A Crack in the Edge of the World (27 page)

Yerba Buena, though only two and a half miles from the mission, was to remain uninhabited for nearly sixty years. But in 1835, by which time Alta California had become Mexican territory, an English sea captain named William Richardson broke its isolation, and became the first man to build a home there. Right beside the herb meadow, far enough from the shoreline to guarantee he would keep dry, he drove four long redwood posts into the ground and covered them with a foresail. He then moved in with some supplies, and ran this lonely and wretched outpost as a trading station, for the sole convenience of the owners of a pair of shallow-draft schooners that plied the upper reaches of what was fast coming to be known as San Francisco Bay. These little ships collected the hides and the tallow produced by the farms on the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and brought it all back to the seagoing transport ships whose masters liked to lay up in Yerba Buena Cove. For the management of this station, the solitary Captain Richardson was paid a modest fee.

He had to wait only a year for fixed company. The shelter afforded by the cove quickly proved tempting for what was to become a harborful of other mariners and traders. It fast became a popular stopping-off place, and the hide trade expanded rapidly. The Russians called in often, and so did British vessels on their way to the Sandwich Islands—now Hawaii. There were French sloops, too, and American survey vessels making the first tentative explorations of a shore that, though currently Mexican, would before long be entirely their own.

Eventually one of these visiting Americans decided to join Richardson, and stay. He was named Jacob Leese and came from Ohio. Richard Dana remembered him later as a wild fellow who liked to shoot at wine bottles he had suspended from the ends of the topgallant stunsail booms (just hanging the bottles would be quite a feat).
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Leese negotiated with the Mexican
alcalde
for land and was granted a
lot directly across from Richardson's tent; he imported boards and building materials. By Independence Day, 1836, he was able to stage a block party—the section of land between his own house and his neighbor's theoretically constituting a street—and invited the mission settlers, Mexican infantrymen from the Presidio and farmers from the Sacramento River Valley, to join him in celebrating America's sixtieth birthday. It was the very first party to be given by the first settlers—and from that day the tiny settlement never looked back, becoming renowned as a place for saturnalia, jollity, and drink. (And on April 15, 1838, Leese, who had married a sister of a Mexican general, became a father: His daughter, Rosalie Leese, thus became the first child to be born in the steadily expanding settlement.)

Ten years later, when the Mexican War broke out, President Polk ordered a Captain John Montgomery of the sloop-of-war USS
Portsmouth
to sail into the bay and seize what had by now grown from a settlement into a well-established trading village of fifty houses with a population of about 200. On July 9, 1846, Montgomery raised the American flag on the field the locals called its plaza and installed an American military governor in the Presidio. Six months later one of his officers, a lieutenant named Washington Bartlett, who had been appointed chief magistrate of the town, posted this notice in the January 30, 1847, issue of the
California Star:

An Ordinance

Whereas, the local name of Yerba Buena, as applied to the settlement or town of San Francisco, is unknown beyond the district; and has been applied from the local name of the cove, on which the town is built; Therefore, to prevent confusion and mistakes in public documents, and that the town may have the advantage of the name given on the public map,

IT IS HEREBY ORDAINED
that the name of San Francisco shall hereafter be used in all official communications and public documents, or records appertaining to the town.

Wash'n. A. Bartlett

Chief Magistrate

The city grew at an exuberant, almost irrational rate. Will Rogers once remarked that it was “the city that was never a town.” At the time of its renaming it already had two newspapers, and a census conducted by one of them found that in only the first six months of American governance it had more than doubled in size. The paper noted the presence among its 459 inhabitants of a minister, three doctors, and three lawyers, together with two surveyors, a teacher, eleven farmers, seven bakers, six blacksmiths, a brewer, six brickmakers, seven butchers, two cabinetmakers, three innkeepers, four tailors, eleven merchants, a morocco-luggage maker, a weaver, a watchmaker, and no fewer than twenty-six carpenters. Less scrupulously counted were a number of “Indians, Sandwich Islanders and negroes.” The Hawaiians, said the paper, generally acted as pilots and navigators, since they had
the uncanny ability to grope their way around the skerries of San Francisco Bay, no matter how thick the frequent fog. And men outnumbered women in the earliest settlement by almost three to one—a condition that would dog the city for years and lead to its later reputation as a place where most of the inhabitants would misspend their days in one kind of abandon or another.

The temptation for quite another kind of abandon began in the spring of 1848, with the event that more than any other would come to define early San Francisco. This, of course, was when gold was first found at Sutter's Mill, and, though it would later result in the explosive expansion of the town, the immediate initial effect was one of true abandonment—for, as the
Annals of San Francisco
put it, “Gold was the irresistible magnet that drew human souls to the place where it lay, rudely snapping asunder the feebler ties of affection and duty.” In an instant almost all of the 500 men who were then living in town at the time dropped everything and headed out to the goldfields, leaving the city, and their women, to fend for themselves. “Day after day the bay was covered with launches filled with the inhabitants and their goods, hastening up the Sacramento … leaving San Francisco like a place where the plague reigns, forsaken by its old inhabitants, a melancholy solitude.”

In the summer of 1848 both of the town's newspapers suspended publication—but only briefly, because by early autumn came the first harbingers of the social revolution that was to come: The local government agreed to accept gold dust, to fix a price for it ($16 an ounce), to establish a mint and to manufacture coinage. Almost overnight everything changed. From the goldfields 100 miles away to the east poured gold dust worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—almost a million dollars in the first eight weeks alone—and all of it to finance the purchase of the goods that the miners needed, the shovels and trowels, the picks and knives, the bags of flour, the bottles of cheap whiskey, the tents, the boxes of eggs, and the vials of laudanum with which they would negate the effects of their otherwise untreatable ailments.

Prices for all of these goods swiftly began to skyrocket—a 500 percent rise in the price of beef, a fourfold increase in the price of flour,
apothecaries making certain that a single droplet of laudanum would go for as much as $40. Merchants found they could charge more or less what they wanted: There were men out there desperate to find the wealth that they knew was waiting for them in the hills, and who would pay almost anything for the wherewithal to find it. Corruption and violence, cheating and envy, started to become a feature of everyday life. The papers began printing again, though only fitfully at first. The town's single school, which had closed briefly for want of gold-hungry teachers, reopened in October when more dedicated replacements arrived. The docks began to bustle with activity, first with crates of imported goods bound for the diggings and then with people, who suddenly and in prodigious numbers began to pour into the city from almost every corner of the hemisphere.

Earlier in the year a messenger had taken a tea caddy filled with gold dust to Washington, showing it to the country's leadership to convince them of the worth of the strike in the Sierra. The sight of it prompted President Polk to make formal mention to Congress of the discoveries—even though most of the country was already fully aware of them, and had packed its bags and organized its westbound travel accordingly. So now, with the president of the United States acting as cheerleader, the influx began—and the briefly moribund town promptly sprang back into lusty and exuberant life, assuming in a matter of weeks the role of gateway, outfitter, and
comprador
for thousands who were lining up on faraway quaysides, readying themselves for the one-way journey to Northern California to find their fortunes.

One sees in those few short months at the start of the gold fever a city that was made hurriedly, almost as though being assembled from a kit. First a town council was appointed; then justices of the peace; and then a settler with some experience of planning was asked to create a grid of streets along which the shanties might be put up in some kind of order, with duckboards laid down outside the houses to keep down some of the dust, or the mud, and keep it off the boots and the skirt hems of the tidier citizens. A bank was built—Naglee and Sinton's Exchange and Deposit Office. Small and primitive churches
sprang up, hastily built, and small wooden halls were set aside for arriving Freemasons and Oddfellows, too. A concert was given in the local schoolhouse. A New York newspaper opened a correspondent's office. The first Chinese settlers found their way from Canton and introduced a small slew of service shops—a laundry, a café or two, a hardware store. A ship arrived from Panama with a U.S. postmaster aboard, a man federally charged with providing post offices and deciding on local mail routes (and he also brought with him the first regular mail that had been sent from New York to this newly won corner of the country).

Next, a brigadier general arrived to set up a proper military establishment. A harbormaster was appointed—a figure of increasing importance because of the armada of ships that was piling up, quite literally, in the roads immediately offshore. More than 200 sailing vessels were lying off the quayside in July 1849, almost all of them abandoned by the crews who had sailed with them, their sailors gone a-digging up in the placer streams. By the end of that same year the number had risen to 600, with most of the ships moored or abandoned. Grainy pictures of the time show behind the town's buildings a huge forest of masts reaching as far as it is possible to see.

Moves were then made to elect a proper state government, and the city thought about hiring police to keep some kind of control on the free-spending, ill-mannered miners who returned from the mountains with gold dust in their bags and mischief on their minds. Gambling houses opened, saloons proliferated in vast numbers, and, inevitably, whorehouses—a scattering at first—started up in business. These, which would eventually number in the hundreds, were staffed by professional women from all over the Americas, who answered the call to come to California every bit as eagerly as did the men.

San Francisco had its beginnings as a city “raised from the ground as if by magic,” with its buildings “hatched like chickens by artificial heat.” As many as a hundred new buildings a month went up in 1849, and the demand for them was so great that a small shop might rent for $3,000 a month and a modest tent in a good location might go for
$40,000 a year. A more substantial building on what was formerly the plaza but which in honor of the first visiting U.S. Navy vessel had been renamed Portsmouth Square,
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was rented in 1850 for $75,000; its owner might have considered himself fortunate to get $200 in annual rent just one year before.

Most of the arrivals stayed in flimsy canvas tents, forests of which went up on the slopes of those hills deemed too steep for the wooden frame buildings being built on the shore. At night they presented an extraordinary sight, lit from within by oil lanterns—a sailor moored in the harbor reported that the hillsides looked like “an amphitheater of fire.” A New York manufacturer named Sydam came to town offering canvas houses that weighed 125 pounds and could comfortably—his word—sleep twenty, with twelve in hammocks and eight on the floor. But the rains, the cold Pacific winds, and the gritty miasma of breeze-borne sand (for sand dunes lay everywhere to the west of the little settlement, stretching six miles to the sea) made tent life far less of an idyll than Sydam advertised. Moreover, he can hardly have anticipated the effect on his invention of the feral donkeys that wandered down from the hills and did their bit to add to the universal misery—by chewing at the tent canvas, biting down guy ropes, and in one case breaking into a tent that was occupied by a snoring drunk and munching away half of the man's hair.

The town was filthy in those early days, and known primarily for rats, fleas, and piles of empty liquor bottles. Cholera outbreaks were dismayingly frequent, and in the early years it was common for the bodies of the dead to be abandoned by the shore, in the hope that the tide might carry them off into the open sea. There was little by way of indoor plumbing, and the water supply was halting, with what there was invariably polluted. Gaslights had been invented but not installed, and so the city at night was dark and dangerous, crowded and unhealthy—and yet regarded with tolerant fondness by all who looked back on those heady first Gold Rush years. Those who survived the
very early San Francisco were armed with a pride that was quite unknown to the later immigrants.

Lateral thinking had more than a little effect on the housing shortage. It was of course perfectly reasonable to use some of the abandoned ships crowding the shoreline for housing or for prisons (one, the British China clipper
Euphemia
, was anchored off the main city wharf and used as a holding pen from 1850, especially for the state's insane). But some bright spark decided that rather than keep the vessels anchored off in the roads—which meant that the patrons had to be rowed back and forth in lighters—it would make sense to sail them in fast, ram them head-on into the muddy shoreline, and berth them there permanently. All they then had to do was hammer together a frontage that would offer the illusion that the ships were in fact properly made buildings.