“The fitful flame of Young Romance,” fed by the Arabian Nights’
Entertainments, Fairy tales and Heathen Mythologies; the wonderful
fables of Genii and Magicians; stories of towns springing up,
ready-built, out of deserts; tales of cities paved with gold; the Happy
Valley of Rasselas; the territories of Oberon and Titania, Robert Owen’s
New Harmony, and the land of Cockaigne; Gulliver’s Travels, the
Adventures of Peter Wilkins, legends of beggars made kings, and
mendicants millionaires; Sinbad the Sailor, Baron Munchausen, Law of
Laurieston, Major Longbow, Colonel Crocket, the Poyais loan; illimitable
exaggeration; undaunted lying; the most rampant schemes of the most
rabid speculators; the wildest visions of the maddest poet; the airiest
castle of the most Utopian lunatic—any one of these, and all of them put
together, do not exceed the wondrous web of realities that is being
daily woven around both hemispheres of the globe. Not to mention
conversations carried on thousands of miles apart, by means of
electricity, and a hundred other marvels that Science has converted into
commonplaces, we would now confine ourselves to the latest “wonderful
wonder that has ever been wondered at”—the gold region of California;
but more especially to its capital, San Francisco.
The story of the magic growth of this city would have defied belief, had
it not rapidly grown up literally under the “eyes of Europe.” When the
returns were made to the United States’ authorities in 1831, it
contained three hundred and seventy-one individuals, and very few more
resided in it up to the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, in the
Sacramento River. Even in April, 1849, we learn from a credible
eye-witness, that there were only from thirty to forty houses in San
Francisco; and that the population was so small, that so many as
twenty-five persons could never be seen out of doors at one time. There
now lie before us two prints; one of San Francisco, taken in November,
1848, soon after the discovery was made, and another exactly a year
afterwards. In the first, we are able to count twenty-six huts and other
dwellings dotted about at uneven distances, and four small ships in the
harbour. In the second, the habitations are countless. The hollow, upon
which the city partly stands, presents a bird’s-eye view of roofs,
packed so closely together, that the houses they cover are innumerable;
while the sides of the surrounding hills are thickly strewed with tents
and temporary dwellings. On every side are buildings of all kinds, begun
or half-finished, but the greater part of them mere canvas sheds, open
in front, and displaying all sorts of signs, in all languages. Great
quantities of goods are piled up in the open air, for want of a place to
store them. The streets are full of people, hurrying to and fro, and of
as diverse and bizarre a character as the houses: Yankees of every
possible variety, native Californians in _sarapes_ and sombreros,
Chilians, Sonorians, Kanakas from Hawaii, Chinese with long tails,
Malays and others in whose embrowned and bearded visages it is
impossible to recognise any especial nationality. In the midst is the
plaza, now dignified by the name of Portsmouth Square. It lies on the
slope of the hill; and, from a high pole in front of a long one-story
adobe building used as the Custom House, the American flag is flying. On
the lower side is the Parker House Hotel. The Bay of San Francisco is
black with the hulls of ships, and a thick forest of masts intercepts
the landscapes of the opposite coast and the islet of Yerba Buena. Flags
of all nations flutter in the breeze, and the smoke of three steamers is
borne away on its wings in dense wreaths.—The first picture is one of
stagnation and poverty, the other presents activity and wealth in
glowing colours.
“Verily,” says the correspondent of a Boston Paper, “the place was in
itself a marvel. To say that it was daily enlarged by from twenty to
thirty houses may not sound very remarkable after all the stories that
have been told; yet this, for a country which imported both lumber and
houses, and where labour was then ten dollars a day, is an extraordinary
growth. The rapidity with which a ready-made house is put up and
inhabited, strikes the stranger in San Francisco as little short of
magic. He walks over an open lot in his before-breakfast stroll—the next
morning, a house complete, with a family inside, blocks up his way. He
goes down to the bay and looks out on the shipping—two or three days
afterward a row of storehouses, staring him in the face, intercepts the
view.”
An intelligent traveller from the United States, has recorded his
impressions of this marvellous spot, as he saw it in August, 1849:—
“The restless, feverish tide of life in that little spot, and the
thought that what I then saw and was yet to see will hereafter fill one
of the most marvellous pages of all history, rendered it singularly
impressive. The feeling was not decreased on talking that evening with
some of the old residents, (that is of six months’ standing,) and
hearing their several experiences. Every new comer in San Francisco is
overtaken with a sense of complete bewilderment. The mind, however it
may be prepared for an astonishing condition of affairs, cannot
immediately push aside its old instincts of value and ideas of business,
letting all past experiences go for nought and casting all its faculties
for action, intercourse with its fellows, or advancement in any path of
ambition, into shapes which it never before imagined. As in the turn of
the dissolving views, there is a period when it wears neither the old
nor the new phase, but the vanishing images of the one and the growing
perceptions of the other are blended in painful and misty confusion. One
knows not whether he is awake or in some wonderful dream. Never have I
had so much difficulty in establishing, satisfactorily to my own senses,
the reality of what I saw and heard.”[1]
Footnote 1:
“Eldorado,” by Bayard Taylor, correspondent to the “Tribune”
newspaper.
The same gentleman, after an absence in the interior of four months,
gives a notion of the rapidity with which the city grew, in the
following terms:—
“Of all the marvellous phases of the history of the Present, the growth
of San Francisco is the one which will most tax the belief of the
Future. Its parallel was never known, and shall never be beheld again. I
speak only of what I saw with my own eyes. When I landed there, a little
more than four months before, I found a scattering town of tents and
canvas houses, with a show of frame buildings on one or two streets, and
a population of about six thousand. Now, on my last visit, I saw around
me an actual metropolis, displaying street after street of well-built
edifices, filled with an active and enterprising people and exhibiting
every mark of permanent commercial prosperity. Then, the town was
limited to the curve of the Bay fronting the anchorage and bottoms of
the hills. Now, it stretched to the topmost heights, followed the shore
around point after point, and sending back a long arm through a gap in
the hills, took hold of the Golden Gate and was building its warehouses
on the open strait and almost fronting the blue horizon of the Pacific.
Then the gold-seeking sojourner lodged in muslin rooms and canvas
garrets, with a philosophic lack of furniture, and ate his simple though
substantial fare from pine boards. Now, lofty hotels, gaudy with
verandas and balconies, were met with in all quarters, furnished with
home luxury, and aristocratic restaurants presented daily their long
bills of fare, rich with the choicest technicalities of the Parisian
cuisine. Then, vessels were coming in day after day, to lie deserted and
useless at their anchorage. Now scarce a day passed, but some cluster of
sails, bound _outward_ through the Golden Gate, took their way to all
the corners of the Pacific. Like the magic seed of the Indian juggler,
which grew, blossomed, and bore fruit before the eyes of his spectators,
San Francisco seemed to have accomplished in a day the growth of half a
century.”
In San Francisco, everything is reversed. The operations of trade are
exactly opposite to those of older communities. There the rule is
scarcity of money and abundance of labour, produce, and manufactures;
here cash overflows out of every pocket, and the necessaries of
existence will not pour in fast enough. Mr. Taylor tells us, that “a
curious result of the extraordinary abundance of gold and the facility
with which fortunes were acquired, struck me at the first glance. All
business was transacted on so extensive a scale that the ordinary habits
of solicitation and compliance on the one hand, and stubborn cheapening
on the other, seemed to be entirely forgotten. You enter a shop to buy
something; the owner eyes you with perfect indifference, waiting for you
to state your want: if you object to the price, you are at liberty to
leave, for you need not expect to get it cheaper; he evidently cares
little whether you buy it or not. One who has been some time in the
country will lay down the money, without wasting words. The only
exception I found to this rule was that of a sharp-faced Down-Easter
just opening his stock, who was much distressed when his clerk charged
me seventy-five cents for a coil of rope, instead of one dollar. This
disregard for all the petty arts of money-making was really a refreshing
feature of society. Another equally agreeable trait was the punctuality
with which debts were paid, and the general confidence which men were
obliged to place, perforce, in each other’s honesty. Perhaps this latter
fact was owing, in part, to the impossibility of protecting wealth, and
consequent dependence on an honourable regard for the rights of others.”
While this gentleman was in San Francisco, an instance of the fairy-like
manner in which fortunes are accumulated, came under his observation. A
citizen of San Francisco died insolvent to the amount of forty-one
thousand dollars the previous autumn. His administrators were delayed in
settling his affairs, and his real estate advanced so rapidly in value
meantime, that after his debts were paid, his heirs derived a yearly
income from it of forty thousand dollars!
The fable of a city paved with gold is realised in San Francisco. Mr.
Taylor reports:—“Walking through the town, I was quite amazed to find a
dozen persons busily employed in the street before the United States
Hotel, digging up the earth with knives and crumbling it in their hands.
They were actual gold-hunters, who obtained in this way about five
dollars a day. After blowing the fine dirt carefully in their hands, a
few specks of gold were left, which they placed in a piece of white
paper. A number of children were engaged in the same business, picking
out the fine grains by applying to them the head of a pin, moistened in
their mouths. I was told of a small boy having taken home fourteen
dollars as the result of one day’s labour. On climbing the hill to the
Post Office I observed in places, where the wind had swept away the
sand, several glittering dots of the real metal, but, like the Irishman
who kicked the dollar out of his way, concluded to wait till I should
reach the heap. The presence of gold in the streets was probably
occasioned by the leakings from the miners’ bags and the sweepings of
stores; though it may also be, to a slight extent, native in the earth,
particles having been found in the clay thrown up from a deep well.”
The prices paid for labour were at that time equally _romantic_. The
carman of one firm (Messrs. Mellus, Howard, and Co.) drew a salary of
twelve hundred a year; and it was no uncommon thing for such persons to
be paid from fifteen to twenty dollars, or between three and four pounds
sterling per day. Servants were paid from forty to eighty pounds per
month. Since this time (August, 1849), however, wages had fallen; the
labourers for the rougher kinds of work could—poor fellows—get no more
than something above the pay of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British
army, or about four hundred per annum. The scarcity of labour is best
illustrated by the cost of washing, which was one pound twelve shillings
per dozen. It was therefore found cheaper to put out washing to the
antipodes; and to this day, San Francisco shirts are washed and “got up”
in China and the Sandwich Islands. So many hundred dozens of dirty, and
so many hundred dozens of washed linen form the part of every outward
and inward cargo to and from the Golden City.
The profits upon merchandise about the time we are writing of, may be
judged of by one little transaction recorded by Mr. Taylor:—“Many
passengers,” he writes, “began speculation at the moment of landing. The
most ingenious and successful operation was made by a gentleman of New
York, who took out fifteen hundred copies of ‘The Tribune’ and other
papers, which he disposed of in two hours, at one dollar a-piece!
Hearing of this I bethought me of about a dozen papers which I had used
to fill up crevices in packing my valise. There was a newspaper merchant
at the corner of the City Hotel, and to him I proposed the sale of them,
asking him to name a price. ‘I shall want to make a good profit on the
retail price,’ said he, ‘and can’t give more than ten dollars for the
lot.’ I was satisfied with the wholesale price, which was a gain of just
four thousand per cent.”
The prices of food are enormous, and, unhappily, so are the appetites;
“for two months after my arrival,” says a respectable authority, “my
sensations were like those of a famished wolf;” yet the first glance at
the tariff of a San Francisco bill of fare is calculated to turn the
keenest European stomach. “Where shall we dine to-day?” asked Mr.
Taylor, during his visit. “The restaurants display their signs
invitingly on all sides; we have choice of the United States, Tortoni’s,
the Alhambra, and many other equally classic resorts, but Delmonico’s,
like its distinguished original in New York, has the highest prices and
the greatest variety of dishes. We go down Kearney Street to a two-story
wooden house on the corner of Jackson. The lower story is a market; the
walls are garnished with quarters of beef and mutton; a huge pile of
Sandwich Island squashes fills one corner, and several cabbage-heads,
valued at two dollars each, show themselves in the window. We enter a
little door at the end of the building, ascend a dark, narrow flight of
steps and find ourselves in a long, low room, with ceiling and walls of
white muslin and a floor covered with oil-cloth. There are about twenty
tables disposed in two rows, all of them so well filled that we have
some difficulty in finding places. Taking up the written bill of fare,
we find such items as the following:—
SOUPS.
Dol. Cents.
Mock Turtle 0 75
St. Julien 1 00
FISH.
Boiled Salmon Trout, Anchovy
Sauce 1 75
BOILED.
Leg of Mutton, Caper Sauce 1 00
Corned Beef, Cabbage 1 00
Ham and Tongues 0 75
ENTRÉES.
Fillet of Beef, Mushroom sauce 1 75
Veal Cutlets, breaded 1 00
Mutton Chop 1 00
Lobster Salad 2 00
Sirloin of Venison 1 50
Baked Maccaroni 0 75
Beef Tongue, Sauce piquante 1 00
So that, with but a moderate appetite, the dinner will cost us five
dollars, if we are at all epicurean in our tastes. There are cries of
‘steward!’ from all parts of the room—the word ‘waiter’ is not
considered sufficiently respectful, seeing that the waiter may have been
a lawyer or a merchant’s clerk a few months before. The dishes look very
small as they are placed on the table, but they are skilfully cooked and
are very palatable to men that have ridden in from the diggings.”
Lodging was equally extravagant. A bedroom in an hotel, 50_l._ per
month, and a sleeping berth or “bunk”—one of fifty in the same
apartment—1_l._ 4_s._ per week. Social intercourse is almost unknown.
There are no females, and men have no better resource than gambling,
which is carried on to an extent, and with a desperate energy, hardly
conceivable. “Gambling,” says a private correspondent, whose letter,
dated April 20, 1850, now lies before us, “is carried on here with a
bold and open front, so as to alarm and astonish one. Thousands and
thousands change hands nightly. Go in, for instance, to a place called
‘Parker House,’ which is a splendid mansion, fitted up as well as any
hotel in England; step into the front room, and you see five or six
Monte, Roulette, and other gaming-tables, each having a bank of nearly
half a bushel of gold and silver, piled up in the centre. That the
excitement shall not be wholly devoid of diversion, the Muses lend their
aid, and a band plays constantly to crowded rooms! Step into the next
building, called ‘El Dorado,’ and there a similar scene is presented,
and which is repeated, on a smaller scale, all over the town. The
gamblers seem to control the town, but of course their days must be
numbered. Fortunes are made or lost daily. People gamble with a freedom
and recklessness which you can never dream of. Young men who come here
must at all times resist gaming, or it must eventually end in their
ruin: the same with drinking, as there is much of it here.”
The variety of habits, manners, tastes, and prejudices, occasioned by
the confluence in one spot of almost every variety of the human species,
is another bar to a speedy deposit of all these floating and opposite
elements into a compact and well assimilated community. “Here,” writes
the same gentleman, “we see the character and habits of the English,
Irish, Scotch, German, Pole, French, Spaniard, and almost every other
nation of Europe. Then you have the South American, the Australian, the
Chilian; and finally, the force of this golden mania has dissolved the
chain that has hitherto bound China in national solitude, and she has
now come forth, like an anchorite from his cell, to join this varied
mass of golden speculators. Here we see in miniature just what is done
in the large cities of other countries; we have some of our luxuries
from the United States and the tropics, butter from Oregon, and for the
most part California, Upper or Lower, furnishes us with our beef, &c.
The streets are all bustle, as you may imagine, in a place now of nearly
thirty thousand inhabitants, independent of a small world of floating
population.”
Not the smallest wonder, however, presented in this region, is the rapid
manner in which social order was shaped out of the human chaos. When a
new placer or “gulch” was discovered, the first thing done was to elect
officers and extend the area of order. The result was, that in a
district five hundred miles long, and inhabited by one hundred thousand
people—who had neither government, regular laws, rules, military or
civil protection, nor even locks or bolts, and a great part of whom
possessed wealth enough to tempt the vicious and depraved,—there was as
much security to life and property as in any part of the Union, and as
small a proportion of crime. The capacity of a people for
self-government was never so triumphantly illustrated. Never, perhaps,
was there a community formed of more unpropitious elements; yet from all
this seeming chaos grew a harmony beyond what the most sanguine apostle
of Progress could have expected. Indeed, there is nothing more
remarkable connected with the capital of El Dorado, than the centre
point it has become.
The story of Cadmus, who sowed dragons’ teeth, and harvested armed men,
who became the builders of cities; the confusion of tongues at the Tower
of Babel; and the beautiful allegory of the lion lying down with the
lamb; are all types of San Francisco. The first, of its sudden rise; the
second, of the varieties of the genus Man it has congregated; and the
third, of the extremes of those varieties, which range from the
Polynesian savage to the most civilised individuals that Europe can
produce. It is a coincidence well worthy of note, that, besides the
intense attraction possessed from its gold, Upper or New California is
of all other places the best adapted, from its geographical position, to
become a rendezvous for all nations of the earth, and that the Bay of
San Francisco is one of the best and most convenient for shipping
throughout the western margin of the American continent. It is precisely
the locality required to make a constant communication across the
Pacific Ocean with the coasts of China, Japan, and the Eastern
Archipelago commercially practicable. Its situation is that which would
have been selected from choice for a concentration of delegates from the
uttermost ends of the earth. If the Chinese, the Malay, the Ladrone, or
the Sandwich Islander had wished to meet his Saxon or Celtic brother on
a matter of mutual business, he would—deciding geographically—have
selected California as the spot of assembly. The attractive powers of
gold could not, therefore, have struck forth over the world from a
better point than in and around San Francisco, both for the interests of
commerce and for those of human intercourse.
The practical question respecting the Golden City remains yet to be
touched. Does it offer wholesome inducements for emigration? On this
subject we can do no more than quote the opinions of the intelligent and
enterprising gentleman, to whose private letter we have already
referred:—“This, I should say, is the best country in the world for an
active, enterprising, steady young man, provided he can keep his health,
as the climate, without due precaution, is not a healthy one. In the
summer season, the weather is pleasantly warm from morning till noon,
then it is windy till evening, and dusty, and then becomes so cold as to
require an over-coat. This weather lasts to October, when the wind gets
round to the south-west. It is dry, warm, and pleasant now (April). This
and the rainy season are the pleasantest and warmest here. Thousands, on
arriving, fall victims to the prevailing disease of dysentery. On the
latter account, therefore, I should not advise, or be the indirect means
of inducing, any one to make the adventure here, because it is
impossible to foresee or calculate whether or not he can stand the
climate and inconveniences of this country; and, if so, he is sure to be
exposed to a miserable and too often neglected sickness, and ending in a
miserable death. I have not been ill myself so far, as my general health
has been extremely good, and I never looked so well as now. The climate
seems to operate injuriously on bilious habits; but to those who can
stand it, it is decidedly pleasanter than England. Fires are never
necessary. Out of doors, at night, a great-coat is required, but in the
house it is always warm. The whole and only question, with a man making
up his mind to locate in California, should be in regard to his health.
Business of all descriptions is better here than in any other part of
the world, and he who perseveres is sure to succeed.
“There are various opinions afloat, in regard to the fertility of the
soil, some holding that there are productive valleys in the interior
which would supply sufficient sustenance for home consumption: others
assert the reverse. Certain it is, however, that in many parts in the
interior, the climate is delightful, but owing to the long continued dry
season, I have doubts as to her ever raising a sufficient supply of
vegetable necessaries of life: our market now is supplied from the
Sandwich Islands and Oregon.
“As to gold mining, it is altogether a lottery; one man may make a large
amount daily, another will but just live. There is an inexhaustible
quantity of gold, however, but with many it is inconceivably hard to
get, as the operations are so many, and health so very precarious, that
it is a mere chance matter if you succeed in getting a large sum
speedily. It seems a question, whether it would not be advisable for the
American Government to work the mines ultimately:
“California must ‘go-a-head:’ the east will pour through the country her
immense commerce into the States, and the mines will last for ages.
Finally, I would now say to my friends, that, if you are inclined to
come to this country, upon this my report of it, you must, to succeed,
attend to my warnings as to drinking and gambling, and to my precautions
against climate.”