GOLDEN CITY.
The first letter which I delivered in San Francisco was from a Mormon
gentleman to a merchant, who, as he read it, exclaimed: “Ah! so you want
to see the lions? I‘ll pick you up at three, and take you _there_.” I
wondered, but went, as travelers do.
At the end of a pleasant drive along the best road in all America, I
found myself upon a cliff overhanging the Pacific, with a glorious
outlook, seaward toward the Farallones, and northward to Cape Benita and
the Golden Gate. Beneath, a few hundred yards from shore, was a conical
rock, covered with shapeless monsters, plashing the water and roaring
ceaselessly, while others swam around. These were “the lions,” my
acquaintance said--the sea-lions. I did not enter upon an explanation of
our slang phrase, “the lions” which the Mormon, himself an Englishman,
no doubt had used, but took the first opportunity of seeing the
remainder of “the lions” of the Golden City.
The most remarkable spot in all America is Mission Dolores, in the
outskirts of San Francisco City--once a settlement of the Society of
Jesus, and now partly blanket factory and partly church. Nowhere has the
conflict between the Saxon and Latin races been so sharp and so
decisive. For eighty or ninety years California was first Spanish, then
Mexican, then a half independent Spanish-American republic. The progress
of those ninety years was shown in the foundation of half a dozen
Jesuit “missions,” which held each of them a thousand or two tame
Indians as slaves, while a few military settlers and their friends
divided the interior with the savage tribes. Gold, which had been
discovered here by Drake, was never sought: the fathers, like the Mormon
chiefs, discouraged mining; it interfered with their tame Indians. Here
and there, in four cases, perhaps, in all, a presidio, or castle, had
been built for the protection of the mission, and a puebla, or tiny free
town, had been suffered to grow up, not without remonstrance from the
fathers. Los Angeles had thus sprung from the mission of that name, the
fishing village of Yerba Buena, from Mission Dolores on the bay of San
Francisco, and San José, from Santa Clara. In 1846, Fremont the
Pathfinder conquered the country with forty-two men, and now it has a
settled population of nearly half a million; San Francisco is as large
as Newcastle or Hull, as flourishing as Liverpool, and the Saxon blanket
factory has replaced the Spanish mission. The story might have served as
a warning to the French Emperor, when he sent ships and men to found a
“Latin empire in America.”
Between the presidio and the Mission Dolores lies Lone Mountain
Cemetery, in that solitary calm and majesty of beauty which befits a
home for the dead, the most lovely of all the cemeteries of America.
Queen Emma, of the Sandwich Islands, who is here at present, said of it
yesterday to a Californian merchant: “How comes it that you Americans,
who live so fast, find time to bury your dead so beautifully?”
Lone Mountain is not the only delicious spot that is given to the
American dead. Laurel Hill, Mount Auburn, Greenwood, Cypress Grove,
Hollywood, Oak Hill, are names not more full of poetry than are the
places to which they belong; but Lone Mountain has over all an advantage
in its giant fuchsias, and scarlet geraniums of the size and shape of
trees; in the distant glimpses, too, of the still Pacific.
San Francisco is ill placed, so far as mere building facilities are
concerned. When the first houses were built in 1845 and 1846, they stood
on a strip of beach surrounding the sheltered cove of Yerba Buena, and
at the foot of the steep and lofty sand-hills. Dunes and cove have
disappeared together; the hills have been shot bodily into the bay, and
the former harbor is now the business quarter of the city. Not a street
can be built without cutting down a hill, or filling up a glen. Never
was a great town built under heavier difficulties; but trade requires it
to be exactly where it is, and there it will remain and grow. Its former
rivals, Vallejo and Benicia, are grass-grown villages, in spite of their
having had the advantage of “a perfect situation.” While the spot on
which the Golden City stands was still occupied by the struggling
village of Yerba Buena, Francisca was a rising city, where corner lots
were worth their ten or twenty thousand dollars. When the gold rush
came, the village, shooting to the front, voted itself the name of its
great bay, and Francisca had to change its title to Benicia, in order
not to be thought a mere suburb of San Francisco. The mouth of the
Columbia was once looked to as the future haven of Western America, and
point of convergence of the railroad lines; but the “center of the
universe” has not more completely removed from Independence to Fort
Riley than Astoria has yielded to San Francisco the claim to be the port
of the Pacific.
The one great danger of this coast all its cities share in common. Three
times within the present century, the spot on which San Francisco stands
has been violently disturbed by subterranean forces. The earthquake of
last year has left its mark upon Montgomery Street and the plaza, for it
frightened the San Franciscans into putting up light wooden cornices to
hotels and banks, instead of the massive stone projections that are
common in the States; otherwise, though lesser shocks are daily matters,
the San Franciscans have forgotten the “great scare.” A year is a long
time in California. There is little of the earliest San Francisco left,
though the city is only eighteen years old. Fires have done good work as
well as harm, and it is worth a walk up to the plaza to see how prim and
starched are the houses which now occupy a square three sides of which
were, in 1850, given up to the public gaming-hells.
One of the few remaining bits of old Golden City life is to be found in
the neighborhood of the “What Cheer House,” the resting-place of diggers
on their way from the interior to take ship for New York or Europe. Here
there is no lack of coin, no want of oaths, no scarcity of drinks.
“Juleps” are as plentiful as in Baltimore itself; Yerba Buena, the old
name for San Francisco, means “mint.”
If the old character of the city is gone, there are still odd scenes to
be met with in its streets. To-day I saw a master builder of great
wealth with his coat and waistcoat off, and his hat stowed away on one
side, carefully teaching a raw Irish lad how to lay a brick. He told me
that the acquisition of the art would bring the man an immediate rise in
his wages from five to ten shillings a day. Unskilled labor, Mexican and
Chinese, is plentiful enough, but white artisans are scarce. The want of
servants is such, that even the wealthiest inhabitants live with their
wives and families in hotels, to avoid the cost and trouble of an
establishment. Those who have houses pay rough unkempt Irish girls from
£6 to £8 a month, with board, “outings” when they please, and
“followers” unlimited.
The hotel boarding has much to do with the somewhat unwomanly manner of
a few among the ladies of the newest States, but the effect upon the
children is more marked than it is upon their mothers. To a woman of
wealth, it matters, perhaps, but little whether she rules a household of
her own, or boards in the first floor of some gigantic hostelry; but it
does matter a great deal to her children, who, in the one case, have a
home to play and work in, and who, in the other, play on the stairs or
in the corridors, to the annoyance of every sojourner in the hotel, and
never dream of work out of school-hours, or of solid reading that is not
compulsory. The only one of the common charges brought against America
in English society and in English books and papers that is thoroughly
true, is the statement that American children, as a rule, are “forward,”
ill mannered, and immoral. An American can scarcely be found who does
not admit and deplore the fact. With the self-exposing honesty that is a
characteristic of their nation, American gentlemen will talk by the hour
of the terrible profligacy of the young New Yorkers. Boys, they tell
you, who in England would be safe in the lower school at Eton or in
well-managed houses, in New York or New Orleans are deep gamesters and
God-defying rowdies. In New England, things are better; in the West,
there is yet time to prevent the ill arising; but even in the most
old-fashioned of American States, the children are far too full of
self-assurance. Their faults are chiefly faults of manner, but such in
children have a tendency to become so many vices. On my way home from
Egypt, I crossed the Simplon with a Southerner and a Pennsylvanian boy
of fourteen or fifteen. An English boy would have expressed his opinion,
and been silent: this lad‘s attacks upon the poor Southerner were
unceasing and unfeeling; yet I could see that he was good at bottom. I
watched my chance to give him my view of his conduct, and when we
parted, he came up and shook hands, saying: “You‘re not a bad fellow for
a Britisher, after all.”
In my walks through the city I found its climate agreeable rather for
work than idleness. Sauntering or lounging is as little possible as it
is in London. The summer is not yet ended; and in the summer at San
Francisco it is cold after eleven in the day--strangely cold for the
latitude of Athens. The fierce sun scorches up the valleys of the San
Joaquin and the Sacramento in the early morning; and the heated air,
rising from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled by the cold
breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa Range is unbroken but by the
single gap of the Golden Gate, and through this opening the cold winds
rush in a never-ceasing gale, spreading fanlike as soon as they have
passed the narrows. Hence it is that the Golden Gate is called “The
Keyhole,” and the wind “The Keyhole Breeze.” Up country they make it
raise the water for irrigation. In winter there is a calm, and then the
city is as sunny as the rest of California.
So purely local is the bitter gale that at Benicia, ten miles from San
Francisco, the mean temperature is ten degrees higher for the year, and
nearly twenty for the summer. I have stood on the shore at Benicia when
the thermometer was at a hundred in the shade, and seen the clouds
pouring in from the Pacific, and hiding San Francisco in a murky pall,
while the temperature there was under seventy degrees. This fog retarded
by a hundred years the discovery of San Francisco Bay. The entrance to
the Golden Gate is narrow, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo,
Drake, Viscaino, sailed past it without seeing that there was a bay, and
the great land-locked sea was first beheld by white men when the
missionaries came upon its arms and creeks, far away inland.
The peculiarity of climate carries with it great advantages. It is never
too hot, never too cold, to work--a fact which of itself secures a grand
future for San Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked. At a
San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not American. Even the lean
Western men and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of
the winds. The high metallic ring of the New England voice is not found
in San Francisco. As for old men, California must have been that fabled
province of Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever a
man‘s age when he entered it, he never grew older by a day. To dogs and
strangers there are drawbacks in the absence of winter: dogs are muzzled
all the year round, and musquitoes are perennial upon the coast.
The city is gay with flags; every house supports a liberty pole upon its
roof, for when the Union sentiment sprang up in San Francisco, at the
beginning of the war, public opinion forced the citizens to make a
conspicuous exhibition of the stars and stripes, by way of showing that
it was from no want of loyalty that they refused to permit the
circulation of the Federal greenbacks. In this matter of flags the
sea-gale is of service, for were it not for its friendly assistance, a
short house between two tall ones could not sport a huge flag with much
effect. As it is, the wind always blowing across the chief streets, and
never up or down, the narrowest and lowest house can flaunt a large
ensign without fear of its ever flapping against the walls of its proud
neighbors.
It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Californian English have the
old-world type. With less ingenuity than the New England Yankees, they
have far more depth and solidity in their enterprise; they do not rack
their brain at inventing machines to peel apples and milk cows, but they
intend to tunnel through the mountains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with
its waters irrigate the Californian plains. They share our British love
for cash payments and good roads; they one and all set their faces
against repudiation in any shape, and are strongly for what they call
“rolling-up” the debt. Throughout the war they quoted paper as
depreciated, not gold as risen. Indeed, there is here the same
unreasoning prejudice against paper money that I met with in Nevada.
After all, what can be expected of a State which still produces
three-eighths of all the gold raised yearly in the world?
San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities bid fair to be, by a
mixed throng of men of all lands beneath the sun. New Englanders and
Englishmen predominate in energy, Chinese in numbers. The French and
Italians are stronger here than in any other city in the States; and the
red-skinned Mexicans, who own the land, supply the market people and a
small portion of the townsfolk. Australians, Polynesians, and Chilians
are numerous; the Germans and Scandinavians alone are few; they prefer
to go where they have already friends--to Philadelphia or Milwaukee. In
this city--already a microcosm of the world--the English, British, and
American are in possession--have distanced the Irish, beaten down the
Chinese by force, and are destined to physically preponderate in the
cross-breed, and give the tone, political and moral, to the Pacific
shore. New York is Irish, Philadelphia German, Milwaukee Norwegian,
Chicago Canadian, Sault de Ste Marie French; but in San Francisco--where
all the foreign races are strong--none is dominant; whence the singular
result that California, the most mixed in population, is also the most
English of the States.
In this strange community, starting more free from the Puritan influence
of New England than has hitherto done any State within the Union, it is
doubtful what religion will predominate. Catholicism is “not
fashionable” in America--it is the creed of the Irish, and that is
enough for most Americans; so Anglicanism, its critics say, is popular
as being “very proper.” Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is
flourishing in California, and it seems probable that the church which
gains the day in California will eventually be that of the whole
Pacific.
On Montgomery Street are some of the finest buildings in all America;
the “Occidental Hotel,” the “Masonic Hall,” the “Union Club,” and
others. The club has only just been rebuilt after its destruction by a
nitro-glycerin explosion which occurred in the express office next door.
A case, of which no one knew the contents, was being lifted by two
clerks, when it exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and
breaking half the windows in the city. On examination it was found to be
nitro-glycerin on its way to the mines.
Another accident occurred here yesterday with this same compound. A
sharp report was heard on board a ship lying in the docks, and the cook
was found dead, below; pieces of a flask had been driven into his heart
and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was examined, and found to be
common oil; but this morning, I read in the _Alta_ a report from a
chemist that traces of nitro-glycerin have been discovered by him upon
the glass, and a statement from one of the hands says that the ship on
her way up had called at Manzanilla, where the cook had taken the flask
from a merchant‘s office, emptied it of its contents, the character of
which was unknown to him, and filled it with common vegetable oil.
Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerin has been the
nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes they care little, but the
freaks of the devilish oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in
the Nevada mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself a
demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and then the slightest
friction will explode it--that, on the other hand, it goes off if
heated. If you leave it standing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are
that it undergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it explodes;
and no lapse of time has on its power the smallest deteriorating effect,
but, on the contrary, the oil will crystallize, and then its strength
for harm is multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed by
earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found to ascribe the
shock to nitro-glycerin.
A day or two after my return from Benicia, I escaped from the city, and
again went south, halting at San José, “The Garden City,” and chief town
of the fertile Guadalupe district, on my way to the quicksilver mines of
New Almaden, now the greatest in the world since they have beaten the
Spanish mines and Idria. From San José, I drove myself to Almaden along
a sun-dried valley with a fertile tawny soil, reaching the delicious
mountain stream and the groves it feeds in time to join my friends at
lunch in the shady hacienda. The director took me through the refining
works, in which the quicksilver may be seen running in streams down
gutters from the furnaces, but he was unable to go with me up the
mountain to the mines from which the cinnabar comes shooting down by its
weight. The superintendent engineer--a meerschaum-equipped Bavarian--and
myself mounted, at the Hacienda Gate, upon our savage-looking beasts,
and I found myself for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican
saddle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups that I had seen used
by the Utes in Denver. The riding feats of the Mexicans and the
Californian boys are explained when you find that their saddle puts it
out of the question that they should be thrown; but the fatigue that its
size and shape cause to man and horse, when the man is a stranger to New
Spain, and the horse knows that he is so, outweighs any possible
advantages that it may possess. With their huge gilt spurs, attached to
the stirrup, not to the boot, the double peak, and the embroidered
trappings, the Mexican saddles are the perfection at once of the
cumbersome and the picturesque.
Silently we half scrambled, half rode, up a break-neck path which forms
a short cut to the mine, till all at once a charge of our horses at an
almost perpendicular wall of rock was followed by their simultaneously
commencing to kick and back toward the cliff. Springing off, we found
that the girths had been slackened by the Mexican groom, and that the
steep bit of mountain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the
ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners and mining in
French, my German not being much worse than my Bavarian‘s English.
After viewing the mines, the walls of which, composed of crimson
cinnabar, show bravely in the torch-glare, we worked our way through the
tunnels to the topmost lode and open air.
Bidding good-by to what I could see of my German in the fog from his
meerschaum, I turned to ride down by the road instead of the path. I had
not gone a furlong, when, turning a corner, there burst upon me a view
of the whole valley of tawny California, now richly golden in the colors
of the fall. Looking from this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with
the Contra Costa Range before me, and Mount Hamilton towering from the
plain, apart, I could discern below me the gleam of the Coyote Creek,
and of the windows in the church of Santa Clara--in the distance, the
mountains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo to Alameda and
San Pablo, basking in unhindered sun. The wild oats dried by the heat
made of the plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups of
black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain foot with “chapparal.”
The volcanic hills were rounded into softness in the delicious haze, and
all nature overspread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the mighty
fog was beginning to pour in through the Golden Gate to refresh America
with dews from the Pacific.