Ships—sail
and steam—from the Isthmus of Panama, from Mazatlan and San Diego, from
Valparaiso and Callao, from Papeete in the far-off Society Islands,
from Sydney and Honolulu, Canton and Hong Kong, threaded their way
through the hundreds of vessels already moored in San Francisco harbor
and let go their anchors as close to the wharves as they could get.
Little bumboats swarmed out to the ships and ferried the hordes of
gold-seekers ashore at a dollar a head.
The
passengers, many of them dubious characters indeed, came to a city
already self-conscious, confident; still booming and building. A German
emigrant who had arrived in San Francisco in the fall of 1849 returned
for a visit in January, 1850. He was dumb-struck at the material
progress which had been made.
"I
had left tents, and low huts and shanties, only two months before; and
there were now regular streets of high wooden, and even here and there
brick, buildings. But if the habitations had improved, the streets had
become proportionally worse . . . they seemed to be only a liquid and
moving mass of soft, chocolate-colored mud. In going from one house to
another you had to wade through it, and crossing a street seemed a
matter of life and death. Many places became really impassable, and in
Clay and Montgomery Streets, mules were several times drowned in the
middle of the road."
Our
visiting German had a sharp eye. He noted that "San Francisco seemed
also to be crowded with laborers who had sought the shelter of the
town, preferring a sure gain to the uncertain toil of gold-digging."
The view of San Francisco below was drawn early in the winter of 1849.
