by H. W. Brands
The village, called Yerba Buena, grew slowly. In 1838 the first baby was born there, to Jacob Leese and his wife, the sister of General Mariano Vallejo, one of the wealthiest and most powerful of the Mexican Californians. The following year a violent earthquake shook the region. This novelty to the newcomers did only slight damage to the few and generally flexible buildings at Yerba Buena, but it reminded the Californians of a very large earthquake that had struck the region in 1812, killing many people and leveling the mission of San Juan Capistrano. Local Indians recalled their tradition that San Francisco Bay had originally been a freshwater lake but had been joined to the sea when a huge earthquake breached the hills that still formed the spine of the San Francisco peninsula. (San Francisco journalist Frank Soulé, writing in the mid-1850s and noting that no comparable earthquake had struck since the 1839 tremor, held his breath: “God help the city if any great catastrophe of this nature should ever take place!” On the other hand, at least one gold-hunter hoped for more shaking. “Last Wednesday we had several quite smart shocks of an earthquake. Perhaps it shook out some large lumps of gold which I may stumble over.”)
In 1844, Yerba Buena comprised perhaps a dozen houses and no more than fifty permanent residents. Two years later, at the time of the American conquest, there were about fifty buildings and perhaps two hundred residents. The village continued to grow under the American occupation, with the arrival of Sam Brannan’s boatload of Mormons from New York nearly doubling the population. The first newspaper appeared, albeit with difficulty. “Our type is a spanish font picked up here in a cloister, and has no VV’s [W’s] in it, as there is none in the spanish alphabet,” the editor explained. “I have sent to the sandvvich Islands for this letter; in the mean time vve must use tvvo VV’s. Our paper at present is that used for vvrapping segars; in due time vve vvill have something better.” In January 1847 the alcalde—now appointed by the Americans but retaining the powers of the Mexican office—rechristened the village as San Francisco, to take advantage of the general name recognition of the bay. Early the following year the label “Golden Gate” appeared in a report produced by John—and Jessie—Frémont, who at the time of writing had no idea of the full aptness of the name.
And then Sam Brannan brought news of gold on the American River, and everything changed. Overnight the town was abandoned, with all able bodies heading for the mines. For months—from the late spring through the autumn of 1848—it remained virtually empty. Then the first wave of immigration hit, borne by the gold-hunting fleets from South America, Australia, the Central American isthmus, and Cape Horn. The largest part of the wave washed right over San Francisco to the goldfields. Passengers and crews abandoned their ships in the harbor, leaving a forest of masts protruding from a plain of decks jammed gunwale to gunwale and bowsprit to taffrail; the new arrivals tarried in town only long enough to ask directions for the mines and supply their needs for the last 150 miles.
Yet that was enough to start the city growing rapidly. The transients had to eat and drink: restaurants and saloons sprang up to fill their bellies and quench their thirst. They had to sleep: hotels appeared beside the restaurants. They had to purchase their supplies: shops and warehouses were constructed. Streets were pushed into the dunes behind the old village; the built-up area spilled south toward the mission and north toward Washerwoman’s Lagoon. Piers were built into the bay to ease the unloading of passengers and cargo. In this process particularly, San Francisco confirmed its preeminence over potential rivals as entrepôt to the mines. While small oceangoing vessels—barks and schooners—could sail much farther up toward Sacramento and Stockton, the largest ships, including great clippers like the Challenge, were confined to the deep water of San Francisco Bay. Behind the piers, low-lying areas were filled in, often with sand and dirt scraped from the city’s high spots by a steam shovel transported around the Horn and called “Steam Paddy,” after the Irishmen its kind replaced. At first the inhabitants of the city avoided the hills they couldn’t flatten—Telegraph, Nob, Russian, Rincon—but as the level lots ran out, the hills were overrun as well, and eventually acquired a certain cachet.
Proprietors and employees in the various service enterprises formed the core of the city’s new population, small in number next to the transients but not inconsequential. To attract and keep the employees, to prevent their running off to the mines with everyone else, the proprietors had to pay wages unthinkable just months before. Unskilled workers, who had been happy with a dollar a day, now got ten. Skilled workers turned up their noses at twenty. But no one wept for the proprietors, whose prices were rising even faster than the wages they were paying.
WHAT DROVE THE growth was the gold—both the actual gold coming down from the mines and the prospective gold that drew the argonauts to San Francisco on their way to the mines. The city’s economy ran on gold; the obsession of all was how to get it. This obsession cast a distinctive—and, in the opinion of those attuned to a more settled existence, unhealthy—glow over city life. Sarah Royce visited San Francisco and was shocked at the temptations awaiting the unwary.
In the immense crowds flocking hither from all parts of the world there were many of the worst classes, bent upon getting gold at all hazards, and if possible without work. These were constantly lying in wait, as tempters of the weak. A still greater number came with gold-getting for their ruling motive yet intending to get it honestly, by labor or legitimate business. They did not intend, at first, to sacrifice their habits of morality, or their religious convictions. But many of them bore those habits and held those convictions too lightly; and as they came to feel the force of unwonted excitement and the pressure of unexpected temptation, they too often yielded, little by little, till they found themselves standing upon a very low plane, side by side with those whose society they once would have avoided. It was very common to hear people who had started on this downward moral grade, deprecating the very acts they were committing, or the practices they were countenancing; and concluding their weak lament by saying, “But here in California we have to do such things.”
There was more to this rationale than the stern Sarah allowed. Especially at first, many of those in San Francisco had no alternative to the dens of iniquity. On cold, rainy evenings the saloons and taverns were among the few places in the city with tight roofs and warm fires; for more than a few harried souls, the saloons were in fact their lodgings, where they rolled out sleeping mats after last call at the bar. Even when housing conditions began to improve, men typically slept several to a room. To stay away from one’s room until as late as possible was the only way of preserving mental and—considering the contagions of such close quarters—physical health. Saloons often afforded the sole refuge.
Necessary or not, the hyperactive public life of San Francisco deranged many private morals. A just-arrived argonaut reflected on this remarkable place, and informed his family back home: “The usual order of things seemed to be entirely reversed. All one’s ideas of economy, of carefulness, of religion, of morality, were first astonished, then mollified down to a par with what one saw going on around him, and I can assure you it is astonishing how soon and easy one can get into expensive habits and get what is called liberal ideas about the rules of decent society.” Another observer, Frank Soulé, who like fellow Mainer Sam Brannan had swapped one coast for the other, and was now a journalistic conscience of San Francisco, lamented the low state of affairs:
No place in the world contains any thing like the number of mere drinking-houses [as opposed to restaurants] in proportion to the population, as San Francisco. This, perhaps, is the worst feature of the city. The quantity of ardent spirits daily consumed is almost frightful. It is peddled out in every gambling-room, on the wharves, at almost every corner, and, in some streets, in almost every house. Many of the taverns are of the lowest possible description—filthy dens of vice and crime, disease and wretchedness. Drunken men and women, with bloated bodies and soiled garments, crowd them at night, making the ho
urs hideous with their bacchanalian revels. Americans and Europeans, Mexicans and South-Americans, Chinese and even negroes, mingle and dissipate together, furnishing a large amount of business for the police department and the recorder’s court.
The saloons typically doubled as gambling houses, or “hells.” Most Americans of the mid-nineteenth century considered gambling a vice, lesser or greater than drinking depending on one’s temperament and upbringing. But given that the entire enterprise of the Gold Rush was a gamble, in which the stakes could include one’s life, conventional taboos against gambling lost much of their force in California. Bayard Taylor— having won his own gamble against Chagres fever and the other hazards of the isthmus—conducted a personal survey of several gaming houses clustered around the San Francisco plaza.
Denison’s Exchange, the Parker House and Eldorado stand side by side; across the way are the Verandah and Aguila de Oro; higher up the plaza the St. Charles and Bella Union; while dozens of second-rate establishments are scattered through the less frequented streets. The greatest crowd is about the Eldorado; we find it difficult to effect an entrance. There are about eight tables in the room, all of which are thronged; copper-hued Kanakas [Polynesians], Mexicans rolled in their sarapes and Peruvians thrust through their ponchos, stand shoulder to shoulder with the brown and bearded American miners. The stakes are generally small, though when the bettor gets into “a streak of luck,” as it is called, they are allowed to double until all is lost or the bank breaks. Along the end of the room is a spacious bar, supplied with all kinds of bad liquors, and in a sort of gallery, suspended under the ceiling, a female violinist tasks her talent and strength of muscle to minister to the excitement of play….At the Aguila de Oro there is a full band of Ethiopian serenaders [black minstrels], and at the other hells, violins, guitars or wheezy accordeons, as the case may be. The atmosphere of these places is rank with tobacco-smoke, and filled with a feverish, stifling heat, which communicates an unhealthy glow to the faces of the players….
They are playing monte, the favorite game in California, since the chances are considered more equal and the opportunity of false play very slight. The dealer throws out his cards with a cool, nonchalant air; indeed, the gradual increase of the hollow square of dollars at his left hand is not calculated to disturb his equanimity. The two Mexicans in front, muffled in their dirty sarapes, put down their half-dollars and dollars and see them lost, without changing a muscle. Gambling is a born habit with them, and they would lose thousands with the same indifference.
Very different is the demeanor of the Americans who are playing; their good or ill luck is betrayed at once by involuntary exclamations and changes of countenance, unless the stake should be very large and absorbing, when their anxiety, though silent, may be read with no less certainty. They have no power to resist the fascination of the game. Now counting their winnings by thousands, now dependent on the kindness of a friend for a few dollars to commence anew, they pass hour after hour in these hot, unwholesome dens. There is no appearance of arms, but let one of the players, impatient with his losses and maddened by the poisonous fluids he has drank, threaten one of the profession, and there will be no scarcity of knives and revolvers.
More respectable than the saloons and gambling halls were the restaurants. From the start, San Francisco boasted a diversity of cuisines to match the diversity of its population: American, Chilean, Peruvian, Polynesian, Mexican, French, Chinese, Italian, German, English. Vegetables and fruit were initially scarce, but beef and seafood were plentiful (“California beef is the best in the world, both in flavor and fatness,” wrote Thomas Van Dorn), as was game of all sorts. Prices were high; dinner at Delmonico’s, or at the Sutter, Franklin, or Lafayette houses, cost from five to fifteen dollars, depending on the quality and quantity of wine. Lesser establishments got one to three dollars for a meal.
The better restaurants did an enormous business. In July 1851, M. L. Winn, who had made his start in San Francisco manufacturing candy and selling it on the street, opened a restaurant called the Fountain Head. Eighteen months later he added a second restaurant, the Branch. By the spring of 1854 the Commercial Advertiser—one of several papers published in San Francisco—would report that the two establishments served an average of 3,000 patrons daily, with 5,000 being unremarkable on a busy day. Winn’s monthly beef bill ran to $8,000; for flour he paid $4,000. His ice bill for one month was $2,000; this allowed him to serve as many as 1,500 glasses of ice cream in a day.
THE DATE OF THE opening of the Fountain Head was not happenstance. Just two months earlier, a predecessor restaurant Winn owned burned to the ground, along with much of the rest of San Francisco.
Fire was the most harrowing civic problem of Gold Rush San Francisco. Especially at the start, when San Franciscans were too busy to build with stone and mortar, and instead threw up tents and wood-frame structures, the city suffered repeated conflagrations. The first occurred on Christmas Eve of 1849. It began at six o’clock in the morning, in Denison’s Exchange, on the east side of the plaza, and spread in both directions, destroying a whole line of structures along Washington Street, between Montgomery and Kearny. A million dollars of property was consumed by the flames; more would have been lost if not for the decisiveness of the firefighters in razing buildings in the fire’s path, creating a fuel-free zone that starved the blaze.
Partly because the city was so new, and partly because the buildings lost were so insubstantial, almost no one wasted time mourning the destruction. Within weeks the ruined structures were replaced by fresh ones, and, amid the city’s continuing growth, they were joined by many others. Consequently, when a second fire broke out, on May 4, 1850, it wreaked havoc even greater than the first. “Before eleven of the forenoon, three immense blocks of buildings, with a few trifling exceptions, were totally destroyed,” Frank Soulé explained. “A great many buildings were torn down or blown up by gunpowder to stay the progress of the flames; and, among others, nearly the whole erections in Dupont Street were voluntarily destroyed to prevent conflagration spreading on that side.” Less civic-minded than the Dupont owners were those city-dwellers who refused to join the bucket brigades without being paid in advance. At least some of the reluctant busied themselves mining the ashes of buildings already lost. One recent arrival found his first gold amid the smoking ruins; sending his wife a lithograph of Portsmouth Square, with the destroyed hotels and other buildings marked in pencil, he enclosed a coarse grain of gold. “I put into this a little piece of gold that I picked up on the square…. The place I picked it up is marked by a cross thus X.” Others caught on to the idea, and soon scavengers were sifting the rubble for the gold dust that had been secreted in the buildings now burned.
As before, reconstruction commenced almost before the flames died out. “New buildings were begun to be erected while the sites of the old were hot with smoking ashes,” Soulé said. “While even one extremity of the old tenement was still blazing, people were planning the nature of the new erection, and clearing away the embers and rubbish from the other scarcely extinguished end.” The energy of the rebuilders was greater than their ability to learn from experience. “In a wonderfully short time the whole burned space was covered with new buildings, and looked as if no fire had ever been there; although it was generally remarked that these were even more unsubstantial and inflammable than those which had just been destroyed.”
The bulk of the new construction was completed in time for the city’s third fire, which broke out only six weeks after the second. This one apparently started in the creosote-clogged chimney of an old house that had been converted into a bakery; the brisk summer winds fanned the flames and spread them to adjacent buildings. Property damage exceeded that of all the previous fires together and was estimated at five million dollars. This time San Franciscans took at least partial heed of their recent history; the buildings that went up over the ruins included a larger portion of masonry structures than before. And the inhabitants of the city be
gan organizing into fire companies, with pump engines, hoses, and ladders purchased ahead of the next round of burning.
These preparations paid off three months later, in September 1850, when a fourth fire broke out. The fire companies quickly answered the alarm and, despite running low on water, managed to hold the losses to less than a million dollars. The citizens once more rebuilt, and congratulated themselves on having found the answer to this civic scourge.
JESSIE FRéMONT MISSED the first four fires, but not the fifth. During the spring of 1851, awaiting the birth of her third child, she moved with John and Lily to San Francisco, to a prefabricated house shipped from China and fitted together on site like the pieces of a puzzle, without nails. The baby—a boy—arrived on April 19 and was named after his father.
Besides the name, John Jr. inherited his father’s knack for surviving close calls. On the fifteenth day after his birth—and on the first anniversary of the great fire of May 4, 1850—the city once more burst into flames. This fire was the worst of all, and was made more terrible by the misplaced confidence that had crept over the city since the last fire. Heinrich Schliemann, a German merchant operating out of St. Petersburg (and the man who would become famous as the uncoverer of ancient Troy) was brand new to the city. “I arrived here last night and put up at the Union Hotel on the Plaza,” he recorded.
