In The Footprints Of The Padres Part 3

Mr. Edward Everett Hale rediscovered in 1862 an old printed romance in which the name California was, before the year 1520, applied to a fabulous island that lay near the Indus and likewise "very near the Terrestrial Paradise." The colonists under Cortez were perhaps the first to apply it to Lower California, which was long thought to be an island.

The name San Francisco was given to a port on the California coast for the first time by Cermenon, who ran ash.o.r.e near Point Reyes, or in Drake's Bay, when voyaging from the Philippines in 1595. At any rate, the name was not given to the famous bay that now bears it before 1769, and until that date it was unknown to the world. It is not true, as some have conjectured, that the name San Francisco was given to any port in memory of Sir Francis Drake. Spanish Catholics gave the name in honor of St. Francis of a.s.sisi. Drake was an Englishman and a freebooter, who had no love for the saints.

That the Bay of San Francisco should have so long remained undiscovered is the more remarkable inasmuch as many efforts were made to survey and settle the coast. California was looked upon as the El Dorado of New Spain. It was believed that it abounded in pearls, gold, silver, and other metals; and even in diamonds and precious stones. Fruitless expeditions, private or royal, set forth in 1615, 1633 and 1634; 1640, 1642 and 1648; 1665 and 1668. But nothing came of these. A hundred years later the Spanish friars established their peaceful missions, and in 1776 the mission church of San Francisco was dedicated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Outer Signal Station at the Golden Gate]

At last the fog began to show signs of life and motion. Huge ma.s.ses of opaque mist, that had shut us in like walls of alabaster, were rent asunder and noiselessly rolled away. The change was magical. In a few moments we found ourselves under a cloudless sky, upon a sparkling sea, flooded with sunshine, and the Golden Gate wide open to give us welcome.

V.

ATOP O' TELEGRAPH HILL

Perhaps it is a mile wide, that Golden Gate; and it is more bronze than golden. A fort was on our right hand; one of those dear old brick blockhouses that were formidable in their day, but now are as houses of cards. Drop one sh.e.l.l within its hollow, and there will be nothing and no one left to tell the tale.

Down the misty coast, beyond the fort, was Point Lobos--a place where wolves did once inhabit; farther south lie the semi-tropics and the fragrant orange lands; while on our left, to the north, is Point Bonita--pretty enough in the sunshine,--and thereabout is Drake's Bay.

Behind us, dimly outlined on the horizon, the Farallones lie faintly blue, like exquisite cloud-islands. The north sh.o.r.e of the entrance to the Bay was rather forbidding,--it always is. The whole California sh.o.r.e line is bare, bleak, and unbeautiful. It is six miles from the Golden Gate to the sea-wall of San Francisco. There was no sea-wall in those days.

We were steaming directly east, with the Pacific dead astern. Beyond the fort were scantily furnished hill-slopes. That quadrangle, with a long row of low white houses on three sides of it, is the _presidio_--the barracks; a lorner or lonelier spot it were impossible to picture. There were no trees there, no shrubs; nothing but gra.s.s, that was green enough in the rainy winter season but as yellow as straw in the drouth of the long summer. Beyond the _presidio_ were the Lagoon and Washerwoman's Bay. Black Point was the extremest suburb in the early days; and beyond it Meigg's Wharf ran far into the North Bay, and was washed by the swift-flowing tide.

San Francisco has as many hills as Rome. The most conspicuous of these stands at the northeast corner of the town; it is Telegraph Hill, upon whose brawny shoulder stood the first home we knew in the young Metropolis. After rounding Telegraph Hill, we saw all the city front, and it was not much to see: a few wooden wharves crowded with shipping and backed by a row of one or two-story frame buildings perched upon piles. The harbor in front of the city--more like an open roadstead than a harbor, for it was nearly a dozen miles to the opposite sh.o.r.e--was dotted with sailing-vessels of almost every description, swinging at anchor, and making it a pretty piece of navigation to pick one's way amongst them in safety.

As the John L. Stevens approached her dock we saw that an immense crowd had gathered to give us welcome. The excitement on ship and sh.o.r.e was very great. After a separation of perhaps years, husbands and wives and families were about to be reunited. Our joy was boundless; for we soon recognized our father in the waiting, welcoming throng. But there were many whose disappointment was bitter indeed when they learned that their loved ones were not on board. Often a ship brought letters instead of the expected wife and family; for at the last moment some unforeseen circ.u.mstance may have prevented the departure of the one so looked for and so longed for. In the confusion of landing we nearly lost our wits, and did not fully recover them until we found ourselves in our own new home in the then youngest State in the Union.

How well I remember it all! We were housed on Union Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, and directly opposite the public school--a pretentious building for that period, inasmuch as it was built of brick that was probably shipped around Cape Horn. California houses, such as they were, used to come from very distant parts of the globe in the early Fifties; some of them were portable, and had been sent across the sea to be set up at the purchaser's convenience. They could be pitched like tents on the shortest possible notice, and the fact was evident in many cases.

Our house--a double one of modest proportions--was of brick, and I think the only one on our side of the street for a considerable distance. There was a brick house over the way, on the corner of Montgomery Street, with a balcony in front of it and a grocery on the ground-floor. That grocery was like a country store: one could get anything there; and from the balcony above there was a wonderful view.

Indeed that was one of the jumping-off places; for a steep stairway led down the hill to the dock two hundred feet below. As for our neighbors, they dwelt in frame houses, one or two stories in height; and his was the happier house that had a little strip of flowery-land in front of it, and a breathing s.p.a.ce in the rear.

The school--our first school in California--backed into the hill across the street from us. The girls and the boys had each an inclosed s.p.a.ce for recreation. It could not be called a playground, for there was no ground visible. It was a platform of wood heavily timbered beneath and fenced in; from the front of it one might have cast one's self to the street below, at the cost of a broken bone or two. In those days more than one leg was fractured by an accidental fall from a soaring sidewalk.

Above and beyond the school-house Telegraph Hill rose a hundred feet or more. Our street marked the snow-line, as it were; beyond it the Hill was not inhabited save by flocks of goats that browsed there all the year round, and the herds of boys that gave them chase, especially of a holiday. The Hill was crowned by a shanty that had seen its best days.

It had been the lookout from the time when the Forty-Niners began to watch for fresh arrivals. From the observatory on its roof--a primitive affair--all ships were sighted as they neared the Golden Gate, and the glad news was telegraphed by a system of signals to the citizens below.

Not a day, not an hour, but watchful eyes sought that signal in the hope of reading there the glad tidings that their ship had come.

The Hill sloped suddenly, from the signal station, on every side. On the north and east it terminated abruptly in artificial cliffs of a dizzy height. The rocks had been blasted from their bases to make room for a steadily increasing commerce, and the debris was shipped away as ballast in the vessels that were chartered to bring pa.s.sengers and provision to the coast, and found nothing in the line of freight to carry from it.

Upon those northern and eastern slopes of the Hill a few venturesome cottagers had built their nests. The cottages were indeed nestlike: they were so small, so compact, so cosy, so overrun with vines and flowering foliage. Usually of one story, or of a story and a half at most, they clung to the hillside facing the water, and looking out upon its n.o.ble expanse from tiny balconies as delicate and dainty as toys. Their garden-plots were set on end; they must needs adapt themselves to the angle of demarkation; they loomed above their front-yards while their back-yards lorded it over their roofs. Indeed they were usually approached by ascending or descending stairways, or perchance by airy bridges that spanned little gullies where ran rivulets in the winter season; and they were a trifle dangerous to encounter after dark. There were parrots on perches at the doorways of those cottages; and song-birds in cages that were hidden away in vines. There were pet poodles there. I think there were more lap-dogs than watch-dogs in that early California.

And there were pleasant people within those hanging gardens,--people who seemed to have drifted there and were living their lyrical if lonely lives in semi-solitude on islands in the air. I always envied them. I was sorry that we were housed like other folk, and fronted on a street than which nothing could have been more commonplace or less interesting.

Its one redeeming feature in my eyes was its uncompromising steepness; nothing that ran on wheels ever ran that way, but toiled painfully to the top, tacking from side to side, forever and forever, all the way up.

Weary were the beasts of burden that ascended that hill of difficulty.

There was the itinerant marketer, with his overladen cart, and his white horse, very much winded. He was a Yorkshire man, and he cried with a loud voice his appetizing wares: "Cabbage, taters, onions, wild duck, wild goose!" Well do I remember the refrain. Probably there were few domestic fowls in the market then; moreover, even our drinking water was peddled about the streets and sold to us by the huge pailful.

The goats knew Sat.u.r.day and Sunday by heart. Every Sat.u.r.day we lads were busier than bees. We had at intervals during the week collected what empty tin cans we might have chanced upon, and you may be sure they were not a few. The markets of California, in early times, were stocked with canned goods. Flour came to us in large cans; probably the barrel would not have been proof against mould during the long voyage around the Horn. Everything eatable--I had almost said and drinkable--we had in cans; and these cans when emptied were cast into the rubbish heap and finally consigned to the dump-cart.

We boys all became smelters, and for a very good reason. There was a market for soft solder; we could dispose of it without difficulty; we could in this way put money in our purse and experience the glorious emotion awakened by the spirit of independence. With our own money, earned in the sweat of our brows--it was pretty hot work melting the solder out of the old cans and moulding it in little pig-leads of our own invention,--we could do as we pleased and no questions asked. Oh, it was a joy past words,--the kindling of the furnace fires, the adjusting of the cans, the watching for the first movement of the melting solder!

It trickled down into the ashes like quicksilver, and there we let it cool in shapeless ma.s.ses; then we remelted it in skillets (usually smuggled from the kitchen for that purpose), and ran the fused metal into the moulds; and when it had cooled we were away in haste to dispose of it.

Some of us became expert amateur metallists, and made what we looked upon as snug little fortunes; yet they did not go far or last us long.

The smallest coin in circulation was a dime. No one would accept a five-cent piece. As for coppers, they are scarcely yet in vogue. Money was made so easily and spent so carelessly in the early days the wonder is that any one ever grew rich.

A quarter of a dollar we called two "bits." If we wished to buy anything the price of which was one bit and we had a dime in our pocket, we gave the dime for the article, and the bargain was considered perfectly satisfactory. If we had no dime, we gave a quarter of a dollar and received in change a dime; we thus paid fifty per cent more for the article than we should have done if we had given a dime for it. But that made no difference: a quarter called for two bits' worth of anything on sale. A dime was one bit, but two dimes were not two bits; and it was only a very mean person--in our estimation--who would change his half dollar into five dimes and get five bits' worth of goods for four bits'

worth of silver.

[Ill.u.s.tration: City of Oakland in 1856]

Sunday is ever the people's day, and a San Francisco Sunday used to be as lively as the Lord's Day at any of the capitals of Europe. How the town used to flock to Telegraph Hill on a Sunday in the olden time! They were mostly quiet folk who went there, and they went to feast their eyes upon one of the loveliest of landscapes or waterscapes. They probably took their lunch with them, and their families--if they had them; though families were infrequent in the Fifties. They wandered about until they had chosen their point of view, and then they took possession of an unclaimed portion of the Hill. They "squatted," as was the custom of the time. The "squatter" claimed the right of sovereignty, and exercised it so long as he was left unmolested.

One man seemed to have as much right as another on Telegraph Hill. And one right was always his: no one disputed him the right of vision; he shared it with his neighbor, and was willing to share it with the whole world. For generations he has held it, and he will probably continue to hold it so long as the old Hill stands. From the heights his eye sweeps a scene of beauty. There is the Golden Gate, bathed in sunset glories; and there the northern sh.o.r.e line that climbs skyward where Mount Tamalpais takes on his mantle of mist. There is Saucelito, with its green terraces resting upon the tree-tops; and there the bit of sheltered water that seems always steeped in sunshine,--now the haunt of house boats, then the haven of a colony of Neapolitan fishermen; and Angel Island, with its military post; and Fort Alcatraz, a rocky bubble afloat in mid-channel and one ma.s.s of fortifications.

What an inland sea it is--the Bay of San. Francisco, seventy miles in length, from ten to twelve in width; dotted with islands, and capable of harboring all the fleets of all the civilized or uncivilized worlds! The northern part of it, beyond the narrows, is known as the Bay of San Pablo; the Straits of Carquinez connect it with Suisun Bay, which is a sleepy sheet of water fed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.

To the east is Yerba-Buena, vulgarly known as Goat Island; and beyond it the Contra Costa, with its Alameda, Oakland, and Fruit Vale; then the Coast Range; and atop of all and beyond all Mount Diablo, with its three thousand eight hundred feet of perpendicularity, beyond whose summit the sun rises, and from whose peaks almost half the State is visible and almost half the sea,--or at least it seems so--but that's another vision!

VI.

PAVEMENT PICTURES

We had been but a few days in San Francisco when a new-found friend, scarcely my senior, but who was a comparatively old settler, took me by the hand and led me forth to view the town. He was my neighbor, and a right good fellow, with the surprising composure--for one of his years--that is so early, so easily, and so naturally acquired by those living in camps and border-lands.

We descended Telegraph Hill by Dupont Street as far as Pacific Street.

So steep was the way that, at intervals, the modern fire-escape would have been a welcome aid to our progress. Sidewalks, always of plank and often not broader than two boards placed longitudinally, led on to steps that plunged headlong from one terrace to another. From the veranda of one house one might have leaped to the roof of the house just below--if so disposed,--for the houses seemed to be set one upon another, so acute was the angle of their base-line. The town stood on end just there, and at the foot of it was a foreign quarter.

In those days there were at least four foreign quarters--Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese. We knew the Spanish Quarter at the foot of the hill by the human types that inhabited it; by the balconies like hanging gardens, clamorous with parrots; and by the dark-eyed senoritas, with lace mantillas drawn over their blue-black hair; by the shop windows filled with Mexican pottery; the long strings of cardinal-red peppers that swung under the awnings over the doors of the sellers of spicy things; and also by the delicious odors that were wafted to us from the tables where Mexicans, Spaniards, Chilians, Peruvians, and Hispano-Americans were discussing the steaming _tamal_, the fragrant _frijol_, and other fiery dishes that might put to the blush the ineffectual pepper-pot.

Everywhere we heard the most mellifluous of languages--the "lovely lingo," we used to call it; everywhere we saw the people of the quarter lounging in doorways or windows or on galleries, dressed as if they were about to appear in a rendition of the opera of "The Barber of Seville,"

or at a fancy-dress ball. Figaros were on every hand, and Rosinas and Dons of all degrees. At times a magnificent Caballero dashed by on a half-tamed bronco. He rode in the shade of a sombrero a yard wide, crusted with silver embroidery. His Mexican saddle was embossed with huge Mexican dollars; his jacket as gaily ornamented as a bull-fighter's; his trousers open from the hip, and with a chain of silver b.u.t.tons down their flapping hems; his spurs, huge wheels with murderous spikes, were fringed with little bells that jangled as he rode,--and this to the accompaniment of much strumming of guitars and the incense of cigarros.

Near the Spanish Quarter ran the Barbary Coast. There were the dives beneath the pavement, where it was not wise to enter; blood was on those thresholds, and within hovered the shadow of death. Beyond, we entered Chinatown, as rare a bit of old China as is to be found without the Great Wall itself. Chinatown has grown amazingly within the last forty years, but it has in reality gained little in interest. There is more of it: that is the only difference; and what there is of it is more difficult of approach. The Joss House, the theatre, with its great original "continuous performance"--its tragedy half a year in length,--flourished there. The glittering, spectacular restaurant was wide open to the public, and so was everything else. That fact made all the difference between Chinatown in the Fifties and Chinatown forty years later.

My companion and I tarried long on Dupont Street, between Pacific and Sacramento Streets. The shops were like peep shows on a larger scale.

How bright they were! how gay with color! how rich with carvings and curios. Each was like a set-scene on the stage. The shopkeepers and their aids were like actors in a play. They seemed really to be playing and not trying to engage in any serious business. Surely it would have been quite beneath the dignity of such distinguished gentlemen to take the smallest interest in the affairs of trade. They were clad in silks and satins and furs of great value; they had a little finger-nail as long as a slice of quill pen; they had tea on tables of carved teak; and they had impossible pipes that breathed unspeakable odors. They wore bracelets of priceless jade. They had private boxes, which hung from the ceiling and looked like cages for some uncla.s.sified bird; and they could go up into those boxes when life at the tea-table became tiresome, and get quite another point of view. There they could look down upon the world of traffic that never did anything in their shops, as far as we could see; and, still murmuring to themselves in a tongue that sounds untranslatable and a voice that was never known to rise above a stage whisper, they could at one and the same moment regard with scorn the Christian, keep an eye on the cash-boy, and make perfect pictures of themselves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Interior of the El Dorado]

In some parts of that strange street, where everybody was very busy but apparently never accomplished anything, there were no fronts to the rooms on the groundfloor. If those rooms were ever closed--it seemed to me they never were,--some one kindly put up a long row of shutters, and that end was accomplished. When the shutters were down the whole place was wide open, and anybody, everybody, could enter and depart at his own sweet will. This is exactly what he did; we did it ourselves, but we didn't know why we did it. The others seemed to know all about it.