Historic Towns of the Western States Part 28

The Law-and-Order Party now insisted that the Vigilantes disband. But the Committee held that its purpose was not simply to deal out justice to murderers, but also to so clarify the social atmosphere as to make future a.s.sa.s.sinations punishable by law. Therefore it struck directly at city politics, banishing the openly vicious, and laying the way for a clean administration when the corrupt officials could be rotated out of office.

This Vigilance Committee drew a large following of citizens; but there was a continuous undercurrent of opposition. General Sherman, commander of the second division of the State militia, backed by the vacillating Governor and representing const.i.tutional authority, was the leader of the opposition sentiment. In June, the Law-and-Order Party under him determined to rise against the Vigilantes. He appealed to General Wool, United States Commander in the Department, for arms, and also to Commodore Farragut at Mare Island. These commanders declined to interfere in State troubles without orders from the Government. Governor Johnson declared the city and county of San Francisco in a state of insurrection, and asked aid from Washington. General Sherman, finding himself powerless, resigned.

Chief-Justice Terry, an active opponent of the Committee, having come from Sacramento to enforce the law, now complicated matters by stabbing an officer of the Vigilantes. The Committee held him a prisoner but set him free when his victim recovered. After three months of life, after hanging in all four criminals, well-known desperadoes, banishing many others, and paving the way for a purer administration of law, the Committee disbanded, leaving a small body to settle its affairs. The next election saw a full set of honest officials in power, and for twenty years San Francisco had the name of being one of the best-governed cities in the world.

Looking back dispa.s.sionately, it appears that the Vigilance Committee had something of the dignity and purpose and procedure of the ancient court of the Areopagus. It was not like the extemporized Sanhedrim that tried Christ, a body which kept the appearance of justice but mocked the reality.

It was not a masked band of regulators like the Ku Klux or the White Caps; but it was an irresistible rising of the best citizens in calm debate, in open daylight, with sobriety and decorum and every safeguard of justice.

Unlike the anti-Mafia of New Orleans, it put down the mob spirit, but did not engender it. Though acting outside of the const.i.tuted authorities, it had the severest reverence for law in the ideal. As President Coleman expressed it, the Committee did not act under lynch law, but under a sort of martial law that obtains in time of siege. Considering the daring wantonness of crime, the subsidized or terrorized condition of the courts of justice, and the immunity of criminals, law-abiding citizens seem to have been justified in reverting to the elemental order of things, as is the man who attacks the thief in the night. But, of course, loyalty from the first to public interests instead of easy optimism and self-absorption, would have held back the occasion for the heroic measures of the historic Committee. Men never learn, save through suffering, that the support of the common welfare is a sacred duty, and that this duty squares exactly with their highest private interests.

During all these years and long after, San Francisco suffered greatly from disputed land t.i.tles. Conflicting claims led to labyrinthine legislation, and increasing hardship, one crisis being the Squatter Riots.

The treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo had decreed that all property rights should be respected by the new government. So property rights founded on cloudy and ill-understood laws and customs of Spain and Mexico had now to be adjudicated in the Californian courts. San Francisco was entangled in the mazes of two rival Spanish claims, embracing well-nigh all her territory except the "made" land. There was much dispute as to whether or not the city had ever been made a pueblo proper. On this depended the holding or forfeiting of four square leagues of land. Though the city pet.i.tioned the Land Commission in 1852 for confirmation of her public grants, the controversy was pending through wearying legislation, with repeated surveys and delays and continual jeopardy of property, until finally settled by the decision of Secretary Lamar in 1887.

The decline of the gold output brought to the front the agricultural resources of the State, and San Francisco came to be the centre of distribution for wheat, wines, and fruits.

The Central Pacific Railroad was completed in 1867, with San Francisco as the Western terminus, and as by a magic stroke the city was only three thousand miles instead of nineteen thousand miles from Eastern markets.

Since then three other transcontinental lines and numerous local lines have brought trade and travel into this emporium of the Pacific, while the ships of all nations fetch and carry through her Golden Gate.

The war of secession found California wavering between the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars. A large Southern element, much to the front in politics, had maintained a strong Democratic influence in the State. The celebrated duel, just outside the city limits between Broderick and Terry--the Terry of Vigilance Committee memory--turned the tide toward Republicanism and sympathy for the North. The duel grew out of the Broderick and Gwin senatorial contest. Terry stood for Southern chivalry; Broderick stood for free labor and progressive politics. Not essentially great or n.o.ble, Broderick was made heroic by his tragic death. During war times he was a colossal figure in men's minds, and his anti-slavery sentiments echoed through city and State, a slogan and a cleaving sword for freedom and the North.

[Ill.u.s.tration UNION DEPOT.]

In the '70's there sprang up in San Francisco a tremendous excitement over the silver mines on the Comstock Lode. The bonanza was estimated to be worth over fifteen hundred millions of dollars. True, this argent field was across the Sierras, in the State of Nevada. But most of the output found its way to San Francisco. The princ.i.p.al owners lived there, and San Francisco was the depot for Comstock supplies. The Stock Board operated there, and stocks bought for less than one hundred thousand dollars soared up to two hundred million. At the highest notch of prices the manipulators sold out, and the airy fabric of speculation fell with a crash. The banks had been emptied by speculators eager to buy stocks, and were greatly embarra.s.sed. Myriads were swept into poverty, leaving immense fortunes in the hands of a few.

Soon after the Comstock collapse the Sand Lot agitation sprang into life.

Over one hundred and fifty millions of dollars had been removed from circulation by the Comstock jugglery. The wealth of the outside world was temporarily diverted from the San Francisco markets. A great drought had been on the State during two years and the lean kine had devoured the fat.

Harvests were spa.r.s.e or wholly lacking. Cattle perished beside the dry watercourses. A large body of the outside unemployed had come to swell the tide of the city's drifting, workless ones. The railroad was threatening a reduction of wages to its thousands of men. Riots were on in Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Baltimore, and had sent contagion on the enforced idlers in San Francisco. Feeling long smouldering broke into fire against the Chinese and the railroad, two factors believed by the working-men to be largely instrumental in cheapening wages and robbing men of work. A mob gathered, threatening to rout out the Asiatics. The police could not disperse the rioters.

[Ill.u.s.tration CHINESE PHARMACY.]

On July 24th there came a third call for the Vigilance Committee to a.s.semble, which many thought an unnecessary and high-handed summons.

William T. Coleman was for a third time given charge. The Committee was to proceed upon lines followed in the '50's. But this time they were to co-operate with the authorities rather than to work in opposition. On July 25th, the mob, infuriated by the menace of the Committee and looking on it as a mere support of capitalistic interests, gathered about the Pacific Mail Dock, where immigrant Chinese were landed. The Committee, armed with pick-handles, met the labor mob at the dock and a few men were killed. This ended the uprising. But the issue was soon thrust into politics. The anti-Chinese believers gathered upon the sand lots in the neighborhood of the City Hall and organized the Working-man's Party. It spread throughout the State. Dennis Kearny, an illiterate but rudely eloquent speaker, became the leader, the Wat Tyler of the hour. The movement ended in the adoption by the State of a new Const.i.tution framed along progressive lines.

The people of San Francisco are of all kindreds and tongues. Buddha, Mahomet, and Confucius are prayed to beside the Christian temples. The Indians of the Mission have faded from the peninsula and the sombreroed Spaniard dashes no more from the Mission to the beach about his bull-fights and bear-baitings. But here are Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Celts, Greeks, Slavs, Latins, Hindus, Chinese, Kanakas, j.a.panese, and Chilenos, all mixing in the great crucible and slowly shaping a new type of man, the Western American. All seem to be mixing, it should be explained, except the Chinese, for, after a quarter of a century of experience, San Francisco feels that her Chinese population is still an alien body and sure to remain so even to the third and fourth generation.

[Ill.u.s.tration CHINESE GROCERY STORE.]

The problem of Chinese immigration has come up again and again in San Francisco. In 1869 the Chinese were invited and welcomed from China. In 1892, the Geary law was pa.s.sed prohibiting the coming of any but the student cla.s.s and providing for deportation under certain conditions. A generation grew up between this hail and farewell, China in the meantime pouring her tens of thousands of coolies into San Francisco. California welcomes any race that affiliates. But she has found that the Chinese race is not as the impressionable Indian or negro; but is an arrested race in the yoke of caste and ancient tradition, one looking with contempt upon upstart Anglo-Saxon civilization. The Chinese swarmed into a quarter of the city about Portsmouth Square, and have made there a small, evil-smelling Canton, where only a foreign tongue is spoken, and where strange G.o.ds are worshipped. Few have brought wives. Slave girls are the only women. Every Chinese prays to die in China, or to have his bones rot there. American law to most of them is but a pestilent thing to be evaded. They have no interest in the growth of the country or its inst.i.tutions. They work for starvation wages, their living being extremely cheap, requiring only tea and rice and a bare shelf to sleep upon in a room crowded with such shelves. Being imitative, and as patient as cattle, and withal so cheap as hirelings, they have taken the places of women in the household and factory and the places of men and boys in the work of dock and shop and field. The a.s.sertion that this labor liberates the whites for higher work does not seem to be verified. Many trace the vicious "hoodlum" cla.s.s of both s.e.xes to the enforced idleness of these young people, springing from the iron compet.i.tion of the Chinese in the labor market.

[Ill.u.s.tration SMOKING ROOM, CHINESE RESTAURANT.]

Notwithstanding all this, the little slant-eyed men with their grotesque superst.i.tions, their stiff, stark, unhomelike homes, add a quaintness and a touch of color to this romantic city. Gay placards of intense greens and vermilions flutter from their doorposts. Under the dull outer tunics of the elders gleam surtouts of gay brocades, while the few children, little faithful copies of their sires, all tricked out like the lanterns of the night, go toddling on tiny, rocking shoes through the narrow, dingy streets. The Chinese theatres, temples, and restaurants are full of the Oriental strangeness. The interiors of some of them are lacquered and varnished like huge tea-boxes.

[Ill.u.s.tration A BUSINESS CENTRE.]

As one gets a strip of Cathay in Chinatown, so he may find a corner of Italy on the south slopes of Telegraph Hill. Here children, looking like the cherubs of their kinsmen, the old masters, swarm through steep narrow streets, upon curious little balconies, out of odd windows, or upon the steps of chapels.

The architecture of San Francisco is a medley of many schools. The buildings, especially the homes, are largely of wood; the recurring feature is the bay window that focuses the light and heat. To the newcomer they all seem of the same color, for the fogs and winds soon reduce all hues to a fine, restful gray. In the beginning, by a curious irony, stone and lumber were shipped from the East and from Asia to this land of forests and granite to build some of the structures still holding their places against the pressure of time. In the newer buildings of the city there is some attempt to make the architecture express the function of the structure--the stability of the business house, the aspiration of the church, the simple security of the home. The new City Hall is an example of permanence and chaste elegance. The old mission architecture is being revived. This Spanish-Moorish adaptation is the most characteristic and harmonious development of Californian architecture. Built of the earth, the old mission piles seem almost as if not made by man, but nature. For they repeat in long stretches and low swells the contour of the hills about them, and give back their color-tones of dun and tan and rusty red.

The year the new and greater name was given to the city, a misfortune fell upon the streets. Regardless of cliff and curve, ignoring height and hollow, the streets were laid out in undeviating straight lines. And so a city on fairer than Roman hills, with circling waterways more lovely than the curve of Constantinople's Golden Horn, was deformed as far as its high bearing could be hurt; was checkered by pitiless compa.s.s lines, when it might have had windings and slow curves and gentle slopes.

Market, the main street, runs lengthwise of the peninsula. Its intersection with Kearny is a nerve-centre of the city, whence radiate three great streets. Near this spot are the main newspaper buildings and most of the large hotels. San Francisco's streets, unlike those of Sacramento and Los Angeles, are not lined with trees. But nearly every dooryard has its green place where tall geraniums, camelias, heliotropes, or fuchias fling out, the year round, their splashes of scarlet and purple.

[Ill.u.s.tration PRAYER BOOK CROSS, GOLDEN GATE PARK.]

The city boasts of one great park of a thousand acres, on the hills and ravines out by the sea. Central, Prospect, and Fairmount parks of the East fail beside the charm of this Arcadian Western park, probably the finest in North America. The trees of the world, from conifer to cactus, are here, and every flower that blooms. Beyond the park is the Cliff House, overhanging huge rocks, the rendezvous of gulls and seals and shy things of the water.

[Ill.u.s.tration SEAL ROCK AND CLIFF HOUSE.]

The old Portsmouth Square is dingy and draggled. It looks upon the scene of the executions of the Vigilantes and is full of memories for the chronicler. Its great charm now is the statue of Robert Louis Stevenson, who when in San Francisco, often sat there, studying the quaint, broken life about him. Another significant monument, poetic and historic presented to the city by Mayor James D. Phelan, stands before the new City Hall in honor of the Native Son of the Golden West.

It is doubtless only a question of time when expanding San Francisco will absorb the cities an hour's ride across the Bay,--Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda,--the homes now of many of San Francisco's business men.

The University of California at Berkeley draws its largest clientele from San Francisco. By the benefactions of the widow of Senator Hearst of San Francisco, this university has under way a housing perhaps the most s.p.a.cious and symmetrical in the world. The structure, to cost nearly five million dollars, follows a plan chosen by experts from designs submitted after a world compet.i.tion, and will crown a long hill slope, looking down on San Francisco City and Bay and out toward sleeping Asia. The allied professional colleges of the University are already in San Francisco. Its art department is in the fine old mansion of Hopkins, the railroad builder, on California Street, the home street of millionaires. A school of mechanic arts, endowed by the pioneer, James Lick, who gave the great astronomical observatory to the State University, is also under way in San Francisco.

[Ill.u.s.tration CITY HALL, SAN FRANCISCO.]

Another university drawing its student body largely from San Francisco is an hour or more down the peninsula from the city,--the Leland Stanford, Jr., founded by Jane and Leland Stanford and wife, of San Francisco. This university, by the way, is built, after the old mission plan of one-story buildings, about an inner court, with arcades and Roman towers and tiled roof.

[Ill.u.s.tration LELAND STANFORD.]

The city has three great working libraries, the Public, the Mercantile, and the Mechanics' Inst.i.tute. Adolph Sutro, the late owner of about one tenth of the territory of San Francisco City and County, whose fine grounds out by the Cliff House have long been open to the public, left a unique collection of two hundred thousand pamphlets and volumes of rare worth, gathered for the public use. The Bancroft Library is phenomenal in that it has cornered all the original material for the history of the far West.

Those myriads of ma.n.u.scripts, pamphlets, and books have been indexed by experts and the library is a sort of Vatican for California.

The Bohemian Club of San Francisco, a comradery of litterateurs, artists, and lovers of the arts, is a unique expression of the aesthetic individuality of the city, and is one of its strong social forces.

[Ill.u.s.tration THOMAS STARR KING.]

San Francisco has perhaps no famous name that dominates the city as Franklin dominates Philadelphia; as Beecher, Brooklyn; as Carnegie, Pittsburg. But if great-hearted Thomas Starr King had lived longer, he might have been its crowning personality as he is now its most sainted memory. His inflexible loyalty and impa.s.sioned eloquence made him at the outbreak of the Civil War a commanding figure, if not the leading citizen of California.

Though only fifty years old, San Francisco has given to literature and art a few names that the world will not willingly let die. For forty years Joaquin Miller, the "Poet of the Sierras," has been a friend and neighbor of her hills and waters, telling in n.o.ble numbers the glories and the terrors of the strange new land "by the sundown seas." Here Bret Harte founded the _Overland Monthly_ and with "The Luck of Roaring Camp" began his creation of Californian characters. What matters it if they never existed outside of his pages,--those drinking, dirking dare-devils, those tenor-voiced, soulful-eyed gamblers, striking sorrow to the hearts of ladies? For, touched by his genius, they exist for us there, in perennial charm and invitation.

[Ill.u.s.tration HENRY GEORGE.]

Here, too, Henry George wrote his _Progress and Poverty_, a book that was a prophet-cry heard round the world, declaring that every man has a right to a foothold on the earth. Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Warren Stoddard, John Vance Cheney, Charlotte Perkin Gilman, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and Gertrude Atherton did here a deal of their early literary work,[17] but now have wandered away into the world, leaving behind them, however, a goodly group of critics, story-writers, and poets; painters, also, William Keith and the rest, who have caught into splendid captivity some of the immensities and radiances about them.

This is but an abstract and brief chronicle of the great city at the Western gate of the world. There she sits, the ultimate outpost of the pa.s.sion of progress. Sleepless unrest, forever urging the peoples westward, land by land, now, at the end of centuries, begins to surge and thunder on the sh.o.r.es of Balboa's Sea. But this end is only a beginning--this great city is only the first of a chain of cities fated, under the star of empire, to spring into life on these circling sh.o.r.es, making the Pacific at last the greater Mediterranean of mankind.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FOOTNOTE:

[17] The reader will yet more vividly recall that _The Man with the Hoe_ came out of San Francisco and will heartily approve the editor's selection of Mr. Markham to contribute this chapter to the volume.

EDITOR.