Description
I THE OLD SAN FRANCISCO In some vast travail of a bygone age a peninsula was born. Its birthright was a harbor (land-locked save for its Golden Gate) and, beyond, an empire of unrevealed wealth. For untold ages it slept; the child-dream of power stole upon it. Suddenly it woke and looked upon the sail-capped waters of its harbor. What had been a lonely stretch of sand became a city. They called it San Francisco. Founded as a Mission outpost by far-journeying Franciscan friars in 1776, it grew but slowly until 1849. Clustered around the Mission Dolores and the Presidio, or around the sheltered cove of Yerba Buena, under the brow of Telegraph Hill, where an occasional ship dropped anchor to trade for hides, the people had little to do but amuse themselves with their loves and foibles; to go to horse races and bull fights, fiestas and fandangos. They were as carefree as the fat herds that roamed the rich val- leys of their nearby ranchos. In 1849 came the awakening, with the rush of thousands of adventurous argonauts in quest of the wealth that lay in the Californian mountain sides and valleys. The dreaming peninsula was the natural port of entry and base of supplies for the gold fields, and straightway a little settlement grew up in the Yerba Buena cove, where thrifty “Americanos” traded for the gold their fellows brought down from the mines. A city sprang up after the fashion of any frontier settlement ; wooden shacks to shelter traders and gamblers and saloon-keepers; beyond, the insubstantial homes of their various families. Three years before Captain Montgomery of the United States war sloop “Portsmouth” had planted the American fiag in what subsequently became Portsmouth Square; but that act alone could not make the mission-military town American in its habits. The loves and intrigues and fandangos went on just the same.
Product ID: 9781776749218
Sku: OZ-OON2-8NS0
