Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  Wahrhaftig’s speech received a tremendous ovation.

  Clyde Wahrhaftig was a Renaissance man. He was a first-rate pianist, a gifted artist, a lover of Proust and Bach, an activist, an environmentalist, and a great field geologist. He worked until the end of his life. Four years after he gave his speech, he died peacefully in his sleep in San Francisco.

  There are exposed rocks all across San Francisco. Billy Goat Hill. Filbert and Kearny. Fort Mason. Jackson and Jones. McClaren Park. Tank Hill. Hudson and Mendell. Sacramento and Powell. Delta Street. O’Shaughnessy and Malta. Kite Hill. Armstrong and Ingalls. Fort Point. Shields and Head. Illinois Street. Corona Heights.

  I will never know very much about those exposures. But they will never again be just rocks to me. They will be fragments of stars. And as I walk among them, I will think about the man who loved them, and who was made of similar stuff.

  Chapter 26

  The Delirium

  The pedestrian bridge over Portsmouth Square,

  southwest of Washington and Kearny Streets

  No city in the world has ever come into existence the way San Francisco did. It was a creation ex nihilo, the urban equivalent of the big bang. During those years when the world rushed in and created an instant city, utter delirium prevailed. It almost seems preordained that San Francisco was to become the city of the Beats and the hippies, the counter-cultural capital of drug experimentation, for a radical alteration of consciousness was hard-wired into it from its beginning. The Sioux called gold “the yellow metal that drives white men crazy,” and San Francisco during the Gold Rush years was, without doubt, one of the craziest cities in the history of the world. It was a wild Saturnalia, a carnival of self-invention, in which all the rules that governed self and society were suspended. As Kevin Starr put it, “for a few brief years, in far-off California, the bottom fell out of the 19th century.” San Francisco was the center of that free fall. And no one who saw it could believe what they were seeing.

  New York Tribune correspondent Bayard Taylor wrote, “Every new-comer to San Francisco is overtaken by a sense of complete bewilderment … One knows not whether he is awake or in some wonderful dream. Never have I had so much difficulty in establishing, satisfactorily to my own sense, the reality of what I saw and heard.”

  The three authors of The Annals of San Francisco, the 1855 tome that remains the best book about the Gold Rush city, were so overwhelmed when they tried to sum up their impressions of San Francisco in 1849 that they almost fell into stream of consciousness prose:

  And everybody made money, and was suddenly growing rich. The loud voices of the eager seller and as eager buyer—the laugh of reckless joy—the bold accents of successful speculation—the stir and hum of active hurried labor, as man and brute, horse and bullock, and their guides, struggled and managed through heaps of loose rubbish, over hills of sand, and among deceiving deep mud pools and swamps, filled the amazed newly arrived immigrant with an almost appalling sense of the exuberant life, energy and enterprise of the place. He breathed quick and faintly—his limbs grew weak as water—and his heart sunk within him as he thought of the dreadful conflict, when he approached and mingled among that confused and terrible business battle … The very thought of that wondrous time is an electric spark that fires into one great flame all our fancies, passions and experiences of the fall of the eventful year, 1849. The remembrance of those days comes across us like the delirium of fever.

  Gold was discovered on January 24, 1848, on the American River near the town of Coloma in the central foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The discovery was hushed up, and the 800-odd citizens of San Francisco—which a year earlier, for commercial reasons, officially changed its appellation from Yerba Buena to the better-known name of the bay, mission, and presidio—did not get the news until March 15, when one of the town’s two fledgling newspapers, the Californian, buried a small item about it, below a story about a private horse race. The other newspaper, the California Star, ran a similarly perfunctory item 10 days later. Such claims had proven to be false before, and the reports were greeted with skepticism. A letter in the Californian opined, “I doubt, sir, if ever the sun shone upon such a farce as is now being enacted in California, though I fear it may prove a tragedy before the curtain drops.” The barely 19-year-old editor of the California Star, Edward Kemble, visited Coloma to see for himself and pronounced the whole thing “a sham, as superb a take-in as ever was got up to guzzle the gullible.”

  But rumors kept trickling out about workers at Sutter’s Fort paying for their purchases with gold, and they reached the ear of one of San Francisco’s most prominent—and loudest—citizens, a shrewdly self-promoting businessman named Sam Brannan. Brannan was a Mormon who in July 1846 had arrived in Yerba Buena aboard the ship Brooklyn with 238 of his coreligionists, more than doubling the town’s population. When they paid him in gold dust, he knew that the stories were true—and that he could make a killing.

  When Brannan returned by steamboat to San Francisco on May 12, 1848, he pulled off one of the great publicity coups of all time. Holding aloft a quinine bottle full of gold dust in one hand and waving his hat in the other, Brannan marched down Montgomery Street at the water’s edge and then up a block to Portsmouth Square, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

  What historian Richard Dillon called “the shout heard ‘round the world” gave birth to the city of San Francisco, caused the largest mass migration in U.S. history, and changed our national character in ways historians are still arguing about. It was an earthquake too big to measure on any Richter scale.

  The town emptied. Within three days, the male population of San Francisco went from 600 to 200. Everyone headed east across the bay, feverishly trying to get upriver to the gold fields. On May 29, the Californian ceased publication, its editor lamenting, “The whole country, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the seashore to the base of Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry of gold! Gold!! GOLD!!! While the field is left unplanted, the house unbuilded, and everything neglected but the manufacturers of shovels and picks.” The California Star’s Kemble gloated over the demise of his rival: “Gone to—-. The Californian ceased issue with the annunciatory slip of Tuesday last. Verdict of inquest—fever.” But the boy editor’s last laugh was short-lived. On June 14, Kemble announced the demise of his own paper in one of the all-time great journalistic swan songs: “In fewer words than are usually employed in the announcement of similar events, we appear before the remnant of a reading community with the material or immaterial information that we have stopped the paper—that its publication ceased with the last regular issue. We have done. Let our word of parting be, Hasta luego.”

  San Francisco was an empty shell. The city council no longer met, because its members had headed for the hills. Students in the school that had just opened joined them. Their teacher followed. Ships arrived in the bay, but their crews immediately deserted. Goods piled up on the wharves. Real estate values plummeted as owners sold out to raise money to go prospecting. By mid-July, according to one report, there were only seven able-bodied men in San Francisco.

  Slowly but surely, the word spread. By June, gold seekers began arriving from Monterey and San Jose. Mexicans appeared in the fields by the summer. By autumn, most of the San Franciscans who had headed for the hills had returned, most of them either empty-handed or realizing that there was more gold to be made at home than in the diggings. But throngs of new Argonauts took their place: By October there were 8,000 men mining in the hills. By the end of 1848, the city’s population had risen to 2,000. And after President Polk’s December 1848 State of the Union Address, when he confirmed that vast quantities of gold had been discovered in California, the floodgates opened. It was, someone said, as though the continent had suddenly tilted and everyone had slid to the west.

  They came from across the country and around the world, in that annus mirabilis of 1849. They were clergymen from New England and f
armhands from Germany, frontiersmen from Missouri and peasants from China, clerks from New York City and students from Chile, black sailors from Boston whalers and fishermen from Hawaii. Some were wealthy and highly educated. Others were impoverished and illiterate. Pouring into California that year were 80,000 men, more than half of them in their 20s. What they all shared was a desire to strike it rich, and a willingness to throw over their old life to do it. All of them were about to embark on the greatest adventure of their lives. It was called “seeing the elephant.” And San Francisco was the door through which they had to pass to see it.

  It was a very strange door.

  Just getting to San Francisco was an epic venture in itself. California was still a dangerous, little-known frontier: The first organized emigrant party, the Bartleson-Bidwell party, had crossed the Sierra just eight years earlier. There were only three ways to get to the West Coast. There was the sea route, starting in New York or Boston, rounding Cape Horn and beating up the coast of South America—an 18,000-mile trip that usually took five claustrophobic months. There was the sea-and-land route via Panama, which was much shorter but required a hellish trip through disease-ridden jungle. And there was the overland route, jumping off from Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri. This meant dealing with vast deserts, hostile Indians, and unknown mountains. (A few people, eager to avoid all these routes, paid a $50 deposit to fly on an “aerial locomotive”—the brainchild of the founder and first editor of Scientific American, no less—that would carry up to 100 passengers “pleasantly and safely” from New York to California in three days. Probably fortunately, what would have been the world’s first dirigible was destroyed by a rowdy crowd.) Each of these routes had their advantages and disadvantages, but all were long, expensive, and arduous. Many 49ers died en route, their bodies tossed into the ocean or buried by the trail.

  So when these thousands of young men first sailed through the magnificent entrance to the bay and set eyes on San Francisco, they never forgot it. And even had they not made a perilous journey halfway around the world, it was not a place anyone was likely to forget.

  The first thing the 49ers saw when they sailed around Clark’s Point at the base of Telegraph Hill was a forest of ships’ masts. Hundreds of ships were crowded next to each other off the cove, forming “a perfect town upon the water.” Most of these ships had been abandoned by their gold-crazed crews the instant they dropped anchor: Between 3,000 and 4,000 sailors had deserted by the end of 1849. One observer wrote that “these ships had a very old, ruinous, antiquated appearance, and at first sight, gave me an impression, that this new-born city had been inhabited for ages, and was now going to ruin.”

  These ships met varying fates. Some were reclaimed for their timber. (The beautiful yellow house at 825 Francisco Street, just east of the Norwegian Seamen’s Church on one of the city’s great blocks, was built out of wood salvaged from abandoned ships.) But most were simply left to rot, and their hulks were covered when the city expanded east into the cove. There are at least 47 ships buried beneath San Francisco’s streets, ghostly reminders of the city’s maritime beginnings.

  Once ashore, the Argonauts found themselves in a place unlike any other on earth, a combination campground, casino, construction zone, battlefield, strip club, depot, garbage dump, stock exchange, and amusement park. The sheer spectacle was astonishing. Men in strange costumes speaking a babble of tongues hurried about everywhere, like ants in an anthill kicked by a giant boot. Most were heavily armed, having been warned (incorrectly, at least at first) that villains and desperados lurked on every corner. A doctor wrote, “Pistols were fired at rapid succession in every direction. Horses with their drunken riders were dashing through the town, the gay serapa and other gaudy trappings flying in the wind.”

  Thousands of tents were pitched anywhere and everywhere—on the flats, up the hills, on sand dunes. There were some wood-framed houses, and more were being built every day, but many structures were built out of any material that came to hand. A young German, Frederick Gerstacker, wrote, “Houses, if I may give them that name, were raised on the lightest possible frames, even basket-work, covered or stretched over with the lightest possible calico.” At night, this vast, colorful “Canvas City” turned into a fairyland, as lanterns illuminated the tents from within and thousands of fires lit up the crescent-shaped cove and the surrounding hills.

  San Francisco may have looked like a magic kingdom at night, but it was still the same barren, sandy, wind-swept place it was when William Richardson had erected his sail-shelter a few hundred yards above the beach 14 years earlier. One observer who climbed Nob Hill claimed he could not see a single tree as far as he could see. The westerly wind blew sand and dust into everything.

  But far worse than the dust was the “mud plague” of 1849–50. The winter of 1849 may have been the wettest in the city’s history, with as much as 50 inches of rain falling. There were no paved or planked streets and few sidewalks. Everything turned to mud up to four feet deep. William Smith Jewett, who was to become California’s first resident professional artist, landed with a mining company—many 49ers traveled in organized companies, most of which dissolved soon after arrival—in December 1849. Carried by boat to the Broadway wharf, he and his companions beheld the lights of the city and started up Broadway, only to get so hopelessly stuck in the mud that they had to return to the ship to spend the night. One wag put up a sign saying “This street is impassable. Not even jackassable.” Hauling goods was virtually impossible: An entire mule team, including the wagon, simply disappeared into the quicksand, never to be seen again.

  The obvious solution was to plank the streets. But wood cost $400 to $500 per thousand feet and was all being used to build houses, so the instant city’s inhabitants seized anything that came to hand. They tossed limbs of trees and brushwood into the muddiest places. When those were swallowed up, they threw in boxes, stoves, garbage, cases of tobacco, iron, sheet lead, salt beef, bags of rice and beans, even three barrels of revolvers. Montgomery Street merchants made stepping-stones out of boxes and barrels, forcing pedestrians to walk single file. Other paths were made out of empty bottles, which were so plentiful “a large city might have been built with them.”

  Weirdest of all, the ground of this strange town was covered with hundreds of shirts. “There were at that time, I really believe, not 10 square feet in the city, where a dirty, but in every other respect perfectly new shirt was not lying,” Gerstacker observed. Laundry was so expensive—it cost $6 to $9 to wash a dozen shirts—that many 49ers simply threw their dirty shirts away and bought new ones. It was cheaper to send the laundry to Hawaii, or possibly even China, than to have it washed in San Francisco.

  Laundry was not the only thing that was ruinously expensive in the city. Everything cost 10 to 20 times higher than elsewhere. When Bayard Taylor and a companion landed, they hired two Mexicans to carry their luggage several blocks, for which the porters charged $2 each—the equivalent of $50 each today. Taylor drily observed that this was “a sum so immense in comparison to the service rendered that there was no longer any doubt of our having actually landed in California.” Lodging, for those lucky enough to find it, was astronomically expensive. Most 49ers stayed in squalid lodging houses, where as many as 80 men would huddle on the floor, with a few lucky ones occupying some filthy bunks. No mattresses or blankets were provided. Many men simply slept on the bare ground, or on crates.

  Rents and real estate prices were exorbitant. A shack with a primitive fireplace rented for $800 a month, a store for $3,000. A building on Portsmouth Square that before the Gold Rush had rented for $10 to $20 a month now rented for $75,000 a year. A lot on Portsmouth Square that sold for $16.50 in 1847 sold for $6,000 in late-spring 1848. Before the end of the year, it sold for $45,000.

  Food was also expensive: In the summer of 1849, a dozen eggs cost $12 and a loaf of bread worth 5 cents cost 50 cents. Most of the city’s inhabitants were bachelors who were remarkably (but typically for their tim
e) innocent of even the most rudimentary knowledge of cooking, cleaning, or anything domestic. As a result—and because few lodgings had cooking facilities—almost everyone ate in restaurants. (It is said that this is the origin of San Francisco’s tradition as a great restaurant town.) There were culinary establishments for every taste and budget, from the high-end Delmonico’s, where a meal could cost $10, to filthy dives where $1 would buy a meal of boiled beef, bread, and coffee. Many men ate standing up at street stands. Others frequented the “Celestial” (Chinese) restaurants that had already begun to open.

  The prototypical Gold Rush restaurant was the “eating house,” the culinary equivalent of the lodging houses. Dining in one of these joints was not for the faint of heart or slow of jaw. As a 49er described it, the ringing of various bells and gongs would set off a stampede of men toward two long rows of tables on which were placed “dishes of the most incongruous character … Boiled and roast meats, fresh and salt, potted meats, curries, stews, fish, rice, cheese, frijolis, and molasses, are served up on small dishes, and ranged indiscriminately on the table; there is a total absence of green vegetables.” The men immediately began wolfing down whatever “fixing” was in front of them, ignoring requests to pass the dishes, and frequently using only a knife to “convey to the mouth both liquids and solids.” In 10 minutes or less all the food was gone. The sated men picked their teeth with forks while waiters wiped off greasy spoons in preparation for the next seating.

  The center of town was the old Plaza. Today Portsmouth Square, as it is now called, sits on the former boundary between the sterile Financial District and Chinatown, which is the opposite of sterile. That boundary no longer exists, because the square has become Chinatown’s outdoor living room. On any given day, it is filled with hundreds of old Chinese, smoking cigarettes and animatedly kibitzing about mah-jongg games. It seems somehow fitting that the two elements that made up the Gold Rush, money and immigrants, still define the square.