In 1579, before Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or New
Amsterdam were settled, Sir Francis Drake, British explorer, careened
and repaired his ship, the Golden Hind, on the shore of what is now
Drake's Bay, an indentation on the California coast just north of the
Golden Gate. This was nearly two hundred years before Padre Junipero
Serra led his band of zealots and soldiers up out of New Spain into Alta
California.
At Drake's Bay the chaplain of the Golden Hind held the first religious
service in the English language on the American continent--a service
that is commemorated by a Celtic cross set up on a hill in Golden Gate
Park, San Francisco. Though close by, Drake did not find the Bay and
site of San Francisco.
It was not until October 31, 1769, that the peninsula and Bay of San
Francisco were discovered by an expedition headed by Don Gaspar de
Portola, Governor of Baja or Lower California. This expedition had set
out overland from San Diego for the purpose of locating Monterey Bay,
discovered in 1603 by Sebastian Vizcaino, Portuguese navigator in the
service of Spain.
Six years after the Portola discovery, Don Juan Manuel Ayala sailed the
first vessel, the San Carlos, through the Golden Gate. The following
year the first permanent settlement by white men on the site of San
Francisco was made when Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza established a
military post at the Presidio beside the Golden Gate. In this same
month, July, 1776, the Liberty Bell was ringing in Philadelphia. But
there was no thought then that the embattled farmers of the Atlantic
coast should inherit before many years this potential Spanish settlement
on the Pacific.
In October, 1776, Padre Junipero Serra founded the Mission Dolores, the
third of the chain of missions extending from San Diego. Subsequently a
settlement was made at Yerba Buena Cove, and there was established the
pueblo of Yerba Buena which has grown into the city of San Francisco.
Things moved slowly in those days--so slowly that in 1784 the pueblo
had but fourteen houses and sixty inhabitants.
Let us turn back the hands of the clock to the time when the pueblo
straggled over the sand hills which faced the water of the bay of Saint
Francis, under the shadow of Loma Alta. What do we see? Where today the
Merchants Exchange Building, central office of San Francisco's
commercial life, heaves its bulk into the air was the cabin of Jacob
Leese, trader. Houses were few and far between, and business was
something to be done when there was nothing else to do.
From the Plaza, then but a block or so from the waterside, two main
roads trailed off through the sand dunes. One went to the southwest,
winding among the hills toward the Mission Dolores, and the other in a
generally northwesterly direction out past the lagoon of the washerwomen
to the Presidio of San Francisco, the seat of the military government.
Sleepy, content to bask in the sunshine that flooded its sand hills and
kept back the banks of fog that loomed above the higher eminence's
separating the cove from the ocean, Yerba Buena dreamed, not of the
future in store for it, but of the next fiesta, of the coming barbecue
at Miguel Noe's rancho, or of the projected cock fight on Sunday at the
Mission Dolores.
To this port came occasionally a Yankee whale ship for fresh water, or
some enterprising trader with shawls and combs and trinkets for the
women, to barter for hides and tallow with the dons from the south and
the great interior ranchos.
Up the coast some Russians had established a settlement, much to the
disquiet of the authorities, who looked upon this as an encroachment of
barbarians menacing Spanish power. Rezanov, plenipotentiary of the Czar,
was a man of charming personality, however, and was able to lull the
suspicions of the indolent Spanish officials and lay his plans for a
coup that never took place. From afar Britain looked with interest upon
this strip of coast with its matchless harbor, and regretted that Drake
had not discovered it when he wintered his ship close by in 1579. Thus
Yerba Buena sprawled and dreamed in the sunshine, unmindful of the web
of destiny being woven about it.
Followed then the war with Mexico and the occupation by the officers and
men of the United States sloop-of-war Portsmouth under Commodore John
Montgomery, who broke the American flag to the breeze in the Plaza.
In 1848 gold was discovered by James W. Marshall in the tail-race of
General Sutter's mill, El Dorado county, and almost overnight San
Francisco was transformed from a hamlet into a pulsing city, overcome
with the rush of newcomers, the population in two years growing almost
to twenty thousand.
California became a state in 1850 without ever having gone through a
probationary period as a territory. In the late sixties the great
Comstock Lode, in Nevada, poured a flood of wealth into San Francisco,
and in 1869, one hundred years after the first white man looked upon San
Francisco Bay, came the railroad, bringing an increasing influx of
people from the East. The opening of the markets of China and Japan led
to the establishment of a trade that has made San Francisco the focal
port of the West.
These were the beginnings of San Francisco. Burned to the ground three
times in the early years of its existence, the city displayed an
invincible fortitude and each time capitalized disaster to build anew
with larger faith in its destiny. When again, in 1906, earthquake and
fire devastated the city its phoenix spirit came to life. The Argonauts
lived once more, magnificent in their resolution. The renaissance was a
prodigy that made onlookers exclamatory. Jules Jusserand, Ambassador of
France to the United States, phrased the wonder of it in majestic prose:
"The page written by the inhabitants of San Francisco on the moving
ashes of their city is not one that any wind will ever blow away."