disputed land titles. Conflicting claims led to labyrinthine legislation,
and increasing hardship, one crisis being the Squatter Riots.
The treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo had decreed that all property rights
should be respected by the new government. So property rights founded on
cloudy and ill-understood laws and customs of Spain and Mexico had now to
be adjudicated in the Californian courts. San Francisco was entangled in
the mazes of two rival Spanish claims, embracing well-nigh all her
territory except the "made" land. There was much dispute as to whether or
not the city had ever been made a pueblo proper. On this depended the
holding or forfeiting of four square leagues of land. Though the city
petitioned the Land Commission in 1852 for confirmation of her public
grants, the controversy was pending through wearying legislation, with
repeated surveys and delays and continual jeopardy of property, until
finally settled by the decision of Secretary Lamar in 1887.
The decline of the gold output brought to the front the agricultural
resources of the State, and San Francisco came to be the centre of
distribution for wheat, wines, and fruits.
The Central Pacific Railroad was completed in 1867, with San Francisco as
the Western terminus, and as by a magic stroke the city was only three
thousand miles instead of nineteen thousand miles from Eastern markets.
Since then three other transcontinental lines and numerous local lines have
brought trade and travel into this emporium of the Pacific, while the ships
of all nations fetch and carry through her Golden Gate.
The war of secession found California wavering between the Stars and
Stripes and the Stars and Bars. A large Southern element, much to the front
in politics, had maintained a strong Democratic influence in the State. The
celebrated duel, just outside the city limits between Broderick and
Terry--the Terry of Vigilance Committee memory--turned the tide toward
Republicanism and sympathy for the North. The duel grew out of the
Broderick and Gwin senatorial contest. Terry stood for Southern chivalry;
Broderick stood for free labor and progressive politics. Not essentially
great or noble, Broderick was made heroic by his tragic death. During war
times he was a colossal figure in men's minds, and his anti-slavery
sentiments echoed through city and State, a slogan and a cleaving sword for
freedom and the North.
[Illustration UNION DEPOT.]
In the '70's there sprang up in San Francisco a tremendous excitement over
the silver mines on the Comstock Lode. The bonanza was estimated to be
worth over fifteen hundred millions of dollars. True, this argent field was
across the Sierras, in the State of Nevada. But most of the output found
its way to San Francisco. The principal owners lived there, and San
Francisco was the depot for Comstock supplies. The Stock Board operated
there, and stocks bought for less than one hundred thousand dollars soared
up to two hundred million. At the highest notch of prices the manipulators
sold out, and the airy fabric of speculation fell with a crash. The banks
had been emptied by speculators eager to buy stocks, and were greatly
embarrassed. Myriads were swept into poverty, leaving immense fortunes in
the hands of a few.
Soon after the Comstock collapse the Sand Lot agitation sprang into life.
Over one hundred and fifty millions of dollars had been removed from
circulation by the Comstock jugglery. The wealth of the outside world was
temporarily diverted from the San Francisco markets. A great drought had
been on the State during two years and the lean kine had devoured the fat.
Harvests were sparse or wholly lacking. Cattle perished beside the dry
watercourses. A large body of the outside unemployed had come to swell the
tide of the city's drifting, workless ones. The railroad was threatening a
reduction of wages to its thousands of men. Riots were on in Philadelphia,
Pittsburg, Baltimore, and had sent contagion on the enforced idlers in San
Francisco. Feeling long smouldering broke into fire against the Chinese and
the railroad, two factors believed by the working-men to be largely
instrumental in cheapening wages and robbing men of work. A mob gathered,
threatening to rout out the Asiatics. The police could not disperse the
rioters.
[Illustration CHINESE PHARMACY.]
On July 24th there came a third call for the Vigilance Committee to
assemble, which many thought an unnecessary and high-handed summons.
William T. Coleman was for a third time given charge. The Committee was to
proceed upon lines followed in the '50's. But this time they were to
co-operate with the authorities rather than to work in opposition. On July
25th, the mob, infuriated by the menace of the Committee and looking on it
as a mere support of capitalistic interests, gathered about the Pacific
Mail Dock, where immigrant Chinese were landed. The Committee, armed with
pick-handles, met the labor mob at the dock and a few men were killed. This
ended the uprising. But the issue was soon thrust into politics. The
anti-Chinese believers gathered upon the sand lots in the neighborhood of
the City Hall and organized the Working-man's Party. It spread throughout
the State. Dennis Kearny, an illiterate but rudely eloquent speaker, became
the leader, the Wat Tyler of the hour. The movement ended in the adoption
by the State of a new Constitution framed along progressive lines.
The people of San Francisco are of all kindreds and tongues. Buddha,
Mahomet, and Confucius are prayed to beside the Christian temples. The
Indians of the Mission have faded from the peninsula and the sombreroed
Spaniard dashes no more from the Mission to the beach about his bull-fights
and bear-baitings. But here are Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Celts, Greeks,
Slavs, Latins, Hindus, Chinese, Kanakas, Japanese, and Chilenos, all mixing
in the great crucible and slowly shaping a new type of man, the Western
American. All seem to be mixing, it should be explained, except the
Chinese, for, after a quarter of a century of experience, San Francisco
feels that her Chinese population is still an alien body and sure to remain
so even to the third and fourth generation.
[Illustration CHINESE GROCERY STORE.]
The problem of Chinese immigration has come up again and again in San
Francisco. In 1869 the Chinese were invited and welcomed from China. In
1892, the Geary law was passed prohibiting the coming of any but the
student class and providing for deportation under certain conditions. A
generation grew up between this hail and farewell, China in the meantime
pouring her tens of thousands of coolies into San Francisco. California
welcomes any race that affiliates. But she has found that the Chinese race
is not as the impressionable Indian or negro; but is an arrested race in
the yoke of caste and ancient tradition, one looking with contempt upon
upstart Anglo-Saxon civilization. The Chinese swarmed into a quarter of the
city about Portsmouth Square, and have made there a small, evil-smelling
Canton, where only a foreign tongue is spoken, and where strange gods are
worshipped. Few have brought wives. Slave girls are the only women. Every
Chinese prays to die in China, or to have his bones rot there. American law
to most of them is but a pestilent thing to be evaded. They have no
interest in the growth of the country or its institutions. They work for
starvation wages, their living being extremely cheap, requiring only tea
and rice and a bare shelf to sleep upon in a room crowded with such
shelves. Being imitative, and as patient as cattle, and withal so cheap as
hirelings, they have taken the places of women in the household and factory
and the places of men and boys in the work of dock and shop and field. The
assertion that this labor liberates the whites for higher work does not
seem to be verified. Many trace the vicious "hoodlum" class of both sexes
to the enforced idleness of these young people, springing from the iron
competition of the Chinese in the labor market.
[Illustration SMOKING ROOM, CHINESE RESTAURANT.]
Notwithstanding all this, the little slant-eyed men with their grotesque
superstitions, their stiff, stark, unhomelike homes, add a quaintness and a
touch of color to this romantic city. Gay placards of intense greens and
vermilions flutter from their doorposts. Under the dull outer tunics of the
elders gleam surtouts of gay brocades, while the few children, little
faithful copies of their sires, all tricked out like the lanterns of the
night, go toddling on tiny, rocking shoes through the narrow, dingy
streets. The Chinese theatres, temples, and restaurants are full of the
Oriental strangeness. The interiors of some of them are lacquered and
varnished like huge tea-boxes.
[Illustration A BUSINESS CENTRE.]
As one gets a strip of Cathay in Chinatown, so he may find a corner of
Italy on the south slopes of Telegraph Hill. Here children, looking like
the cherubs of their kinsmen, the old masters, swarm through steep narrow
streets, upon curious little balconies, out of odd windows, or upon the
steps of chapels.
The architecture of San Francisco is a medley of many schools. The
buildings, especially the homes, are largely of wood; the recurring feature
is the bay window that focuses the light and heat. To the newcomer they
all seem of the same color, for the fogs and winds soon reduce all hues to
a fine, restful gray. In the beginning, by a curious irony, stone and
lumber were shipped from the East and from Asia to this land of forests and
granite to build some of the structures still holding their places against
the pressure of time. In the newer buildings of the city there is some
attempt to make the architecture express the function of the structure--the
stability of the business house, the aspiration of the church, the simple
security of the home. The new City Hall is an example of permanence and
chaste elegance. The old mission architecture is being revived. This
Spanish-Moorish adaptation is the most characteristic and harmonious
development of Californian architecture. Built of the earth, the old
mission piles seem almost as if not made by man, but nature. For they
repeat in long stretches and low swells the contour of the hills about
them, and give back their color-tones of dun and tan and rusty red.
The year the new and greater name was given to the city, a misfortune fell
upon the streets. Regardless of cliff and curve, ignoring height and
hollow, the streets were laid out in undeviating straight lines. And so a
city on fairer than Roman hills, with circling waterways more lovely than
the curve of Constantinople's Golden Horn, was deformed as far as its high
bearing could be hurt; was checkered by pitiless compass lines, when it
might have had windings and slow curves and gentle slopes.
Market, the main street, runs lengthwise of the peninsula. Its intersection
with Kearny is a nerve-centre of the city, whence radiate three great
streets. Near this spot are the main newspaper buildings and most of the
large hotels. San Francisco's streets, unlike those of Sacramento and Los
Angeles, are not lined with trees. But nearly every dooryard has its green
place where tall geraniums, camelias, heliotropes, or fuchias fling out,
the year round, their splashes of scarlet and purple.
[Illustration PRAYER BOOK CROSS, GOLDEN GATE PARK.]
The city boasts of one great park of a thousand acres, on the hills and
ravines out by the sea. Central, Prospect, and Fairmount parks of the East
fail beside the charm of this Arcadian Western park, probably the finest in
North America. The trees of the world, from conifer to cactus, are here,
and every flower that blooms. Beyond the park is the Cliff House,
overhanging huge rocks, the rendezvous of gulls and seals and shy things
of the water.
[Illustration SEAL ROCK AND CLIFF HOUSE.]
The old Portsmouth Square is dingy and draggled. It looks upon the scene of
the executions of the Vigilantes and is full of memories for the
chronicler. Its great charm now is the statue of Robert Louis Stevenson,
who when in San Francisco, often sat there, studying the quaint, broken
life about him. Another significant monument, poetic and historic presented
to the city by Mayor James D. Phelan, stands before the new City Hall in
honor of the Native Son of the Golden West.
It is doubtless only a question of time when expanding San Francisco will
absorb the cities an hour's ride across the Bay,--Oakland, Berkeley, and
Alameda,--the homes now of many of San Francisco's business men.
The University of California at Berkeley draws its largest clientele from
San Francisco. By the benefactions of the widow of Senator Hearst of San
Francisco, this university has under way a housing perhaps the most
spacious and symmetrical in the world. The structure, to cost nearly five
million dollars, follows a plan chosen by experts from designs submitted
after a world competition, and will crown a long hill slope, looking down
on San Francisco City and Bay and out toward sleeping Asia. The allied
professional colleges of the University are already in San Francisco. Its
art department is in the fine old mansion of Hopkins, the railroad builder,
on California Street, the home street of millionaires. A school of mechanic
arts, endowed by the pioneer, James Lick, who gave the great astronomical
observatory to the State University, is also under way in San Francisco.
[Illustration CITY HALL, SAN FRANCISCO.]
Another university drawing its student body largely from San Francisco is
an hour or more down the peninsula from the city,--the Leland Stanford,
Jr., founded by Jane and Leland Stanford and wife, of San Francisco. This
university, by the way, is built, after the old mission plan of one-story
buildings, about an inner court, with arcades and Roman towers and tiled
roof.
[Illustration LELAND STANFORD.]
The city has three great working libraries, the Public, the Mercantile, and
the Mechanics' Institute. Adolph Sutro, the late owner of about one tenth
of the territory of San Francisco City and County, whose fine grounds out
by the Cliff House have long been open to the public, left a unique
collection of two hundred thousand pamphlets and volumes of rare worth,
gathered for the public use. The Bancroft Library is phenomenal in that it
has cornered all the original material for the history of the far West.
Those myriads of manuscripts, pamphlets, and books have been indexed by
experts and the library is a sort of Vatican for California.
The Bohemian Club of San Francisco, a comradery of litterateurs, artists,
and lovers of the arts, is a unique expression of the æsthetic
individuality of the city, and is one of its strong social forces.
[Illustration THOMAS STARR KING.]
San Francisco has perhaps no famous name that dominates the city as
Franklin dominates Philadelphia; as Beecher, Brooklyn; as Carnegie,
Pittsburg. But if great-hearted Thomas Starr King had lived longer, he
might have been its crowning personality as he is now its most sainted
memory. His inflexible loyalty and impassioned eloquence made him at the
outbreak of the Civil War a commanding figure, if not the leading citizen
of California.
Though only fifty years old, San Francisco has given to literature and art
a few names that the world will not willingly let die. For forty years
Joaquin Miller, the "Poet of the Sierras," has been a friend and neighbor
of her hills and waters, telling in noble numbers the glories and the
terrors of the strange new land "by the sundown seas." Here Bret Harte
founded the _Overland Monthly_ and with "The Luck of Roaring Camp" began
his creation of Californian characters. What matters it if they never
existed outside of his pages,--those drinking, dirking dare-devils, those
tenor-voiced, soulful-eyed gamblers, striking sorrow to the hearts of
ladies? For, touched by his genius, they exist for us there, in perennial
charm and invitation.
[Illustration HENRY GEORGE.]
Here, too, Henry George wrote his _Progress and Poverty_, a book that was
a prophet-cry heard round the world, declaring that every man has a right
to a foothold on the earth. Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Warren
Stoddard, John Vance Cheney, Charlotte Perkin Gilman, Kate Douglas Wiggin,
and Gertrude Atherton did here a deal of their early literary work,[17] but
now have wandered away into the world, leaving behind them, however, a
goodly group of critics, story-writers, and poets; painters, also, William
Keith and the rest, who have caught into splendid captivity some of the
immensities and radiances about them.
This is but an abstract and brief chronicle of the great city at the
Western gate of the world. There she sits, the ultimate outpost of the
passion of progress. Sleepless unrest, forever urging the peoples westward,
land by land, now, at the end of centuries, begins to surge and thunder on
the shores of Balboa's Sea. But this end is only a beginning--this great
city is only the first of a chain of cities fated, under the star of
empire, to spring into life on these circling shores, making the Pacific at
last the greater Mediterranean of mankind.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTE:
[17] The reader will yet more vividly recall that _The Man with
the Hoe_ came out of San Francisco and will heartily approve the editor's
selection of Mr. Markham to contribute this chapter to the volume.
EDITOR.
[Illustration]
MONTEREY
CIUDAD DE AYER Y DE HOY
BY HAROLD BOLCE
To know the story of Monterey, one must go back for a moment to the
southern coast of Europe. There, on an island a day's sail from the land
that later cradled a prodigy destined to make dynasties his playthings,
there was born, in 1713, a boy who by pacific conquests was to perform a
part no less significant than Napoleon's in determining the history of
nations.
While the infant Bonaparte was listening, perhaps impatiently, to Corsican
lullabies, Junípero Serra, a mendicant friar from Majorca, discovered, or
rediscovered, on the far shores of this continent the supposedly vanished
harbor of Monterey, and thereby marked the genesis of the movement that was
finally to give the American republic a western frontage on the sea.
[Illustration JUNÍPERO SERRA, FOUNDER OF MONTEREY.]
But for this auspicious event and the stimulating effect on Spanish
exploration it afterwards provoked, the great domain from San Diego to the
Straits of Juan de Fuca would not to-day be rendering tribute to the
Government at Washington. The western lines of the Louisiana Purchase
would mark our farthermost frontier; the incredible hoard of California's
roaring camps would be minted into sovereigns, shillings, rubles,
imperials, or francs; no Pacific Squadron would have carried our flag to
the gates of the East; and we would to-day be a hemmed-in nation, disputing
our land boundaries with encroaching colonies of Europe, instead of a world
power projecting canals to sever continents in the interest of our trade,
and sailing our ships east and west across the seven seas.
The average tourist, viewing the adobe ruins of the Monterey presidio and
recalling the futile guns of that crumbled fortress, does not dream of the
place Monterey filled in the march of international events. Nor will the
guide enlighten him as he takes him over the seagirt drive to Carmel and
the cliffs of Point Lobos, for that profane, though picturesque historian
omits even to say that Robert Louis Stevenson furnished the plan for this
famous highway.
Some gleams of Monterey's immortal past illumine the reverent traveller who
climbs the stone steps of Junípero's Mission at Carmel. He knows, then,
vaguely, that he is exploring the venerable tomb of one of the great men of
the world. And the irreverent guide, if asked, will indicate indifferently
the spot on the gospel side of the sanctuary where rest the bones of this
prophet and builder of empire, but before the hurrying train-catcher has
returned to the Golden Gate he has ceased to reflect upon the incalculable
debt America owes to this mendicant seer and colonizer who, in the name of
God, St. Francis, and the King, added half a continent to the Crown of
Spain, and, building better than he knew, established the western
foundations of the republic that was to rise above Spanish and Mexican
decay.
[Illustration CARMEL MISSION (RESTORED).]
Monterey was an old name on the crude maps of the Mexican frontier.
Eighteen years before the _Mayflower_ landed at Plymouth Rock, Don
Sebastian Vizcaino had rounded the pine-edged promontory that hides the
harbor of Monterey, and, anchoring in the bay, went ashore and with sacred
rites named the port in honor of Count de Monterey, the reigning Viceroy.
For more than a century and a half the spot was not revisited save by
savage hunters. Efforts to relocate the harbor were without success.
[Illustration TWILIGHT--MONTEREY BAY.]
Back of the concealing peninsula the bay of Monterey sweeps in a great
crescent to Santa Cruz, thirty miles away, and to exploring navigators,
shunning possible shoals, the coast presented a seemingly unbroken line. It
came to be the scientific belief that some geologic upheaval had altered
the contour of the coast. Mariners were mystified. Efforts to rediscover
Monterey assumed the nature of crusades. No less a personage than Gaspar de
Portala, with a retinue of sixty-five persons, set out overland from Loreto
in 1769 to find the vanished harbor. Without identifying the haven he
sought, he camped on its tree-rimmed beaches and erected a cross under the
ancient oak in whose shade Vizcaino had partaken of the sacrament.
A year later came the seer and scholar Junípero. Long before, in his
college in Majorca where he graced with distinction the chair of
philosophy, he had read and treasured the description Vizcaino had given.
Now he recognized the surviving oak and the neighboring springs, and,
turning, he saw unrolled before him the bay which, in its vastness, had to
other eyes seemed only a part of the open sea.
Inspecting Portala's wooden cross, Junípero saw that at the base were
votive offerings of birds, shells, strings of fish newly caught, and in a
beaver-skin quiver a cluster of arrows tipped with obsidian. Here were
signs and portents which to Junípero were ever a source of inspiration. In
after years he learned that the Eslenes, or Monterey Indians, had for ages
handed down a tradition that some day a messiah would come to them; and
that just before the advent of Junípero, the cross which Portala had reared
seemed to rise in the sky at night until its splendor filled the heavens;
and that then the tribes, believing their deliverer was at hand, came with
gifts of food and trinkets to this unaccustomed altar and, in token of the
peace they felt, tied a quiver of arrows to the cross.
[Illustration SAN CARLOS CHURCH.]
In the fertile valley of Carmel just over the pine-clad cordillera that
conceals the bay, on a slope above the thundering surf, Junípero dedicated
the Mission that was to be named San Carlos in honor of the King. Hanging
his bells on a cypress branch, he chimed the tidings of the gospel he was
to preach.
"Why sound this call?" protested his companions; "there are no heathen
here."
"Would that these bells might be heard around the world!" replied
Junípero.
Few events in Spanish history since the expulsion of the Moors three
centuries before had occasioned the joy that greeted the news of the
rediscovery of Monterey. In the Mexican capital cathedral bells pealed
throughout the night, rockets flared in the sky, and guns in the forts kept
up a cannonade. Later, in Madrid the rejoicing was even more tumultuous.
Royal salutes were added to the acclaim and the King declared a public
holiday. A sandalled monk, seeking neither gain nor temporal glory, the
leader of a handful of Franciscan pioneers, had restored a fabled harbor to
the world.
The discovery of the bay of San Francisco, reported at the same time, was
ignored as a trivial and miscellaneous item.