Labrador in 1497, nothing was known of the west coast of North America.
Cabrillo felt his way along it in 1542, claiming it for Spain. In 1579,
Francis Drake, fleeing from plundered Spanish galleons, tarried for repairs
beside Cape Reyes, the Cape of Kings, and claimed the country, as New
Albion, for Elizabeth of England. Although anchored in a cove within a mile
of San Francisco Bay, he doubtless sailed away without guessing its
existence behind the forest-covered mountains.
In 1602, Vizcaino, charting the west for Spain, as Gosnold was mapping the
east for England, made stay in Drake's old anchorage, and named it the
Port of San Francisco.
Notwithstanding the reiterated desire of the Spanish Crown that Mexico, or
New Spain, should set about colonizing upper California, it was not till
1769 that the work was begun. Spain needed a harbor in which to retire on
the way from the Philippines. The Russian fur-traders were heading down the
coast. The French and the English were rumored to be nearing from the east.
So it behooved Spain to be on the alert to maintain her right to the new
territory.
José de Galvaez, _Visitador_ of Spain, who had been sent to Mexico with
powers extraordinary, "to examine and reform all branches of government,"
seized upon the project of colonization, and found the administrator of his
plans in Padre Junipero Serra, of fragrant memory,--a Franciscan monk, who
had all his life passioned to save Indians as a Tamerlane would have
passioned to destroy them.
Spain's plan of colonization comprehended a triple series of
establishments: the ecclesiastical or the mission, the military or the
presidio, the civil or the pueblo. The theory of colonization carried the
idea of a military and a religious conquest of the new lands. The Indians,
whenever belligerent, were to be overcome by force; but as far as possible,
they were to be drawn into the mission life by peaceable expedients.
In 1769, four expeditions, composed of soldiers, settlers, and Franciscan
friars, set out from Mexico to enter upon the work of colonizing and
civilizing California. If in the mists of coming ages the Æneid of
California be lost, Spain may prove her sponsorship of the Californian
province by the litany of seraphic and apostolic names given to mountain
and mesa, to coast and cañon. Andalusian names of saints and angels chime
wherever the padres stepped or stopped.
One of the four expeditions, pushing northward by land, unwittingly passed
Monterey; and a fragment of the company, while out hunting, came suddenly
in sight of the waters now known as the Golden Gate and the San Francisco
Bay. For the name San Francisco was soon transferred to this greater water
from the old port known to Drake and Vizcaino.
In the summer of 1776 a company of padres, soldiers, and families, with
stock and seeds, arrived on the San Francisco peninsula, and built
temporary shelter of brush and tulès plastered with mud. On September 17th,
the feast of the stigmata of St. Francis, solemn possession was taken of
the presidio in the name of Spain; and on October 4th, the day of St.
Francis, the mission was formally dedicated. The cross was raised, the Te
Deum was chanted, while bells and guns chorused to sea and sky.
The mission was in a little fertile valley four miles from the Presidio,
near a small creek now filled in. It became known as the Mission de los
Dolores, in honor of the sorrows of Mary.
[Illustration THE DISCOVERY OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY. FROM THE PAINTING BY A.F.
MATHEWS.]
Hostile tribes from the south had lately fallen upon the Indians of the
peninsula, firing their _rancherias_, murdering many of the inhabitants,
and terrorizing the rest into flight. So the savages proved scarce at
first. Even in 1802 the Indians at the Mission numbered only about eight
hundred. But these natives, like all the Californian Indians, though quite
docile, proved stupid and brutish and lazy. They made little progress from
savagery to the state of _gentes de razon_, or "reasonable beings," fit to
populate the pueblos.
This mission _régime_, however futile it may have been, however formal and
external its religious training, seems to have touched upon some of the
educational and sociological thought of our own time. It made use of the
wisdom Spain had learned from her Roman conquerors--the taking of the
conquered into full partnership. The idea of the daily contact of superior
with inferior; of community of property and co-operation in labor; of the
union of manual work with mental drill--all these were rudely exemplified
in the mission life. Sixty years was the span of the experiment, a brief
time for an effort in civilization.
[Illustration MISSION DOLORES. BUILT IN 1776.]
The Mission Dolores grew after the general plan of the score of others
in California. It was built about an open court, the place for work or
recreation. The chapel stood at one end of the rectangle; the living
rooms, storehouses, and shops lined the other sides. Only the chapel,
thrice restored, with its _campo santo_ beside it, remains of the
Dolores structure. When Beechy visited it in 1829, it was already a
crumbling ruin. The sun-dried bricks, here as at the other unprotected
mission relics, are fast melting back into the earth. The adobe, like
the swallow's nest, cannot endure the hammers and chisels of wind and
rain and sun.
Little of moment occurred at Dolores till the days of secularization. The
barren, sand-driven, wind-swept hills were not attractive to the Spanish,
and the Mission was not in high estimation with the authorities. Don Pedro
de Aberini wrote of it in 1776: "Of all sites in California this Mission is
situated upon the worst." Nevertheless, in 1825, the Mission, from a few
head of stock and a few sacks of seed brought in 1776, had accumulated
76,000 cattle, 79,000 sheep, 40,000 horses, and $60,000 in money and
products.
Mexico's jealousy of the sympathy which the padres felt for Spain, from
whom Mexico had torn herself in 1822; the clamoring of settlers for the
lands held by the missions; quixotic pleas of Mexican statesmen for Indian
autocracy; and perhaps, under all, an itching for the Pious Fund that
supported the mission work--these led on to the secularization of the
missions in 1836. The Indian, civilized only surface-deep, was unready for
civilized self-government; and so he fell back to barbarism, plus
dissipation--his last state worse than the first.
The Dolores Indians were especially incompetent, and no attempt was made
to organize a pueblo for them. So Dolores, after secularization, dragged
out an anomalous existence as a lapsed mission, carried on by political
rather than by ecclesiastical rule, with an alcalde rather than a padre in
charge.
In 1835 the embarcadero of Yerba Buena two miles from the Presidio, was, at
command of Governor Figueroa, made the port of entry. This place (named
from a medicinal weed growing about the cove) was only a landing-place for
fishermen and hide droghers. Only one house stood here at this time. Not a
sail shadowed the bay. Herds of deer came down to the water and schools of
seal swam to the shore. Yet Yerba Buena afterward absorbed the Mission and
the Presidio on the margin of Golden Gate, and took the name of the Bay,
thus becoming the germ of the present city.
A knowledge of the charm and worth of the sovereign bay queening the
western shore of North America was rapidly travelling the world. In 1806,
the Russian Rezanof had visited it officially. His coming and going has a
romantic interest, as his betrothal to Doña Concepcion, the beautiful
daughter of Argüello, commandant of the Presidio, his tragic death on his
way home, and her retirement to a convent, made the Evangeline tale of
early California. England in 1840 sent Belcher to the bay to gather
information, and France sent de Mofras.
Both of these nations were suspected of coveting the California province;
and the hope of getting possession of it, especially of San Francisco Bay,
was doubtless in the background of our national consciousness as one motive
of the Mexican War. It was felt by our country that the United States must
own the west coast or be pot-bound later on. The Government offered to buy
the territory from Mexico, but the proposal was refused.
Gradually it came to be known that the United States, fearing similar
action by European powers, was to seize and hold California in the event of
a war with Mexico. With the vexed question of motive and action this is not
the place to deal. But in 1846, after the Mexican War had fairly started,
Frémont, pursuing a scientific exploration in California, received secret
Government advices, and, gathering troops in the North, urged a
declaration of independence. Commodore Sloat, in command of a frigate at
Monterey, in July, 1846, raised the American flag in place of the Spanish
nopal and eagle standard, declaring California a part of the United States.
The next day, following the order of Sloat, our flag was set flying in the
plaza at Yerba Buena by the captain of a frigate in the bay, accompanied by
an escort of soldiers and marines. No opposition was offered by the
Mexicans. Portsmouth, the name of the vessel, was given to the plaza, and
Montgomery, the name of the captain, was given to the street, then along
the water front, but now pushed back a half a dozen blocks by the filling
in of the cove.
The first alcalde of Yerba Buena under the American flag was Washington
Bartlett. Hearing that a new town, Francesca, was to be established farther
up the bay, and fearing injury to his own from one with a name so similar
to that of the bay, Alcalde Bartlett proceeded, in 1847, to cast the
plebeian name of his pueblo. He declared the name Yerba Buena insignificant
and unknown to the world; proclaimed that henceforth the settlement should
bear the name of the fostering bay beside it. This somewhat tardy edict was
accepted by all, and San Francisco became a name to conjure with.
The village nucleated a little back of the cove about its inevitable
Spanish plaza, which was to be the scene of wild and whirling days to come.
Telegraph Hill, the old observation station, rose on the north of it, and
Rincon Hill was off toward the south. When California was ceded to the
United States in 1848, San Francisco was fairly afoot upon her triumphant
way. Brannan had established a newspaper, _The Star_, and had sent two
thousand copies East, describing the new land, and, curiously enough,
prophesying the gold and the wheat of the future--the first "boom" note
from California. A school was flourishing; churches were building; two
hundred houses were on the hills, and the population was about eight
hundred.
And now sweeps into the story the dominant major--the finding of the gold.
Told of in Indian legend and in Spanish tradition, the shining sands of
Pactolus were found at last in a Californian cañon. San Franciscans,
hearing the tale, felt again the wander spirit, and were off to the
mountains, seeking quicker fortunes. Soldiers and sailors deserted from the
bay. The school closed; the newspaper suspended. Business was at a
standstill: there was no one to work or to buy.
A wind of excitement passed across two hemispheres. The tidings of the gold
flashed from city to city, swift as the signal fires of Agamemnon telling
that Troy had fallen. The faces of men turned expectantly toward this land
at the edge of the world. Everywhere were heard the sounds of preparation
and farewell, as adventurers by land and sea, by craft and caravan, set out
for El Dorado.
By 1849 immigrants from the ends of the earth were pouring in; and the
bare, brown hills and curving shores of San Francisco were whitening with
tents. Goods were piled high in the open air, and all available walls were
covered with grotesque signs and placards speaking in all languages.
By the winter of '49, the drowsy, droning Spanish town had expanded into a
little excited city. Everywhere were springing up nondescript lodging and
boarding houses, drinking houses, and gambling saloons. Twenty-five
thousand people thronged the thoroughfares. There was scarcely such a thing
as a home. Crowds of people slept wedged together on floors and tables, in
rows of cots or in bunks fastened in tiers to the walls. The streets, full
of sticky clay and miry sand, were thronged with struggling horses, mules,
and oxen; and crowds of men from all nations and all levels of life jostled
by, laughing, railing, or cursing. A whirlwind had rushed in upon the
sleepy town. Old habits of life were broken through. Lawyers were turned
into draymen and bootblacks; doctors into merchants and carpenters;
soldiers into waiters and auctioneers. All men could find work; and none,
however rich, could wholly evade it. Gambling was the chief amusement;
speculation in a hundred forms was pressing forward, and fortunes were
changing hourly.
In all this rude democracy, there was one mark of an aristocracy--high
prices. Workmen charged twenty dollars a day; lumber was five hundred
dollars a thousand; flour was forty dollars a barrel; eggs were a dollar
apiece.
All unready for this tumultuous rise in population and precipitation of
business, the infant city had to evolve on the moment accommodation for man
and beast and craft, and organization for civic safety. To add to the
perplexities, in the first years of the city, fire after fire devoured its
flimsy fabric of canvas and shingle. The fourth and worst fire, in May,
1851, destroyed seven million dollars' worth of property. The recurrent
devastation made a demand for fireproof buildings, which gave a certain
stability and dignity to the city. The bay began to fill with the new
clipper ships, which brought steadier crews and more rational cargoes than
did the older clumsy ships now rotting at the docks. Secure wharfage,
passable streets, an efficient fire-department began to give a feeling of
prosperity and permanence.
San Francisco was the stopping-place of every comer and goer; the Egypt of
the corn, the depot of supplies for the gold territory. Naturally, forces
of good and evil streamed into the young city and came into collision.
Strange new conditions were in the environment. The old primitive
safeguards of the early mission era were outgrown. The population,
representing every form of tradition and government, found itself removed
from well-nigh all restraints, all bolstering-up of church and state. Each
man of worth, while bent to his private task, had forced upon him the
problem of helping to build up a social fabric and of holding it secure.
The Anglo-Saxon has an elastic genius for government. Wherever he goes,
finding new conditions, he finds new ways for maintaining the public
safety. The reaction of his spirit under the conditions about him in early
California furnishes an interesting study in social dynamics.
By 1850, California was running under a State constitution and the city had
a charter. The old stable forces of home, and school, and church, the
Argonaut soon evolved about him. However, great freedom of action and
opinion prevailed, and a tolerance of evil that well-nigh blunted the
distinctions between right and wrong. "Sydney coves," and other unruly
spirits took advantage of this laxity. Abuses thickened, and anxious
problems of public order were upon the young metropolis.
The affair of "The Hounds" was one of the organized outrages that
confronted the municipality. A band of lawless ex-convicts, affiliated for
mutual protection in evil designs, grew very obnoxious in their bold
defiance of authority, their open and wanton outrages upon citizens,
especially foreigners. The community, having no municipal organization,
rose against the law-breakers, put twenty on trial, and half of these into
prison. This show of public indignation quieted the pack for a time. But
there was no strong authority to conserve the public good. What was the
concern of all found an executive in none.
Yet, finally, out of this sagging and sinking of the public order and its
adjustment sprang the most spectacular popular uprising and the most
notable object-lesson in self-government known to the West or perhaps to
any other land,--the Vigilance Committee of 1852-56. The occasion of this
citizens' uprising was a series of unpunished crimes of arson, murder,
rapine, and burglary. The perpetrators of these outrages, owing to lax
administration of law by corrupt or careless officials, seemed immune from
apprehension or punishment. The many fires that had devastated the infant
city had without doubt been of incendiary origin. Over a hundred murders
had occurred in a few months and not a single capital punishment had
followed.
Feeling that this insecurity of life and property was intolerable, and
fearing that it would draw down the perils and uncertainties of mob law, a
party of prominent citizens, all above suspicion of self-interest,
organized a defensive league against the allied rabble. They determined to
take the law into their own hands, and to administer it with equal and
exact justice, with swiftness and finality.
[Illustration SEAL OF THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE.]
The first and most exciting case handled by this extraordinary court of
justice came swiftly to judgment. Upon the night of organization, in June,
1852, an ex-convict was seized in an act of theft. He was tried in the
presence of eighty members sitting with closed doors; was convicted,
sentenced, and hanged in Portsmouth Square that night. The general public,
sensitive and suspicious, dreading mob tactics, was troubled at first by
this summary show of power. But the Committee came out with a complete list
of its members, each member assuming equal share of responsibility, each
avowing the public welfare as the only end in view, each pledging his life,
his fortune, his honor, for the protection of his city and the upholding of
the public safety. A profound impression was made by the manifesto of this
self-constituted protectorate. When it was found that no secret society,
but, instead, a band of the solid men of the city was at the head of the
movement, the community rallied to its support with enthusiasm. The
Committee quietly kept at its work of investigation and punishment. Its
calm, swift justice, its lack of personal bias, its righteous vengeance
terrified evil-doers. Many were banished by formal warning. Three other
well-known criminals were hanged. Crime rapidly diminished, and for the
first time in years people began to feel secure in person and possessions.
After thirty days the occupation of the Vigilance Committee was gone. It
did not disband, but existed for years a merely nominal tribunal.
By 1854, the growth of San Francisco began to slacken. Inflation began its
inevitable counter-movement of collapse. The days of picking up gold were
over. Immigration fell off. A large part of the city's population
scattered, returning East, or going into the country to try life on ranch
or range. Disorder increased; the old suppressed crimes leaped into evil
eminence.
A new journal, _The Bulletin_, edited by James King, of William, assailed
the rising corruption, political and personal, social and individual,
public and private.
In 1856, without warning, King was shot down in the street by a man who had
writhed under the torment of the _Bulletin_ pens,--an unscrupulous
ex-convict, James Casey, a rival editor, and a man lately elected
supervisor. This murder precipitated public opinion, and exploded the lazy
optimism that had waited for things to right themselves. Casey was at once
jailed, by chance escaping lynching. It was inevitable that heroic measures
should be set in operation. And so there came about a second administration
of the Vigilance Committee, this unique social providence, this people's
protectorate. But this time it had before it not only the purging of the
city's crime, but also a struggle with jealous and sluggish authority
vested in city and State officials. In a few days 2500 men had enrolled as
Vigilantes, and were drilling in arms, under their former trusted
President, William T. Coleman. Meantime the Governor of the State was
summoned by the Anti-Vigilantes, representing chiefly the conservative
officeholders and the people affiliated in some way with the lawless
element. These Anti-Vigilantes came to be known in derision as the
Law-and-Order Party. The Know-Nothing Governor swayed first from one side
to another. He had no power behind him, for the militia were deserting to
the popular cause.
The Vigilantes took charge not only of Casey, but also of one Cora who had
wantonly shot a United States marshal and had evaded punishment. After a
dispassionate trial, with all form and ceremony, the two criminals were
sentenced to death and hanged on the day of King's funeral. It may be worth
remembering that this man Cora was defended in his first trial by the
eloquent Col. E.D. Baker.
The Law-and-Order Party now insisted that the Vigilantes disband. But the
Committee held that its purpose was not simply to deal out justice to
murderers, but also to so clarify the social atmosphere as to make future
assassinations punishable by law. Therefore it struck directly at city
politics, banishing the openly vicious, and laying the way for a clean
administration when the corrupt officials could be rotated out of office.
This Vigilance Committee drew a large following of citizens; but there was
a continuous undercurrent of opposition. General Sherman, commander of the
second division of the State militia, backed by the vacillating Governor
and representing constitutional authority, was the leader of the opposition
sentiment. In June, the Law-and-Order Party under him determined to rise
against the Vigilantes. He appealed to General Wool, United States
Commander in the Department, for arms, and also to Commodore Farragut at
Mare Island. These commanders declined to interfere in State troubles
without orders from the Government. Governor Johnson declared the city and
county of San Francisco in a state of insurrection, and asked aid from
Washington. General Sherman, finding himself powerless, resigned.
Chief-Justice Terry, an active opponent of the Committee, having come from
Sacramento to enforce the law, now complicated matters by stabbing an
officer of the Vigilantes. The Committee held him a prisoner but set him
free when his victim recovered. After three months of life, after hanging
in all four criminals, well-known desperadoes, banishing many others, and
paving the way for a purer administration of law, the Committee disbanded,
leaving a small body to settle its affairs. The next election saw a full
set of honest officials in power, and for twenty years San Francisco had
the name of being one of the best-governed cities in the world.
Looking back dispassionately, it appears that the Vigilance Committee had
something of the dignity and purpose and procedure of the ancient court of
the Areopagus. It was not like the extemporized Sanhedrim that tried
Christ, a body which kept the appearance of justice but mocked the reality.
It was not a masked band of regulators like the Ku Klux or the White Caps;
but it was an irresistible rising of the best citizens in calm debate, in
open daylight, with sobriety and decorum and every safeguard of justice.
Unlike the anti-Mafia of New Orleans, it put down the mob spirit, but did
not engender it. Though acting outside of the constituted authorities, it
had the severest reverence for law in the ideal. As President Coleman
expressed it, the Committee did not act under lynch law, but under a sort
of martial law that obtains in time of siege. Considering the daring
wantonness of crime, the subsidized or terrorized condition of the courts
of justice, and the immunity of criminals, law-abiding citizens seem to
have been justified in reverting to the elemental order of things, as is
the man who attacks the thief in the night. But, of course, loyalty from
the first to public interests instead of easy optimism and self-absorption,
would have held back the occasion for the heroic measures of the historic
Committee. Men never learn, save through suffering, that the support of
the common welfare is a sacred duty, and that this duty squares exactly
with their highest private interests.