San
Francisco was founded by the Spanish missionary, Juan Bautista de
Anza, in 1776. Originally called Yerba Buena, it was captured by the
Americans during the Mexican War in
1846. Renamed San Francisco, it was only a small settlement until
gold was discovered on land owned by John
Sutter in 1848. The Gold Rush increased
the population of San Francisco from 800 to 25,000 in two years. The
opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 also stimulated the
growth of the city.
On 18th April, 1906, the San Andreas fault shifted violently and the
city suffered an earthquake and was followed by a four day fire. Over
700 people died and 28,000 buildings were destroyed. Several earthquakes
have taken place in the area including a serious one in 1989.
San Francisco has one of the largest ports on the West Coast and became
a major source of trade with East Asia, Hawaii and Alaska. During
the Second World War San Francisco was a key
supply point and port of embarkation for the war in the Pacific. In
1945 the United Nations Charter was drafted
at the San Francisco Conference.
San Francisco covers about 46 square miles (120 square kilometres)
and in 1990 had a population of 1,585,577, the fifth largest in the
United States. Finance remains one of the most important activities
and is the headquarters to two of the largest commercial banks as
well as the Federal Reserve Bank and the Pacific Stock Exchange.
San Francisco
during the earhquake during 1906
(1)
Frank
Soule, Annals of San Francisco (1855)
A short experience of the mines had satisfied
most of the citizens of San Francisco that,
in vulgar parlance, all was not gold that
glittered, and that hard work was not easy
- sorry truisms for weak or lazy men.
They returned very soon
to their old quarters
and found that much greater profits with
far less labor were to be found in supplying the necessities of the
miners and speculating
in real estate.
For a time, everybody
made money, in spite of himself. The continued advance in the price
of goods, and especially in the value of real estate, gave riches
at once to the fortunate owner of a stock of the former or of a single,
advantageously situated lot of the latter. When trade was brisk and
profits so large, nobody grudged to pay any price or any rent for
a proper place of business. Coin was scarce, but bags of gold dust
furnished a circulating medium, which answered all purposes. The gamblers
at the public saloons staked such bags, or were supplied with money
upon them by the "banks" till the whole was exhausted.
There were few regular
houses erected, for neither building materials nor sufficient labor
were to be had; but canvas tents or
houses of frame served the immediate needs of the place. Great quantities
of goods continued to pour in from the nearer ports, till there were
no longer stores to receive and cover them. In addition to Broadway
Wharf, Central Wharf was projected, subscribed for, and commenced.
Several other small
wharves at landing places were constructed
at the cost of private parties. All these,
indeed, extended but a little way across
the mud flat in the bay and were of no
use at low tide; yet they gave considerable
facilities for landing passengers and goods
in open boats.
(2)
Waterman L. Ormsby, The Overland Mail (1858)
It was just after sunrise that the city of San Francisco hove in sight
over the hills, and never did the night traveller approach a distant
light, or the lonely mariner descry a sail, with more joy than did
I the city of San Francisco on the morning of Sunday, October 10.
As we neared the city we met milkmen and pleasure seekers taking their
morn-
ing rides, looking on with wonderment as we rattled along at a tearing
pace.
Soon we struck the pavements,
and, with a whip, crack, and bound, shot through the streets to our
destination, to the great consternation of everything in the way and
the no little surprise of everybody. Swiftly we whirled up one street
and down another, and round the corners, until finally we drew up
at the stage office in front of the Plaza, our driver giving a shrill
blast of his horn and a nourish of triumph for the arrival of the
first overland mail in San Francisco from St. Louis. But our work
was not yet done. The mails must be delivered, and in a jiffy we were
at the post office door, blowing the horn, howling and shouting for
somebody to come and take the overland mail.
(3)
General
George
Crook first visited San Francisco
in 1852. He wrote about it in his autobiography published in 1889.
San Francisco was then
a conglomeration of frame buildings, streets deep in sand; wharf facilities
were very limited. Where the Occidental Hotel now stands there was
mud and marsh which was overflowed by the tides. Everything was excitement
and bustle, prices were most exhorbitant, common laborers received
much higher wages than officers of the Army, although at that time,
by special act of Congress, we were allowed extra pay.
Everything was so different
from what I had been accustomed to that it was hard to realize I was
in the United States. People had flocked there from all parts of the
world; all nationalities were represented there. Sentiments and ideas
were so liberal and expanded that they were almost beyond bounds.
Money was so plentiful amongst citizens that it was but lightly appreciated.
The roads and walks all
about the town and barracks were one
mud hole. It was nothing unusual to see the tops of boots sticking
out of the mud in the streets where they had been left by the
wearer in preference to digging them out.
(4)
Isabella
Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky
Mountains (1879)
It is a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of San
Francisco, which I left in its cold morning fog early yesterday, driving
to the Oakland ferry through streets with sidewalks heaped with thousands
of cantaloupe and water-melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pears»
grapes, peaches, apricots, - all of startling size as compared with
any I ever saw before. Other streets were piled with sacks of flour,
left out, all night, owing to the security from rain at this season.
I pass hastily over the early part of the journey, the crossing the
bay in a fog as chill as November, the number of " lunch baskets,"
which gave the car the look of conveying a great picnic party, the
last view of the Pacific, on which I had
looked for nearly a year, the fierce sunshine and brilliant sky inland,
the look of long rainlessness, which one may not call drought, the
valleys with sides crimson with the poison oak, the dusty vineyards,
with great purple clusters thick among the leaves, and between the
vines great dusty melons lying on the dusty earth. From off the boundless
harvest-fields the grain was carried in June, and it is now stacked
in sacks along the track, awaiting freightage. California is a "
land flowing with milk and honey." The barns are bursting with
fulness. In the dusty orchards the apple and pear branches are supported,
that they may not break down under the weight of fruit; melons, tomatoes,
and squashes of gigantic size lie almost unheeded on the ground; fat
cattle, gorged almost to repletion, shade themselves under the oaks;
superb "red" horses shine, not with grooming, but with condition;
and thriving farms everywhere show on what a solid basis the prosperity
of the "Golden State" is founded. Very uninviting, however
rich, was the blazing Sacramento Valley, and very repulsive the city
of Sacramento, which, at a distance of 125 miles from the Pacific,
has an elevation of only thirty feet. The mercury stood at 103°
in the shade, and the fine white dust was stifling.
(5)
Ulysses
S. Grant wrote about the Gold Rush in his Memoirs (1885)
San Francisco at that day was a lively place. Gold, or placer
digging as it was called, was at its height. Steamers plied daily
between San Francisco and both Stockton and Sacramento. Passengers
and gold from the southern mines came by the Stockton boat; from the
northern mines by Sacramento. In the evening when these boats arrived,
Long Wharf - there was but one wharf in San Francisco in 1852 was
alive with people crowding to meet the miners as they came down to
sell their “dust” and to “have a time.” Of these
some were runners for hotels, boarding houses or restaurants; others
belonged to a class of impecunious adventurers, of good manners and
good presence, who were ever on the alert to make the acquaintance
of people with some ready means, in the hope of being asked to take
a meal at a restaurant. Many were young men of good family, good education
and gentlemanly instincts. Their parents had been able to support
them during their minority, and to give them good educations, but
not to maintain them afterwards. From 1849 to 1853 there was a rush
of people to the Pacific coast, of the class described, All thought
that fortunes were to be picked up, without effort, in the gold fields
on the Pacific. Some realized more than their most sanguine expectations;
but for one such there were hundreds disappointed, many of whom now
fill unknown graves; others died wrecks of their former selves, and
many, without a vicious instinct, became criminals and outcasts.
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