Historic Towns of the Western States Part 27

The one break in the mountain wall of the California Coast Range is the Golden Gate, the watery pa.s.s that leads from San Francisco to the Pacific.

Spurs and peaks and cross ridges of this mountain chain would at long range seem to encompa.s.s the city round about; but, on nearer view, the edging waters on three sides make her distinctly a city of the sea.

Looking from the bay, past the fortified islands of the city, one may see San Francisco to the west, rising in airy beauty on cl.u.s.tered gray hills.

At night the city hangs against the horizon like a lower sky, pulsing with starry lamps. By day it stretches in profile long and undulating, with spires and domes climbing up the steeps from a sh.o.r.e lined with the shipping of every nation--felucca, ironclad, merchantman, junk, together with bevies of tiny busybody craft, all of them circled and followed by slow-swinging gulls.

[Ill.u.s.tration VIEW NORTHWEST FROM SPRECKELS' BUILDING.]

For years after the magnificent, all-inclusive claims of the Cabots at Labrador in 1497, nothing was known of the west coast of North America.

Cabrillo felt his way along it in 1542, claiming it for Spain. In 1579, Francis Drake, fleeing from plundered Spanish galleons, tarried for repairs beside Cape Reyes, the Cape of Kings, and claimed the country, as New Albion, for Elizabeth of England. Although anch.o.r.ed in a cove within a mile of San Francis...o...b..y, he doubtless sailed away without guessing its existence behind the forest-covered mountains.

In 1602, Vizcaino, charting the west for Spain, as Gosnold was mapping the east for England, made stay in Drake's old anchorage, and named it the Port of San Francisco.

Notwithstanding the reiterated desire of the Spanish Crown that Mexico, or New Spain, should set about colonizing upper California, it was not till 1769 that the work was begun. Spain needed a harbor in which to retire on the way from the Philippines. The Russian fur-traders were heading down the coast. The French and the English were rumored to be nearing from the east.

So it behooved Spain to be on the alert to maintain her right to the new territory.

Jose de Galvaez, _Visitador_ of Spain, who had been sent to Mexico with powers extraordinary, "to examine and reform all branches of government,"

seized upon the project of colonization, and found the administrator of his plans in Padre Junipero Serra, of fragrant memory,--a Franciscan monk, who had all his life pa.s.sioned to save Indians as a Tamerlane would have pa.s.sioned to destroy them.

Spain's plan of colonization comprehended a triple series of establishments: the ecclesiastical or the mission, the military or the presidio, the civil or the pueblo. The theory of colonization carried the idea of a military and a religious conquest of the new lands. The Indians, whenever belligerent, were to be overcome by force; but as far as possible, they were to be drawn into the mission life by peaceable expedients.

In 1769, four expeditions, composed of soldiers, settlers, and Franciscan friars, set out from Mexico to enter upon the work of colonizing and civilizing California. If in the mists of coming ages the aeneid of California be lost, Spain may prove her sponsorship of the Californian province by the litany of seraphic and apostolic names given to mountain and mesa, to coast and canon. Andalusian names of saints and angels chime wherever the padres stepped or stopped.

One of the four expeditions, pushing northward by land, unwittingly pa.s.sed Monterey; and a fragment of the company, while out hunting, came suddenly in sight of the waters now known as the Golden Gate and the San Francis...o...b..y. For the name San Francisco was soon transferred to this greater water from the old port known to Drake and Vizcaino.

In the summer of 1776 a company of padres, soldiers, and families, with stock and seeds, arrived on the San Francisco peninsula, and built temporary shelter of brush and tules plastered with mud. On September 17th, the feast of the stigmata of St. Francis, solemn possession was taken of the presidio in the name of Spain; and on October 4th, the day of St.

Francis, the mission was formally dedicated. The cross was raised, the Te Deum was chanted, while bells and guns chorused to sea and sky.

The mission was in a little fertile valley four miles from the Presidio, near a small creek now filled in. It became known as the Mission de los Dolores, in honor of the sorrows of Mary.

[Ill.u.s.tration THE DISCOVERY OF SAN FRANCIs...o...b..Y. FROM THE PAINTING BY A.F.

MATHEWS.]

Hostile tribes from the south had lately fallen upon the Indians of the peninsula, firing their _rancherias_, murdering many of the inhabitants, and terrorizing the rest into flight. So the savages proved scarce at first. Even in 1802 the Indians at the Mission numbered only about eight hundred. But these natives, like all the Californian Indians, though quite docile, proved stupid and brutish and lazy. They made little progress from savagery to the state of _gentes de razon_, or "reasonable beings," fit to populate the pueblos.

This mission _regime_, however futile it may have been, however formal and external its religious training, seems to have touched upon some of the educational and sociological thought of our own time. It made use of the wisdom Spain had learned from her Roman conquerors--the taking of the conquered into full partnership. The idea of the daily contact of superior with inferior; of community of property and co-operation in labor; of the union of manual work with mental drill--all these were rudely exemplified in the mission life. Sixty years was the span of the experiment, a brief time for an effort in civilization.

[Ill.u.s.tration MISSION DOLORES. BUILT IN 1776.]

The Mission Dolores grew after the general plan of the score of others in California. It was built about an open court, the place for work or recreation. The chapel stood at one end of the rectangle; the living rooms, storehouses, and shops lined the other sides. Only the chapel, thrice restored, with its _campo santo_ beside it, remains of the Dolores structure. When Beechy visited it in 1829, it was already a crumbling ruin. The sun-dried bricks, here as at the other unprotected mission relics, are fast melting back into the earth. The adobe, like the swallow's nest, cannot endure the hammers and chisels of wind and rain and sun.

Little of moment occurred at Dolores till the days of secularization. The barren, sand-driven, wind-swept hills were not attractive to the Spanish, and the Mission was not in high estimation with the authorities. Don Pedro de Aberini wrote of it in 1776: "Of all sites in California this Mission is situated upon the worst." Nevertheless, in 1825, the Mission, from a few head of stock and a few sacks of seed brought in 1776, had acc.u.mulated 76,000 cattle, 79,000 sheep, 40,000 horses, and $60,000 in money and products.

Mexico's jealousy of the sympathy which the padres felt for Spain, from whom Mexico had torn herself in 1822; the clamoring of settlers for the lands held by the missions; quixotic pleas of Mexican statesmen for Indian autocracy; and perhaps, under all, an itching for the Pious Fund that supported the mission work--these led on to the secularization of the missions in 1836. The Indian, civilized only surface-deep, was unready for civilized self-government; and so he fell back to barbarism, plus dissipation--his last state worse than the first.

The Dolores Indians were especially incompetent, and no attempt was made to organize a pueblo for them. So Dolores, after secularization, dragged out an anomalous existence as a lapsed mission, carried on by political rather than by ecclesiastical rule, with an alcalde rather than a padre in charge.

In 1835 the embarcadero of Yerba Buena two miles from the Presidio, was, at command of Governor Figueroa, made the port of entry. This place (named from a medicinal weed growing about the cove) was only a landing-place for fishermen and hide droghers. Only one house stood here at this time. Not a sail shadowed the bay. Herds of deer came down to the water and schools of seal swam to the sh.o.r.e. Yet Yerba Buena afterward absorbed the Mission and the Presidio on the margin of Golden Gate, and took the name of the Bay, thus becoming the germ of the present city.

A knowledge of the charm and worth of the sovereign bay queening the western sh.o.r.e of North America was rapidly travelling the world. In 1806, the Russian Rezanof had visited it officially. His coming and going has a romantic interest, as his betrothal to Dona Concepcion, the beautiful daughter of Arguello, commandant of the Presidio, his tragic death on his way home, and her retirement to a convent, made the Evangeline tale of early California. England in 1840 sent Belcher to the bay to gather information, and France sent de Mofras.

Both of these nations were suspected of coveting the California province; and the hope of getting possession of it, especially of San Francis...o...b..y, was doubtless in the background of our national consciousness as one motive of the Mexican War. It was felt by our country that the United States must own the west coast or be pot-bound later on. The Government offered to buy the territory from Mexico, but the proposal was refused.

Gradually it came to be known that the United States, fearing similar action by European powers, was to seize and hold California in the event of a war with Mexico. With the vexed question of motive and action this is not the place to deal. But in 1846, after the Mexican War had fairly started, Fremont, pursuing a scientific exploration in California, received secret Government advices, and, gathering troops in the North, urged a declaration of independence. Commodore Sloat, in command of a frigate at Monterey, in July, 1846, raised the American flag in place of the Spanish nopal and eagle standard, declaring California a part of the United States.

The next day, following the order of Sloat, our flag was set flying in the plaza at Yerba Buena by the captain of a frigate in the bay, accompanied by an escort of soldiers and marines. No opposition was offered by the Mexicans. Portsmouth, the name of the vessel, was given to the plaza, and Montgomery, the name of the captain, was given to the street, then along the water front, but now pushed back a half a dozen blocks by the filling in of the cove.

The first alcalde of Yerba Buena under the American flag was Washington Bartlett. Hearing that a new town, Francesca, was to be established farther up the bay, and fearing injury to his own from one with a name so similar to that of the bay, Alcalde Bartlett proceeded, in 1847, to cast the plebeian name of his pueblo. He declared the name Yerba Buena insignificant and unknown to the world; proclaimed that henceforth the settlement should bear the name of the fostering bay beside it. This somewhat tardy edict was accepted by all, and San Francis...o...b..came a name to conjure with.

The village nucleated a little back of the cove about its inevitable Spanish plaza, which was to be the scene of wild and whirling days to come.

Telegraph Hill, the old observation station, rose on the north of it, and Rincon Hill was off toward the south. When California was ceded to the United States in 1848, San Francisco was fairly afoot upon her triumphant way. Brannan had established a newspaper, _The Star_, and had sent two thousand copies East, describing the new land, and, curiously enough, prophesying the gold and the wheat of the future--the first "boom" note from California. A school was flourishing; churches were building; two hundred houses were on the hills, and the population was about eight hundred.

And now sweeps into the story the dominant major--the finding of the gold.

Told of in Indian legend and in Spanish tradition, the shining sands of Pactolus were found at last in a Californian canon. San Franciscans, hearing the tale, felt again the wander spirit, and were off to the mountains, seeking quicker fortunes. Soldiers and sailors deserted from the bay. The school closed; the newspaper suspended. Business was at a standstill: there was no one to work or to buy.

A wind of excitement pa.s.sed across two hemispheres. The tidings of the gold flashed from city to city, swift as the signal fires of Agamemnon telling that Troy had fallen. The faces of men turned expectantly toward this land at the edge of the world. Everywhere were heard the sounds of preparation and farewell, as adventurers by land and sea, by craft and caravan, set out for El Dorado.

By 1849 immigrants from the ends of the earth were pouring in; and the bare, brown hills and curving sh.o.r.es of San Francisco were whitening with tents. Goods were piled high in the open air, and all available walls were covered with grotesque signs and placards speaking in all languages.

By the winter of '49, the drowsy, droning Spanish town had expanded into a little excited city. Everywhere were springing up nondescript lodging and boarding houses, drinking houses, and gambling saloons. Twenty-five thousand people thronged the thoroughfares. There was scarcely such a thing as a home. Crowds of people slept wedged together on floors and tables, in rows of cots or in bunks fastened in tiers to the walls. The streets, full of sticky clay and miry sand, were thronged with struggling horses, mules, and oxen; and crowds of men from all nations and all levels of life jostled by, laughing, railing, or cursing. A whirlwind had rushed in upon the sleepy town. Old habits of life were broken through. Lawyers were turned into draymen and bootblacks; doctors into merchants and carpenters; soldiers into waiters and auctioneers. All men could find work; and none, however rich, could wholly evade it. Gambling was the chief amus.e.m.e.nt; speculation in a hundred forms was pressing forward, and fortunes were changing hourly.

In all this rude democracy, there was one mark of an aristocracy--high prices. Workmen charged twenty dollars a day; lumber was five hundred dollars a thousand; flour was forty dollars a barrel; eggs were a dollar apiece.

All unready for this tumultuous rise in population and precipitation of business, the infant city had to evolve on the moment accommodation for man and beast and craft, and organization for civic safety. To add to the perplexities, in the first years of the city, fire after fire devoured its flimsy fabric of canvas and shingle. The fourth and worst fire, in May, 1851, destroyed seven million dollars' worth of property. The recurrent devastation made a demand for fireproof buildings, which gave a certain stability and dignity to the city. The bay began to fill with the new clipper ships, which brought steadier crews and more rational cargoes than did the older clumsy ships now rotting at the docks. Secure wharf.a.ge, pa.s.sable streets, an efficient fire-department began to give a feeling of prosperity and permanence.

San Francisco was the stopping-place of every comer and goer; the Egypt of the corn, the depot of supplies for the gold territory. Naturally, forces of good and evil streamed into the young city and came into collision.

Strange new conditions were in the environment. The old primitive safeguards of the early mission era were outgrown. The population, representing every form of tradition and government, found itself removed from well-nigh all restraints, all bolstering-up of church and state. Each man of worth, while bent to his private task, had forced upon him the problem of helping to build up a social fabric and of holding it secure.

The Anglo-Saxon has an elastic genius for government. Wherever he goes, finding new conditions, he finds new ways for maintaining the public safety. The reaction of his spirit under the conditions about him in early California furnishes an interesting study in social dynamics.

By 1850, California was running under a State const.i.tution and the city had a charter. The old stable forces of home, and school, and church, the Argonaut soon evolved about him. However, great freedom of action and opinion prevailed, and a tolerance of evil that well-nigh blunted the distinctions between right and wrong. "Sydney coves," and other unruly spirits took advantage of this laxity. Abuses thickened, and anxious problems of public order were upon the young metropolis.

The affair of "The Hounds" was one of the organized outrages that confronted the munic.i.p.ality. A band of lawless ex-convicts, affiliated for mutual protection in evil designs, grew very obnoxious in their bold defiance of authority, their open and wanton outrages upon citizens, especially foreigners. The community, having no munic.i.p.al organization, rose against the law-breakers, put twenty on trial, and half of these into prison. This show of public indignation quieted the pack for a time. But there was no strong authority to conserve the public good. What was the concern of all found an executive in none.

Yet, finally, out of this sagging and sinking of the public order and its adjustment sprang the most spectacular popular uprising and the most notable object-lesson in self-government known to the West or perhaps to any other land,--the Vigilance Committee of 1852-56. The occasion of this citizens' uprising was a series of unpunished crimes of arson, murder, rapine, and burglary. The perpetrators of these outrages, owing to lax administration of law by corrupt or careless officials, seemed immune from apprehension or punishment. The many fires that had devastated the infant city had without doubt been of incendiary origin. Over a hundred murders had occurred in a few months and not a single capital punishment had followed.

Feeling that this insecurity of life and property was intolerable, and fearing that it would draw down the perils and uncertainties of mob law, a party of prominent citizens, all above suspicion of self-interest, organized a defensive league against the allied rabble. They determined to take the law into their own hands, and to administer it with equal and exact justice, with swiftness and finality.

[Ill.u.s.tration SEAL OF THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE.]

The first and most exciting case handled by this extraordinary court of justice came swiftly to judgment. Upon the night of organization, in June, 1852, an ex-convict was seized in an act of theft. He was tried in the presence of eighty members sitting with closed doors; was convicted, sentenced, and hanged in Portsmouth Square that night. The general public, sensitive and suspicious, dreading mob tactics, was troubled at first by this summary show of power. But the Committee came out with a complete list of its members, each member a.s.suming equal share of responsibility, each avowing the public welfare as the only end in view, each pledging his life, his fortune, his honor, for the protection of his city and the upholding of the public safety. A profound impression was made by the manifesto of this self-const.i.tuted protectorate. When it was found that no secret society, but, instead, a band of the solid men of the city was at the head of the movement, the community rallied to its support with enthusiasm. The Committee quietly kept at its work of investigation and punishment. Its calm, swift justice, its lack of personal bias, its righteous vengeance terrified evil-doers. Many were banished by formal warning. Three other well-known criminals were hanged. Crime rapidly diminished, and for the first time in years people began to feel secure in person and possessions.

After thirty days the occupation of the Vigilance Committee was gone. It did not disband, but existed for years a merely nominal tribunal.

By 1854, the growth of San Francis...o...b..gan to slacken. Inflation began its inevitable counter-movement of collapse. The days of picking up gold were over. Immigration fell off. A large part of the city's population scattered, returning East, or going into the country to try life on ranch or range. Disorder increased; the old suppressed crimes leaped into evil eminence.

A new journal, _The Bulletin_, edited by James King, of William, a.s.sailed the rising corruption, political and personal, social and individual, public and private.

In 1856, without warning, King was shot down in the street by a man who had writhed under the torment of the _Bulletin_ pens,--an unscrupulous ex-convict, James Casey, a rival editor, and a man lately elected supervisor. This murder precipitated public opinion, and exploded the lazy optimism that had waited for things to right themselves. Casey was at once jailed, by chance escaping lynching. It was inevitable that heroic measures should be set in operation. And so there came about a second administration of the Vigilance Committee, this unique social providence, this people's protectorate. But this time it had before it not only the purging of the city's crime, but also a struggle with jealous and sluggish authority vested in city and State officials. In a few days 2500 men had enrolled as Vigilantes, and were drilling in arms, under their former trusted President, William T. Coleman. Meantime the Governor of the State was summoned by the Anti-Vigilantes, representing chiefly the conservative officeholders and the people affiliated in some way with the lawless element. These Anti-Vigilantes came to be known in derision as the Law-and-Order Party. The Know-Nothing Governor swayed first from one side to another. He had no power behind him, for the militia were deserting to the popular cause.

The Vigilantes took charge not only of Casey, but also of one Cora who had wantonly shot a United States marshal and had evaded punishment. After a dispa.s.sionate trial, with all form and ceremony, the two criminals were sentenced to death and hanged on the day of King's funeral. It may be worth remembering that this man Cora was defended in his first trial by the eloquent Col. E.D. Baker.