everything eatable--I had almost said and drinkable--we had in
cans; and these cans when emptied were cast into the rubbish heap and
finally consigned to the dump-cart.
We boys all became smelters, and for a very good reason. There was a
market for soft solder; we could dispose of it without difficulty; we
could in this way put money in our purse and experience the glorious
emotion awakened by the spirit of independence. With our own money,
earned in the sweat of our brows--it was pretty hot work melting the
solder out of the old cans and moulding it in little pig-leads of our
own invention,--we could do as we pleased and no questions asked. Oh, it
was a joy past words,--the kindling of the furnace fires, the adjusting
of the cans, the watching for the first movement of the melting solder!
It trickled down into the ashes like quicksilver, and there we let it
cool in shapeless masses; then we remelted it in skillets (usually
smuggled from the kitchen for that purpose), and ran the fused metal
into the moulds; and when it had cooled we were away in haste to dispose
of it.
Some of us became expert amateur metallists, and made what we looked
upon as snug little fortunes; yet they did not go far or last us long.
The smallest coin in circulation was a dime. No one would accept a
five-cent piece. As for coppers, they are scarcely yet in vogue. Money
was made so easily and spent so carelessly in the early days the wonder
is that any one ever grew rich.
A quarter of a dollar we called two "bits." If we wished to buy anything
the price of which was one bit and we had a dime in our pocket, we gave
the dime for the article, and the bargain was considered perfectly
satisfactory. If we had no dime, we gave a quarter of a dollar and
received in change a dime; we thus paid fifty per cent more for the
article than we should have done if we had given a dime for it. But that
made no difference: a quarter called for two bits' worth of anything on
sale. A dime was one bit, but two dimes were not two bits; and it was
only a very mean person--in our estimation--who would change his half
dollar into five dimes and get five bits' worth of goods for four bits'
worth of silver.
[Illustration: City of Oakland in 1856]
Sunday is ever the people's day, and a San Francisco Sunday used to be
as lively as the Lord's Day at any of the capitals of Europe. How the
town used to flock to Telegraph Hill on a Sunday in the olden time! They
were mostly quiet folk who went there, and they went to feast their eyes
upon one of the loveliest of landscapes or waterscapes. They probably
took their lunch with them, and their families--if they had them; though
families were infrequent in the Fifties. They wandered about until they
had chosen their point of view, and then they took possession of an
unclaimed portion of the Hill. They "squatted," as was the custom of the
time. The "squatter" claimed the right of sovereignty, and exercised it
so long as he was left unmolested.
One man seemed to have as much right as another on Telegraph Hill. And
one right was always his: no one disputed him the right of vision; he
shared it with his neighbor, and was willing to share it with the whole
world. For generations he has held it, and he will probably continue to
hold it so long as the old Hill stands. From the heights his eye sweeps
a scene of beauty. There is the Golden Gate, bathed in sunset glories;
and there the northern shore line that climbs skyward where Mount
Tamalpais takes on his mantle of mist. There is Saucelito, with its
green terraces resting upon the tree-tops; and there the bit of
sheltered water that seems always steeped in sunshine,--now the haunt of
house boats, then the haven of a colony of Neapolitan fishermen; and
Angel Island, with its military post; and Fort Alcatraz, a rocky bubble
afloat in mid-channel and one mass of fortifications.
What an inland sea it is--the Bay of San. Francisco, seventy miles in
length, from ten to twelve in width; dotted with islands, and capable of
harboring all the fleets of all the civilized or uncivilized worlds! The
northern part of it, beyond the narrows, is known as the Bay of San
Pablo; the Straits of Carquinez connect it with Suisun Bay, which is a
sleepy sheet of water fed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.
To the east is Yerba-Buena, vulgarly known as Goat Island; and beyond it
the Contra Costa, with its Alameda, Oakland, and Fruit Vale; then the
Coast Range; and atop of all and beyond all Mount Diablo, with its three
thousand eight hundred feet of perpendicularity, beyond whose summit
the sun rises, and from whose peaks almost half the State is visible and
almost half the sea,--or at least it seems so--but that's another
vision!