How well I remember it--the Happy Valley of the days of old! It lay
between California Street and Rincon Point; was bounded on the east by
the Harbor of San Francisco, and on the west by the mission peaks. I
never knew just why it was called _happy_; I never saw any wildly-happy
inhabitants singing or dancing for joy on its sometimes rather
indefinite street corners. If there is happiness in sand, then, happily,
it was sandy. You might have climbed knee-deep up some parts of it and
slid down on the other side; you could have played at "hide-and-seek"
among its shifting undulations. From what is now known as Nob Hill you
could have looked across it to the heights of Rincon Point--and,
perchance, have looked in vain for happiness. Yet who or what is
happiness? A flying nymph whose airy steps even the sand can not stay
for long.
Down through this Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the
city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city
from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off
at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that
is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on
forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right
angles, as if life were a treadmill and there were no hope of change
until the great change comes?
Happy Valley! I remember one cool twilight when a "prairie schooner,"
that was time-worn and weather-beaten, drifted down Montgomery Street
from Market Street, and rounded the corner of Sutter Street, where it
hove to. You know the "prairie schooner" was the old-time emigrant wagon
that was forever crossing the plains in Forty-nine and the early
Fifties. It was scow-built, hooded from end to end, freighted with goods
and chattels; and therein the whole family lived and moved and had its
being during the long voyage to the Pacific Coast.
On this twilight evening the captain of the schooner, assisted by a
portion of his crew, deliberately took down part of the fence which
enclosed a sand-lot bounded by Montgomery, Sutter and Post Streets;
driving into the centre of the lot; the horses--four jaded beasts--were
turned loose, and soon a camp-fire was lighted and the entire emigrant
family gathered about it to partake of the evening meal. On this lot now
stands the Lick House and the Masonic Hall--undreamed of in those days.
No one seemed in the least surprised to find in the very heart of the
city a scene such as one might naturally look for in the heart of the
Rocky Mountains and the wilds of the great desert, or the heights of the
Humboldt. No doubt they thought it a Happy Valley; and well they might,
for they had reached their journey's end.
A stone's throw from that twilight camp, on the south side of Market
Street, stood old St. Patrick's Church. It was a most unpretending
structure, and was quite overshadowed by the R.C. Orphan Asylum close at
hand. Both were backed by sandhills; and both, together with the sand,
have been spirited away. The Palace and Grand Hotels now stand on the
spot. The original St. Patrick's still exists; and, after one or two
transportations, has come to a final halt near the Catholic cemetery
under the shadow of Lone Mountain. It must be ever dear to me, for
within its modest rectory I met the first Catholic clergyman I ever
became acquainted with; and within it I grew familiar with the offices
of the Church; though I was instructed by the Rev. Father Accolti, S.J.,
at old St. Ignatius', on Market Street; and by him baptized at the St.
Mary's Cathedral, on the corner of California and Dupont Streets, now
the church of the Paulist Fathers. I have referred to dear old St.
Patrick's--which was dedicated on the first Sunday in September,
1851--in the story of my conversion, a little bit of autobiography
entitled "A Troubled Heart, and How It was Comforted at Last." The late
Peter H. Burnett, first Governor of California, was my godfather.
In 1855 St. Mary's Cathedral was the handsomest house of worship in the
city. For the most part, the churches of all denominations were of the
plainest, not to say cheapest, order of architecture. As a youth, I sat
in the family pew in the First Presbyterian Church, situated on Stockton
Street, near Broadway. Well I remember my father, with others of the
congregation--all members of the Vigilance Committee,--at the sound of
the alarm-bell, rising in the midst of the sermon and striding out of
the house to take arms in defence of law and order.
Perhaps the saddest sights in those early days were the neglected
cemeteries. There was one at North Beach, where before 1850 there were
eight hundred and forty interments. It was on the slope of Telegraph
Hill. The place was neglected; a street had been cut through it, and on
the banks of this street we could, at intervals, see the ends of coffins
protruding. Some were broken and falling apart; some were still sound.
It was a gruesome sight.
There were a few Russian graves on Russian Hill, a forlorn spot in those
days; but perhaps the forlornest of all was Yerba Buena cemetery, where
previous to 1854 four thousand and five hundred bodies had been buried.
It was half-way between Happy Valley and the Mission Dolores. The sand
there was tossed in hillocks like the waves of a sandy sea. There the
chaparral grew thickest; and there the scrub-oaks shrugged their
shoulders and turned their backs to the wind, and grew all lopsided,
with leafage as dense as moss.
No fence enclosed this weird spot. The sand sifted into it and through
it and out on the other, side; it made graves and uncovered them; it had
ever a new surprise for us. We boys haunted it in ghoulish pairs, and
whispered to each other as we found one more coffin coming to the
surface, or searched in vain for the one we had seen the week before; it
had been mercifully reburied by the winds. There were rude headboards,
painted in fading colors; and beneath them lay the dead of all nations,
soon to be nameless. By and by they were all carried hence; and those
that were far away, watching and waiting for the loved and absent
adventurers, watched and waited in vain. A change come o'er the spirit
of the place. The site is now marked by the New City Hall--in all
probability the most costly architectural monstrosity on this continent.
"From grave to gay" is but a step; "from lively to severe," another,--I
know not which of the two is longer. It was literally from grave to gay
when the old San Franciscans used to wade through the sandy margin of
Yerba Buena cemetery in search of pleasure at Russ' Garden on the
mission road. It flourished in the early Fifties--this very German
garden, the pride and property of Mr. Christian Russ. It was a little
bit of the Fatherland, transported as if by magic and set down among the
hillocks toward the Mission Dolores. Well I remember being taken there
at intervals, to find little tables in artificial bowers, where sat
whole families as sedate, or merry, and as much at ease as if they were
in their own homes. They would spend Sunday there, after Mass. There was
always something to be seen, to be listened to, to be done. Meals were
served at all hours, and beer at all minutes; and the program contained
a long list of attractions,--enough to keep one interested till ten or
eleven o'clock at night.
I can remember how scanty the foliage was--it resembled a little the
toy-villages that are made in the Tyrol, having each of them a handful
of impossible trees that breathe not balsam, but paint. I remember the
high wind that blew in bravely from the sea; the pavilion that was a
wonder-world of never-failing attractiveness; and how on a certain
occasion I watched with breathless anxiety and dumb amazement a man,
who seemed to have discarded every garment common to the race, wheel a
wheelbarrow with a grooved wheel up a tight rope stretched from the
ground to the outer peak of the pavilion; and all the time there was a
man in the wheelbarrow who seemed paralyzed with fright,--as no doubt he
was. The man who wheeled the barrow was the world-famous Blondin.
[Illustration: Russ Gardens, 1856]
Another sylvan retreat was known as "The Willows." There were some
willows there, but I fear they were numbered; and there was an _al
fresco_ theatre such as one sees in the Champs-Elysées; indeed, the
place had quite a Frenchy atmosphere, and was not at all German, as was
Russ' Garden. French singers sang French songs upon the stage--it was
not much larger than a sounding-board.
An air of gaiety prevailed; for I imagine the majority of the _habitués_
were from the French Quarter of the city. Of course there were birds and
beasts, and cages populous with monkeys; and there was an emeu--the
weird bird that can not fly, the Australian cassowary. This bird
inspired Bret Harte to song, and in his early days he wrote "The Ballad
of the Emeu";
O say, have you seen at the willows so green,
So charming and rurally true,
A singular bird, with the manner absurd,
Which they call the Australian emeu?
Have you
Ever seen this Australian emeu?
I fear the poet was moved to sarcasm when he sang of "the willows so
green, so charming and rurally true." Surely they were greener than any
other trees we had in town; for we had almost none, save a few dark
evergreens. Well, the place was charming in its way, and as rurally true
as anything could be expected to be on that peninsula in its native
wilderness. The Willows and Russ' Garden had their day, and it was a
jolly day. They were good for the people--those rural resorts; they were
rest for the weary, refreshment for the hungry and thirsty--and they
have gone; even their very sites are now obliterated, and the new
generation has perhaps never even heard of them.
How we wondered at and gloried in the Oriental Hotel! It was the queen
of Western hostelries, and stood at the corner of Battery and Bush
Streets. And the Tehama House, so famous in its day! It was Lieutenant
G.H. Derby, better known in letters as John Phoenix, and Squibob--names
delightfully associated with the early history of California,--it was
this Lieutenant Derby, one of the first and best of Western humorists,
who added interest to the hotel by writing "A Legend of the Tehama
House." It begins, chapter first:
"It was evening at the Tehama. The apothecary, whose shop formed the
southeastern corner of that edifice, had lighted his lamps, which,
shining through those large glass bottles in the window, filled with
red and blue liquors--once supposed by this author, when young and
innocent, to be medicines of the most potent description,--lit up the
faces of the passers-by with an unearthly glare, and exaggerated the
general redness and blueness of their noses."
The third and last chapter concludes with these words: "The Tehama House
is still there." The laughter-making and laughter-loving Phoenix has
long since gone to his reward. Of the Oriental Hotel scarcely a
tradition remains. The Tehama House--what there is left of it--has been
spirited to the north side of Broadway within a stone's-throw of the
city and county jail. The cliffs of Telegraph Hill browbeat it. It is,
one might say, the last of its race.
Another hospice--if it _was_ a hospice--I remember. It stood on the
corner of Clay and Sansome Streets, and was a very ordinary building,
erected over the hulk of a ship that had been stranded there in the days
of Forty-nine. I saw the building torn down and the bones of the hulk
disinterred years after the water lots that had been filled in for
several squares, between it and the old harbor, were covered with
substantial buildings. When that bark was buoyant it had weathered Cape
Horn with a small army of argonauts. They had gone their way to dusty
death; she had buried her nose on the water-front and had been
smothered to death in the mire. Docks, streets, grew up around her; a
building had snuffed her out of sight and mind. The old building gave
place to a new one; the bark was resurrected in order to lay a solid
foundation for the new block that was to be. In the hold of this
forgotten bark was discovered a forgotten case of champagne. It had been
sunk in mud and ooze for years. When the bottles were opened the corks
refused to pop, and nobody dared to touch the "bilge" that was within.
All this was on the happy hem of Happy Valley--and still I was not
happy.