THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS.
=A Description of San Francisco, the Metropolis of the
Pacific Coast Before the Fire--One of the Most Beautiful
and Picturesque Cities in America--Home of the California
Bonanza Kings.=
San Francisco has had many soubriquets. It has been happily called the
"City of a Hundred Hills," and its title of the "Metropolis of the
Golden Gate" is richly deserved. Its location is particularly
attractive, inasmuch as the peninsula it occupies is swept by the
Pacific Ocean on the west and the beautiful bay of San Francisco on
the north and east. The peninsula itself is thirty miles long and the
site of the city is six miles back from the ocean. It rests on the
shore of San Francisco Bay, which, with its branches, covers over 600
square miles, and for beauty and convenience for commerce is worthy of
its magnificent entrance--the Golden Gate.
San Francisco was originally a mission colony. It is reported that
"the site of the mission of San Francisco was selected because of its
political and commercial advantages. It was to be the nucleus of a
seaport town that should serve to guard the dominion of Spain in its
vicinity. Most of the other missions were founded in the midst of
fertile valleys, inhabited by large numbers of Indians." Both of these
features were notably absent in San Francisco. Even the few Indians
there in 1776 left upon the arrival of the friars and dragoons. Later
on some of them returned and others were added, the number increasing
from 215 in 1783, to 1,205 in 1813. This was the largest number ever
reported. Soon after the number began to decrease through epidemics
and emigration, until there was only 204 in 1832.
The commercial life of San Francisco dates from 1835, when William A.
Richardson, an Englishman, who had been living in Sausalito since
1822, moved to San Francisco. He erected a tent and began the
collection of hides and tallow, by the use of two 30-ton schooners
leased from the missions, and which plied between San Jose and San
Francisco. At that time Mr. Richardson was also captain of the port.
Seventy-five years ago the white adult males, apart from the Mission
colony, consisted of sixteen persons. The local census of 1852 showed
a population of 36,000, and ten years later 90,000. The last general
census of 1900 credits the city with a population of 343,000. The
increase in the last six years has been much greater than for the
previous five, and it is generally conceded that the population at the
time of the fire was about 425,000.
California was declared American territory by Commodore Sleat, at
Monterey, on the 7th of July, 1846, who on that day caused the
American flag to be raised in that town. On the following day, under
instructions from the commodore, Captain Montgomery, of the war sloop
Portsmouth, performed a similar service in Yerba Buena, by which name
the city afterwards christened San Francisco was then known. This
ceremony took place on the plot of ground, afterward set apart as
Portsmouth Square, on the west line of Kearney street, between Clay
and Washington. At that time and for some years afterwards, the waters
of the bay at high tide, came within a block of the spot where this
service occurred. This was a great event in the history of the United
States, and it has grown in importance and in appreciative remembrance
from that day to the present, as the accumulative evidence abundantly
shows.
Referring to the change in name from Yerba Buena to San Francisco, in
1847, a writer says: "A site so desirable for a city, formed by nature
for a great destiny on one of the finest bays in the world, looking
out upon the greatest, the richest, and the most pacific of oceans--in
the very track of empire--in the healthiest of latitudes--such a site
could not fail to attract the attention of the expanding Saxon race.
Commerce hastened it, the discovery of gold consummated it."
Modern San Francisco had its birth following the gold discoveries
which led to the construction of the Central Pacific railway, and
produced a vast number of very wealthy men known by the general title
of California Bonanza Kings. San Francisco became the home and
headquarters of these multi-millionaires, and large sums of their
immense fortunes were invested in palatial residences and business
blocks.
The bonanza king residence section was Nob Hill, an eminence near the
business part of the city.
In the early days of San Francisco's growth and soon after the Central
Pacific railroad had been built by Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker,
Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington and the others who devoted the best
part of their lives to the project of crossing the mountains by rail
this hill was selected as the most desirable spot in the city for the
erection of homes for the use of wealthy pioneers.
The eminence is situated northwest of the business section of the city
and commands a view of the bay and all adjacent territory with the
exception of the Pacific Ocean, Russian Hill, Pacific Heights and
several other high spots obscuring the view toward the west.
Far removed above the din and noise of the city Charles Crocker was
the first to erect his residence on the top of this historic hill
which afterward became known as Nob Hill. The Crocker home was built
of brick and wood originally, but in later years granite staircases,
pillars and copings were substituted. In its time it was looked upon
as the most imposing edifice in the city and for that reason the
business associates of the railroad magnate decided to vie with him in
the building of their homes.
Directly across from the Crocker residence on California street Leland
Stanford caused to be built a residence structure that was intended
to be the most ornate in the western metropolis. It was a veritable
palace and it was within its walls that the boyhood days of Leland
Stanford, Jr., after whom the university is named, were spent in
luxurious surroundings. After the death of the younger Stanford a
memorial room was set apart and the parents permitted no one to enter
this except a trusted man servant who had been in the family for many
years.
But the Stanford residence was relegated to the background as an
object of architectural beauty when Mark Hopkins invaded the sacred
precincts of Nob Hill and erected the residence which he occupied for
three or four years. At his death the palatial building was deeded to
the California Art Institute and as a tribute to the memory of the
sturdy pioneer the building was called the Hopkins Institute of Art.
Its spacious rooms were laden with the choicest works of art on the
Pacific coast and the building and its contents were at all times a
source of interest to the thousands of tourists who visited the city.
The late Collis P. Huntington was the next of the millionaires of San
Francisco to locate upon the crest of Nob Hill. Within a block of the
Crocker, Stanford and Hopkins palaces this railroad magnate of the
west erected a mansion of granite and marble that caused all the
others to be thrown in the shade. Its exterior was severe in its
simplicity, but to those who were fortunate to gain entrance to the
interior the sight was one never to be forgotten. The palaces of
Europe could not excel it and for several years Huntington and his
wife were its only occupants aside from the army of servants required
to keep the house and grounds in order.
Not to be outdone by the railroad magnates of the city the next to
acquire property on the crest of the hill was James Flood, the
"bonanza king" and partner with William O'Brien, the names of both
being closely interwoven with the early history of California and the
Comstock lode. After having paid a visit to the east the millionaire
mine owner became impressed with the brown stone fronts of New York
and outdone his neighbors by erecting the only brown stone structure
in San Francisco.
It was in this historic hilltop also that James G. Fair laid the
foundation of a residence that was intended to surpass anything in the
sacred precincts, but before the foundations had been completed
domestic troubles resulted in putting a stop to building operations
and it is on this site that Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs, daughter of the
late millionaire mine owner, erected the palatial Fairmont hotel,
which was one of the most imposing edifices in San Francisco.
The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, most
pleasure loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most
interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among
ruins. But those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate
and have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights feel that it can
never be the same. It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had
passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and
different. When it rises out of the ashes it will be a modern city,
much like other cities and without its old flavor.
The city lay on a series of hills and the lowlands between. These
hills are really the end of the Coast Range of mountains which lie
between the interior valleys and the ocean to the south. To its rear
was the ocean; but the greater part of the town fronted on two sides
on San Francisco Bay, a body of water always tinged with gold from the
great washings of the mountains, usually overhung with a haze, and of
magnificent color changes. Across the bay to the north lies Mount
Tamalpais, about 5,000 feet high, and so close that ferries from the
water front took one in less than half an hour to the little towns of
Sausalito and Belvidere, at its foot.
It is a wooded mountain, with ample slopes, and from it on the north
stretch away ridges of forest land, the outposts of the great Northern
woods of Sequoia semperrirens. This mountain and the mountainous
country to the south brought the real forest closer to San Francisco
than to any other American city.
Within the last few years men have killed deer on the slopes of
Tamalpais and looked down to see the cable cars crawling up the hills
of San Francisco to the north. In the suburbs coyotes still stole and
robbed hen roosts by night. The people lived much out of doors. There
was no time of the year, except a short part of the rainy season, when
the weather kept one from the woods. The slopes of Tamalpais were
crowded with little villas dotted through the woods, and those minor
estates ran far up into the redwood country. The deep coves of
Belvidere, sheltered by the wind from Tamalpais, held a colony of
"arks" or houseboats, where people lived in the rather disagreeable
summer months, going over to business every day by ferry. Everything
invited out of doors.
The climate of California is peculiar; it is hard to give an
impression of it. In the first place, all the forces of nature work on
laws of their own in that part of California. There is no thunder or
lightning; there is no snow, except a flurry once in five or six
years; there are perhaps a dozen nights in the winter when the
thermometer drops low enough so that there is a little film of ice on
exposed water in the morning. Neither is there any hot weather. Yet
most Easterners remaining in San Francisco for a few days remember
that they were always chilly.
For the Gate is a big funnel, drawing in the winds and the mists which
cool off the great, hot interior valleys of the San Joaquin and
Sacramento. So the west wind blows steadily ten months of the year and
almost all the mornings are foggy. This keeps the temperature steady
at about 55 degrees--a little cool for comfort of an unacclimated
person, especially indoors. Californians, used to it, hardly ever
thought of making fires in their houses except in the few exceptional
days of the winter season, and then they relied mainly upon
fireplaces. This is like the custom of the Venetians and the
Florentines.
But give an Easterner six months of it and he too learns to exist
without a chill in a steady temperature a little lower than that to
which he is accustomed at home. After that one goes about with perfect
indifference to the temperature. Summer and winter San Francisco women
wore light tailor-made clothes, and men wore the same fall weight
suits all the year around. There is no such thing as a change of
clothing for the seasons. And after becoming acclimated these people
found the changes from hot to cold in the normal regions of the earth
hard to bear. Perhaps once in two or three years there comes a day
when there is no fog, no wind and a high temperature in the coast
district. Then there is hot weather, perhaps up in the eighties, and
Californians grumble, swelter and rustle for summer clothes. These
rare hot days were the only times when one saw on the streets of San
Francisco women in light dresses.
Along in early May the rains cease. At that time everything is green
and bright and the great golden poppies, as large as the saucer of an
after dinner coffee cup, are blossoming everywhere. Tamalpais is green
to its top; everything is washed and bright. By late May a yellow
tinge is creeping over the hills. This is followed by a golden June
and a brown July and August. The hills are burned and dry. The fog
comes in heavily, too; and normally this is the most disagreeable
season of the year. September brings a day or two of gentle rain; and
then a change, as sweet and mysterious as the breaking of spring in
the East, comes over the hills. The green grows through the brown and
the flowers begin to come out.
As a matter of fact, the unpleasantness of summer is modified by the
certainty that one can go anywhere without fear of rain. And in all
the coast mountains, especially the seaward slopes, the dews and the
shelter of the giant underbrush keep the water so that these areas are
green and pleasant all summer.
[Illustration: =MARK HOPKINS INSTITUTE, NOB HILL.=
This Institute which crowned Nob Hill in San Francisco was originally
the residence of Mark Hopkins of Central Pacific fame. Nob Hill was
noted for Palatial Homes. They were destroyed by the fire.]
[Illustration: =UNITED STATES MINT AND SUB-TREASURY, SAN FRANCISCO,
CAL.=
This building, which had some $39,000,000 stored in it, remained
intact.]
[Illustration: =NEW POSTOFFICE BUILDING.=
This costly and handsome structure was destroyed by fire.]
[Illustration: =JEFFERSON SQUARE.=
All of the buildings shown in the background were destroyed. Tents
were erected in this square to shelter the homeless.]
In a normal year the rains begin to fall heavily in November; there
will be three or four days of steady downpour and then a clear
and green week. December is also likely to be rainy; and in this month
people enjoy the sensation of gathering for Christmas the mistletoe
which grows profusely on the live oaks, while the poppies are
beginning to blossom at their feet. By the end of January the rains
come lighter. In the long spaces between rains there is a temperature
and a feeling in the air much like that of Indian summer in the East.
January is the month when the roses are at their brightest.
So much for the strange climate, which invites out of doors and which
has played its part in making the character of the people. The
externals of the city are--or were, for they are no more--just as
curious. One usually entered the city by way of San Francisco Bay.
Across its yellow flood, covered with the fleets from the strange seas
of the Pacific, San Francisco presented itself in a hill panorama.
Probably no other city of the world could be so viewed and inspected
at first sight. It rose above the passenger, as he reached dockage, in
a succession of hill terraces.
At one side was Telegraph Hill, the end of the peninsula, a height so
abrupt that it had a 200 foot sheer cliff on its seaward frontage.
Further along lay Nob Hill, crowned with the Mark Hopkins mansion,
which had the effect of a citadel, and in later years by the great,
white Fairmount. Further along was Russian Hill, the highest point.
Below was the business district, whose low site caused all the
trouble.
Except for the modern buildings, the fruit of the last ten years, the
town presented at first sight a disreputable appearance. Most of the
buildings were low and of wood. In the middle period of the '70s, when
a great part of San Francisco was building, there was some atrocious
architecture perpetrated. In that time, too, every one put bow windows
on his house, to catch all of the morning sunlight that was coming
through the fog, and those little houses, with bow windows and fancy
work all down their fronts, were characteristic of the middle class
residence district.
Then the Italians, who tumbled over Telegraph Hill, had built as they
listed and with little regard for streets, and their houses hung
crazily on a side hill which was little less than a precipice. For the
most part, the Chinese, although they occupied an abandoned business
district, had remade the houses Chinese fashion, and the Mexicans and
Spaniards had added to their houses those little balconies without
which life is not life to a Spaniard.
Yet the most characteristic thing after all was the coloring. For the
sea fog had a trick of painting every exposed object a sea gray which
had a tinge of dull green in it. This, under the leaden sky of a San
Francisco morning, had a depressing effect on first sight and
afterward became a delight to the eye. For the color was soft, gentle
and infinitely attractive in mass.
The hills are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo street ran up
Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a
flight of stairs. It is unnecessary to say that no teams ever came up
this street or any other like it, and grass grew long among the paving
stones until the Italians who live thereabouts took advantage of this
to pasture a cow or two. At the end of the four blocks, the pavers had
given it up and the last stage to the summit was a winding path. On
the very top, a colony of artists lived in little villas of houses
whose windows got the whole panorama of the bay. Luckily for these
people, a cable car climbed the hill on the other side, so that it was
not much of a climb to home.
With these hills, with the strangeness of the architecture and with
the green gray tinge over everything, the city fell always into vistas
and pictures, a setting for the romance which hung over everything,
which always hung over life in San Francisco since the padres came and
gathered the Indians about Mission Dolores.
And it was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure. It opened
out on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean, and most of China,
Japan, the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the west coast of
Central America, Australia that came to this country passed in through
the Golden Gate. There was a sprinkling, too, of Alaska and Siberia.
From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always something strange and
suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay. It would be a South
Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out cottons and idols; a
Chinese junk with fanlike sails, back from an expedition after sharks'
livers; an old whaler, which seemed to drip oil, back from a year of
cruising in the Arctic. Even the tramp windjammers were deep chested
craft, capable of rounding the Horn or of circumnavigating the globe;
and they came in streaked and picturesque from their long voyaging.
In the orange colored dawn which always comes through the mists of
that bay, the fishing fleet would crawl in under triangular lateen
sails, for the fishermen of San Francisco Bay were all Neapolitans who
brought their customers and their customs and sail with lateen rigs
shaped like the ear of a horse when the wind fills them and stained an
orange brown.
Along the water front the people of these craft met. "The smelting pot
of the races," Stevenson called it; and this was always the city of
his soul. There are black Gilbert Islanders, almost indistinguishable
from Negroes; lighter Kanakas from Hawaii or Samoa; Lascars in
turbans; thickset Russian sailors; wild Chinese with unbraided hair;
Italian fishermen in tam o' shanters, loud shirts and blue sashes;
Greeks, Alaska Indians, little bay Spanish-Americans, together with
men of all the European races. These came in and out from among the
queer craft, to lose themselves in the disreputable, tumbledown, but
always mysterious shanties and small saloons. In the back rooms of
these saloons South Sea Island traders and captains, fresh from the
lands of romance, whaling masters, people who were trying to get up
treasure expeditions, filibusters, Alaskan miners, used to meet and
trade adventures.
There was another element, less picturesque and equally
characteristic, along the water front. For San Francisco was the back
eddy of European civilization--one end of the world. The drifters came
there and stopped, lingered a while to live by their wits in a country
where living after a fashion has always been marvellously cheap. These
people haunted the water front or lay on the grass on Portsmouth
Square.
That square, the old plaza about which the city was built, Spanish
fashion, had seen many things. There in the first burst of the early
days the vigilance committee used to hold its hangings. There in the
time of the sand lot riots Dennis Kearney, who nearly pulled the town
down about his ears, used to make his orations which set the unruly to
rioting. In these later years Chinatown laid on one side of it and the
Latin quarter and the "Barbary Coast" on the other.
On this square men used to lie all day long and tell strange yarns.
Stevenson lay there with them in his time and learned the things which
he wrote into "The Wrecker" and his South Sea stories, and in the
center of the square there stood the beautiful Stevenson monument. In
later years the authorities put up a municipal building on one side of
this square and prevented the loungers, for decency's sake, from lying
on the grass. Since then some of the peculiar character of the old
plaza had gone.
The Barbary Coast was a loud bit of hell. No one knows who coined the
name. The place was simply three blocks of solid dance halls, there
for the delight of the sailors of the world. On a fine busy night
every door blared loud dance music from orchestra, steam pianos and
gramophones and the cumulative effect of the sound which reached the
street was at least strange. Almost anything might be happening behind
the swinging doors. For a fine and picturesque bundle of names
characteristic of the place, a police story of three or four years ago
is typical. Hell broke out in the Eye Wink Dance Hall. The trouble
was started by a sailor known as Kanaka Pete, who lived in the What
Cheer House, over a woman known as Iodoform Kate. Kanaka Pete chased
the man he had marked to the Little Silver Dollar, where he turned and
punctured him. The by-product of his gun made some holes in the front
of the Eye Wink, which were proudly kept as souvenirs, and were
probably there until it went out in the fire. This was low life, the
lowest of the low.
Until the last decade almost anything except the commonplace and the
expected might happen to a man on the water front. The cheerful
industry of shanghaiing was reduced to a science. A stranger taking a
drink in one of the saloons which hung out over the water might be
dropped through the floor into a boat, or he might drink with a
stranger and wake in the forecastle of a whaler bound for the Arctic.
Such an incident is the basis of Frank Norris's novel, "Moran of the
Lady Letty," and although the novel draws it pretty strong, it is not
exaggerated. Ten years ago the police and the foreign consuls, working
together, stopped this.
Kearney street, a wilder and stranger Bowery, was the main
thoroughfare of these people. An exiled Californian, mourning over the
city of his heart, said recently:
"In a half an hour of Kearney street I could raise a dozen men for any
wild adventure, from pulling down a statue to searching for the Cocos
Island treasure."
This is hardly an exaggeration.
These are a few of the elements which made the city strange and gave
it the glamour of romance which has so strongly attracted such men as
Stevenson, Frank Norris and Kipling. This lay apart from the regular
life of the city, which was distinctive in itself.
The Californian is the second generation of a picked and mixed stock.
The merry, the adventurous, often the desperate, always the brave,
deserted the South and New England in 1849 to rush around the Horn or
to try the perils of the plains. They found there already grown old in
the hands of the Spaniards younger sons of hidalgos and many of them
of the proudest blood of Spain. To a great extent the pioneers
intermarried with Spanish women; in fact, except for a proud little
colony here and there, the old Spanish blood is sunk in that of the
conquering race. Then there was an influx of intellectual French
people, largely overlooked in the histories of the early days; and
this Latin leaven has had its influence.
Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work
very hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry
stock, the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; so far from
the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the
Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be
unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and above all easy
to meet and to know.
Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it
off from any other part of the country. This sense is almost Latin in
its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin
blood. The true Californian lingers in the north; for southern
California has been built up by "lungers" from the East and middle
West and is Eastern in character and feeling.
With such a people life was always gay. If they did not show it on the
streets, as do the people of Paris, it was because the winds made open
cafes disagreeable at all seasons of the year. The gayety went on
indoors or out on the hundreds of estates that fringed the city. It
was noted for its restaurants. Perhaps the very best for people who
care not how they spend their money could not be had there, but for a
dollar, 75 cents, 50 cents, a quarter or even 15 cents the restaurants
afforded the best fare on earth at the price.
If one should tell exactly what could be had at Coppa's for 50 cents
or at the Fashion for, say, 35, no New Yorker who has not been there
would believe it. The San Francisco French dinner and the San
Francisco free lunch were as the Public Library to Boston or the stock
yards to Chicago. A number of causes contributed to this consummation.
The country all about produced everything that a cook needed and that
in abundance--the bay was an almost untapped fishing pond, the fruit
farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding
country produced in abundance fine meats, all cereals and all
vegetables.
But the chefs who came from France in the early days and liked this
land of plenty were the head and front of it. They passed on their art
to other Frenchmen or to the clever Chinese. Most of the French chefs
at the biggest restaurants were born in Canton, China. Later the
Italians, learning of this country where good food is appreciated,
came and brought their own style. Householders always dined out one or
two nights of the week, and boarding houses were scarce, for the
unattached preferred the restaurants. The eating was usually better
than the surroundings.
Meals that were marvels were served in tumbledown little hotels. Most
famous of all the restaurants was the Poodle Dog. There have been no
less than four restaurants of this name, beginning with a frame shanty
where, in the early days, a prince of French cooks used to exchange
ragouts for gold dust. Each succeeding restaurant of the name has
moved further downtown; and the recent Poodle Dog stood on the edge of
the Tenderloin in a modern five story building. And it typified a
certain spirit that there was in San Francisco.
For on the ground floor was a public restaurant where there was served
the best dollar dinner on earth. It ranked with the best and the
others were in San Francisco. Here, especially on Sunday night, almost
everybody went to vary the monotony of home cooking. Every one who was
any one in the town could be seen there off and on. It was perfectly
respectable. A man might take his wife and daughter there.
On the second floor there were private dining rooms, and to dine
there, with one or more of the opposite sex, was risque but not
especially terrible. But the third floor--and the fourth floor--and
the fifth. The elevator man of the Poodle Dog, who had held the job
for many years and never spoke unless spoken to, wore diamonds and was
a heavy investor in real estate. There were others as famous in their
way--the Zinka, where, at one time, every one went after the theatre,
and Tate's the Palace Grill, much like the grills of Eastern hotels,
except for the price; Delmonico's, which ran the Poodle Dog neck and
neck in its own line, and many others, humbler but great at the price.
The city never went to bed. There was no closing law, so that the
saloons kept open nights and Sundays, at their own sweet will. Most of
them elected to remain open until 3 o'clock in the morning at least.
Yet this restaurant life did not exactly express the careless,
pleasure loving character of the people. In great part their pleasures
were simple, inexpensive and out of doors. No people were fonder of
expeditions into the country, of picnics--which might be brought off
at almost any season of the year--and often long tours in the great
mountains and forests. And hospitality was nearly a vice.
[Illustration: =CHRONICLE BUILDING.=
(An old landmark.)]
[Illustration: =ST. FRANCIS HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.=
(Destroyed by fire.)]
[Illustration: =FERRY HOUSE, WHERE INJURED ARE LEAVING CITY.=
This is the station of the greatest ferry in the world, just outside
the fire belt in San Francisco. Hundreds of refugees have been taken
from it to Oakland and other points.]
As in the early mining days, if they liked the stranger the people
took him in. At the first meeting the local man probably had him put
up at the club; at the second, he invited him home to dinner. As long
as he stayed he was being invited to week end parties at ranches, to
little dinners in this or that restaurant and to the houses of his new
acquaintances, until his engagements grew beyond hope of fulfillment.
There was rather too much of it. At the end of a fortnight a stranger
with a pleasant smile and a good story left the place a wreck. This
tendency ran through all grades of society--except, perhaps, the
sporting people who kept the tracks and the fighting game alive.
These also met the stranger--and also took him in.
Centers of men of hospitality were the clubs, especially the famous
Bohemian and the Family. The latter was an offshoot of the Bohemian,
which had been growing fast and vieing with the older organization for
the honor of entertaining pleasing and distinguished visitors.
The Bohemian Club, whose real founder is said to have been the late
Henry George, was formed in the '70s by a number of newspaper writers
and men working in the arts or interested in them. It had grown to a
membership of 750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers,
musicians and actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group
of men, and hospitality was their avocation. Yet the thing which set
this club off from all others in the world was the midsummer High
Jinks.
The club owns a fine tract of redwood forest fifty miles north of San
Francisco, on the Russian River. There are two varieties of big trees
in California: the Sequoia gigantea and the Sequoia sempervirens. The
great trees of the Mariposa grove belong to the gigantea species. The
sempervirens, however, reaches the diameter of 16 feet, and some of
the greatest trees of this species are in the Bohemian Club grove. It
lies in a cleft of the mountains; and up one hillside there runs a
natural out of door stage of remarkable acoustic properties.
In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from
business, went up to this grove and camp out for two weeks. And on the
last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle with poetic
words, music and effects done by the club, in praise of the forest. In
late years this had been practically a masque or an opera. It cost
about $10,000. It took the spare time of scores of men for weeks; yet
these 700 business men, professional men, artists, newspaper workers,
struggled for the honor of helping out on the Jinks; and the whole
thing was done naturally and with reverence. It would hardly be
possible anywhere else in this country; the thing which made it
possible is the art spirit which is in the Californian. It runs in the
blood.
Some one has been collecting statistics which prove this point. "Who's
Who in America" is long on the arts and on learning and comparatively
weak in business and the professions. Now some one who has taken the
trouble has found that more persons mentioned in "Who's Who" by the
thousand of the population were born in Massachusetts than in any
other State; but that Massachusetts is crowded closely by California,
with the rest nowhere. The institutions of learning in Massachusetts
account for her pre-eminence; the art spirit does it for California.
The really big men nurtured on California influence are few, perhaps;
but she has sent out an amazing number of good workers in painting, in
authorship, in music and especially in acting.
"High Society" in San Francisco had settled down from the rather wild
spirit of the middle period; it had come to be there a good deal as it
is elsewhere. There was much wealth; and the hills of the western
addition were growing up with fine mansions. Outside of the city, at
Burlingame, there was a fine country club centering a region of
country estates which stretched out to Menlo Park. This club had a
good polo team, which played every year with teams of Englishmen from
southern California and even with teams from Honolulu.
The foreign quarters were worth a chapter in themselves. Chief of
these was, of course, Chinatown, of which every one has heard who ever
heard of San Francisco. A district six blocks long and two blocks
wide, when the quarter was full, housed 30,000 Chinese. The dwellings
were old business blocks of the early days; but the Chinese had added
to them, rebuilt them, had run out their own balconies and entrances,
and had given it that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all
Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this,
they had burrowed to a depth equal to three stories under the ground,
and through this ran passages in which the Chinese transacted their
dark and devious affairs--as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in
slave girls and the settlement of their difficulties.
There was less of this underground life than formerly, for the Board
of Health had a cleanup some time ago; but it was still possible to go
from one end of Chinatown to the other through secret underground
passages. The Chinese lived there their own life in their own way. The
Chinatown of New York is dull beside it. And the tourist, who always
included Chinatown in his itinerary, saw little of the real life. The
guides gave him a show by actors hired for his benefit. In reality the
place had considerable importance in a financial way. There were
clothing and cigar factories of importance, and much of the tea and
silk importing was in the hands of the merchants, who numbered several
millionaires. Mainly, however, it was a Tenderloin for the house
servants of the city--for the San Francisco Chinaman was seldom a
laundryman; he was too much in demand at fancy prices as a servant.
The Chinese lived their own lives in their own way and settled their
own quarrels with the revolvers of their highbinders. There were two
theaters in the quarter, a number of rich joss houses, three
newspapers and a Chinese telephone exchange. There is a race feeling
against the Chinese among the working people of San Francisco, and no
white man, except the very lowest outcasts, lived in the quarter.
On the slopes of Telegraph Hill dwelt the Mexicans and Spanish, in low
houses, which they had transformed by balconies into a resemblance of
Spain. Above, and streaming over the hill, were the Italians. The
tenement quarter of San Francisco shone by contrast with that of New
York, for while these people lived in old and humble houses they had
room to breathe and a high eminence for light and air. Their shanties
clung on the side of the hill or hung on the very edge of the
precipice overlooking the bay, on the edge of which a wall kept their
babies from falling. The effect was picturesque, and this hill was
the delight of painters. It was all more like Italy than anything in
the Italian quarter of New York and Chicago--the very climate and
surroundings, wine country close at hand, the bay for their lateen
boats, helped them.
Over by the ocean and surrounded by cemeteries in which there are no
more burials, there is an eminence which is topped by two peaks and
which the Spanish of the early days named after the breasts of a
woman. At its foot was Mission Dolores, the last mission planted by
the Spanish padres in their march up the coast, and from these hills
the Spanish looked for the first time upon the golden bay.
Many years ago some one set up at the summit of this peak a sixty foot
cross of timber. Once a high wind blew it down, and the women of the
Fair family then had it restored so firmly that it would resist
anything. As it is on a hill it must have stood. It has risen for
fifty years above the gay, careless, luxuriant and lovable city, in
full view from every eminence and from every alley. It must stand now
above the desolation of ruins.