Among
the estimated fifteen thousand inhabitants of San Francisco were
representatives of almost every nation and degree of coloring in
nature. There were Germans and Frenchmen, Poles and Englishmen, hard
cases from Australia and Kanakas from the Pacific islands. There were
Chinese and Mexicans, Peruvians and Cubans. There were Bowery "bhoys"
from New York and farm boys from Arkansas and Missouri; all caught in
the dizzy optimism and endless whirl that was life in the metropolis of
El Dorado.
Miners
spilled into the city, coming down on the little steamers from
Sacramento. They had gold in their pockets and the ague in their bones.
All they asked from San Francisco was a good time. For them, the
gambling rooms threw wide their doors; the saloons turned on their
brightest lights. They thronged into what they called the "caffy
shantangs" and spent hour after hour and ounce after ounce trying to
attract the dubious favor of the women who ornamented those
establishments.
Many
of the miners were men of education. The character of their work, the
inanity of what they were doing, reacted on their minds and made these
sprees in the big city a virtual necessity. With more consciousness of
the reasons for their boredom than was possessed by the farm boys and
the "Pikes," they worked it off in the same ways.
Augusto
Ferran and Jose Baturone were Cuban artists who had joined the
procession to California. When they returned to Havana, they published
a set of "Californian Types," sketched mainly in San Francisco. The
picture below, and those on the following ten pages are from their Album Californiano.
