Social San Francisco during the early Fifties seems to have been a
conglomeration of unexpected externals and surprising interiors. It was
heterogeneous to the last degree. It was hail-fellow-well-met, with a
reservation; it asked no questions for conscience's sake; it would not
have been safe to do so. There were too many pasts in the first families
and too many possible futures to permit one to cast a shadow upon the
other. And after all is said, if sins may be forgiven and atoned for,
why should the memory of a shady past imperil the happiness and
prosperity of the future? All futures should be hopeful; they were
"promise-crammed" in that healthy and hearty city by the sea.
It was impossible, not to say impolite, to inquire into your neighbors'
antecedents. It was currently believed that the mines were filled with
broken-down "divines," as if it were but a step from the pulpit to the
pickaxe. As for one's family, it was far better off in the old home so
long as the salary of a servant was seventy dollars a month, fresh eggs
a dollar and a quarter a dozen, turkeys ten dollars apiece, and coal
fifty dollars a ton.
In 1854 and 1855 San Francisco had a monthly magazine that any city or
state might have been proud of; this was _The Pioneer_, edited by the
Rev. Ferdinand C. Ewer. In 1851, a lady, the wife of a physician, went
with her husband into the mines and settled at Rich Bar and Indian Bar,
two neighboring camps on the north fork of the Feather River. There were
but three or four other women in that part of the country, and one of
these died. This lady wrote frequent and lengthy descriptive letters to
a sister in New England, and these letters were afterward published
serially in _The Pioneer_. They picture life as a highly-accomplished
woman knew it in the camps and among the people whom Bret Harte has
immortalized. She called herself "Dame Shirley," and the "Shirley
Letters" in _The Pioneer_ are the most picturesque, vivid, and valuable
record of life in a California mining camp that I know of. The wonder is
that they have never been collected and published in book form; for they
have become a part of the history of the development of the State.
The life of a later period in San Francisco and Monterey has been
faithfully depicted by another hand. The life that was a mixture of
Gringo and diluted Castilian--a life that smacked of the presidio and
the hacienda,--that was a tale worth telling; and no one has told it so
freely, so fully or so well as Gertrude Franklin Atherton.
"Dame Shirley" was Mrs. L.A.C. Clapp. When her husband died she went to
San Francisco and became a teacher in the Union Street public school. It
was this admirable lady who made literature my first love; and to her
tender mercies I confided my maiden efforts in the art of composition.
She readily forgave me then, and was the very first to offer me
encouragement; and from that hour to this she has been my faithful
friend and unfailing correspondent.
South Park and Rincon Hill! Do the native sons of the golden West ever
recall those names and think what dignity they once conferred upon the
favored few who basked in the sunshine of their prosperity? South Park,
with its line of omnibuses running across the city to North Beach; its
long, narrow oval, filled with dusty foliage and offering a very weak
apology for a park; its two rows of houses with, a formal air, all
looking very much alike, and all evidently feeling their importance.
There were young people's "parties" in those days, and the height of
felicity was to be invited to them. As a height o'ertops a hollow, so
Rincon Hill looked down upon South Park. There was more elbow-room on
the breezy height; not that the height was so high or so broad, but it
_was_ breezy; and there was room for the breeze to blow over gardens
that spread about the detached houses their wealth of color and perfume.
How are the mighty fallen! The Hill, of course, had the farthest to
fall. South Parkites merely moved out: they went to another and a better
place. There was a decline in respectability and the rent-roll, and no
one thinks of South Park now,--at least no one speaks of it above a
whisper. As for the Hill, the Hillites hung on through everything; the
waves of commerce washed all about it and began gnawing at its base; a
deep gully was cut through it, and there a great tide of traffic ebbed
and flowed all day. At night it was dangerous to pass that way without a
revolver in one's hand; for that city is not a city in the barbarous
South Seas, whither preachers of the Gospel of peace are sent; but is a
civilized city and proportionately unsafe.
A cross-street was lowered a little, and it leaped the chasm in an agony
of wood and iron, the most unlovely object in a city that is made up of
all unloveliness. The gutting of this Hill cost the city the fortunes of
several contractors, and it ruined the Hill forever. There is nothing
left to be done now but to cast it into the midst of the sea. I had
sported on the green with the goats of goatland ere ever the stately
mansion had been dreamed of; and it was my fate to set up my tabernacle
one day in the ruins of a house that even then stood upon the order of
its going,--it did go impulsively down into that "most unkindest cut,"
the Second Street chasm. Even the place that once knew it has followed
after.
The ruin I lived in had been a banker's Gothic home. When Rincon Hill
was spoiled by bloodless speculators, he abandoned it and took up his
abode in another city. A tenant was left to mourn there. Every summer
the wild winds shook that forlorn ruin to its foundations. Every winter
the rains beat upon it and drove through and through it, and undermined
it, and made a mush of the rock and soil about it; and later portions of
that real estate deposited themselves, pudding-fashion, in the yawning
abyss below.
I sat within, patiently awaiting the day of doom; for well I knew that
my hour must come. I could not remain suspended in midair for any length
of time: the fall of the house at the northwest corner of Harrison and
Second Streets must mark my fall. While I was biding my time, there came
to me a lean, lithe stranger. I knew him for a poet by his unshorn locks
and his luminous eyes, the pallor of his face and his exquisitely
sensitive hands. As he looked about my eyrie with aesthetic glance,
almost his first words were: "What a background for a novel!" He seemed
to relish it all--the impending crag that might topple any day or hour;
the modest side door that had become my front door because the rest of
the building was gone; the ivy-roofed, geranium-walled conservatory
wherein I slept like a Babe in the Wood, but in densest solitude and
with never a robin to cover me.
He liked the crumbling estate, and even as much of it as had gone down
into the depths forever. He liked the sagging and sighing cypresses,
with their roots in the air, that hung upon and clung upon the rugged
edge of the remainder. He liked the shaky stairway that led to it (when
it was not out of gear), and all that was irrelative and irrelevant;
what might have been irritating to another was to him singularly
appealing and engaging; for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name
was Robert Louis Stevenson. He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill
to chat and to dream; he called it "the most San Francisco-ey part of
San Francisco," and so it was. It was the beginning and the end of the
first period of social development on the Pacific coast. There is a
picture of it, or of the South Park part of it, in Gertrude Atherton's
story, "The Californians." The little glimpse that Louis Stevenson had
of it in its decay gave him a few realistic pages for _The Wrecker_.
I have referred to the surprising interiors of the city in the Fifties.
What I meant was this: there was not an alley so miserable and so muddy
but somewhere in it there was pretty sure to be a cottage as demure in
outward appearance as modesty itself. Nothing could be more unassuming:
it had not even the air of genteel poverty. I think such an air was not
to be thought of in those days: gentility kept very much to itself. As
for poverty, it was a game that any one might play at any moment, and
most had played at it.
This cottage stood there--I think I will say _sat_ there, it looked so
perfectly resigned,--and no doubt commanded a rent quite out of
proportion to its size. It had its shaky veranda and its French windows,
and was lined with canvas; for there was not a trowel full of plaster in
it. The ceiling bellied and flapped like an awning when the wind soughed
through the clapboards; and the walls sometimes visibly heaved a sigh;
but they were covered with panelled paper quite palatial in texture and
design, and that is one thing that made those interiors surprising.
At the windows the voluminous lace draperies were almost overpowering.
Satin lambrequins were festooned with colossal cord and tassels of
bullion. A plate-glass mirror as wide as the mantel reflected the
Florentine gilt carving of its own elaborate frame. There were bronzes
on the mantel, and tall vases of Sévres, and statuettes of bisque
brilliantly tinted. At the two sides of the mantel stood pedestals of
Italian marble surmounted by urns of the most graceful and elegant
proportions, and profusely ornamented with sculptured fruits and
flowers. There was the old-fashioned square piano in its carven case,
and cabinets from China or East India; also a lacquered Japanese screen,
marble-topped tables of filigreed teek, brackets of inlaid ebony. Curios
there were galore. Some paintings there were, and these rocked softly
upon the gently-heaving walls. As for the velvet carpet, it was a bed of
gigantic roses that might easily put to the blush the prime of summer in
a queen's garden.
I well remember another home in San Francisco, one that possessed for me
the strongest attraction. It was bosomed in the sandhills south of
Market Street,--I know not between what streets, for they had all been
blurred or quite obliterated by drifts of sifting sand. It was a small
house fenced about; but the fence was for the most part buried under
sand, and looked as if it were a rampart erected for the defense of this
isolated cot. Some few hardy flowers had been planted there, but they
were knee-deep in sand, and their petals were full of grit. One usually
blew into that house with a pinch of sand, but how good it was to be
there!
Within those walls there was the unmistakable evidence of the feminine
touch, the aesthetic influence that refines and beautifies everything.
It was not difficult to idealize in that atmosphere. It was the home of
a lady who chose to conceal her identity, though her pen-name was a
household word from one end of the coast to the other. She was a star
contributor to the weekly columns of the _Golden Era,_ a periodical we
all subscribed for and were immensely proud of. It was unique in its
way. Of late years I have found no literary journal to compare with it
at its best. It introduced Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford,
Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and many others, to their first circle of
admirers. In the large mail-box at its threshold--a threshold I dared
not cross for awe of it--I dropped my earliest efforts in verse, and
then ran for fear of being caught in the act.
Imagine the joy of a lad whose ambition was to write something worth
printing, and whose wildest dream was to be named some day with those
who had won their laurels in the field of letters,--imagine his joy at
being petted in the sanctum of one who was in his worshipful eyes the
greatest lady in the land! About her were the trophies of her triumph,
though she was personally known to few. Each post brought her tribute
from the grateful hearts of her readers afar off in the mountain mining
camps, and perhaps from beyond the Rockies; or, it may have been, from
the unsuspecting admirer who lived just beyond the first sandhill. This
was another surprising interior. There was plain living and high
thinking in the midst of a wilderness that was, to say the least,
uninviting; the windows rattled and the sand peppered them. Without was
the abomination of desolation; but within the desert blossomed as the
rose.
There were other homes as homely as the one I preferred--for there was
sand enough to go round. It went round and round, as God probably
intended it should, until a city sat upon it and kept it quiet. Some of
these homes were perched upon solitary hilltops, and were lost to sight
when the fog came in from the sea; and some were crowded into the thick
of the town, with all sorts of queer people for neighbors. You could,
had you chosen to, look out of a back window into a hollow square full
of cats and rats and tin cans; and upon the three sides of the
quadrangle which you were facing, you might have seen, unblushingly
revealed, all the mysteries and miseries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and
Oceanica; for they were all of them represented by delegates.
Of course there were handsome residences (not so very many of them as
yet), where there was fine art--some of the finest. But often this art
was to be found in the saloons, and the subjects chosen would hardly
find entertainment elsewhere. The furnishing of the houses was within
the bounds of good taste. Monumental marbles were not erected by the
hearth-side; the window drapery was diaphanous rather than dense and
dowdy. The markets of San Francisco were much to blame for the
flashiness of the domestic interior: they were stocked with the gaudiest
fixtures and textures, and in the inspection of them the eye was
bewildered and the taste demoralized.
Harmony survived the inharmonious, and it prevailed in the homes of the
better classes, as it was bound to do; for refinement had set its seal
there, and you can not counterfeit the seal of refinement. But I am
inclined to think that in the Fifties there was a natural tendency to
overdress, to over-decorate, to overdo almost everything. Indeed the day
was demonstrative; if the now celebrated climate had not yet been
elaborately advertised, no doubt there was something hi it singularly
bracing. The elixir of it got into the blood and the brain, and perhaps
the bones as well. The old felt younger than they did when they left
"the States,"--the territory from the Rockies to the Atlantic Ocean was
commonly known as "the States." The middle-aged renewed their youth, and
youth was wild with an exuberance of health and hope and happiness that
seemed to give promise of immortality.
No wonder that it was thought an honor to be known as the first white
child born in San Francisco--I'd think it such myself,--and I'm proud to
state that all three claimants are my personal friends.