For
those who could skate without qualms on thin financial ice, the San
Francisco of 1853 was a delightful place. A cheerful blindness to signs
of imminent trouble characterized the outlook of most bankers,
merchants and speculators.
This
was still the San Francisco of George Horatio Derby's most boisterous
practical jokes—a city liberal to musicians and actors—the city which
was home to Barry and Patten's saloon, the Montgomery Street refuge
where gathered a witty, generous and sophisticated crew. There the
traveler might find Ferdinand Ewer from the Custom House, with the idea
of the Pioneer buzzing in his brain— Kemble, junior editor of the Alta, very
grand in his sombrero and fine raiment— "Jeems Pipes of Pipesville"
(otherwise the versatile Stephen Massett) —Alonzo Delano—Frank Soule.
It
was a city intellectual enough to give a new direction to American
literature—witty enough to originate and savor that exquisite
perversion of a line from King Lear, "How sharper than a
serpent's thanks it is to have a toothless child"—juvenile enough to
roar with appreciation at japes like Derby's description of the first
meeting of the extremely respectable Ladies' Relief Society, a
full-blooded fabrication in which "an elderly female in a Tuscan bonnet
and green veil" buoyed herself up during the proceedings by, from time
to time, "drawing a black pint bottle from the pocket of her dress" and
taking "a snifter therefrom, with vast apparent satisfaction."
It was also a city of quick sentiment, from which a friend sent back east to the parents of a dead boy, the daguerreotype shown below—for whatever comfort the sight might give them.
