NHA Home - Historic Nantucket Articles

Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 48, no. 3 (Summer 1999), p. 15-17

Chrysopolis: San Francisco: City of Gold
By J. S. Holliday

The following is an excerpt from Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California, by J. S. Holliday, published in 1999. It is reprinted with permission from the author and the University of California Press. This passage is from the chapter entitled "Careless Freedoms," subtitled "Chrysopolis." Historic Nantucket chose it because it seems to capture the atmosphere of San Francisco in 1849—the boomtown that embraced so many Nantucketers. It's easy to see how the energetic (and entrepreneurial) men got caught up in the. . . Rush for Riches!

FOR THE THOUSANDS WHO CAME BY SEA, LIKE the Frenchman, the strange world of California enveloped them at the wharves of San Francisco, a city so frantic, so profligate, that the passengers' letters were filled with astonishment. First they were surprised by the number of ships deserted by officers and crews: abandoned at anchor in Yerba Buena Cove, facing the town, crowded together, creaking and swaying, an estimated 150 in May 1849. By October the ghostly fleet numbered 308—a forest of masts. In June 1850 the newspapers reported an astounding number: 635 brigs, barks, schooners, and other vessels, many with their cargoes undisturbed and worthless in the glutted market. If not left to rot and sink, scores of these hulks were pulled ashore to be used for storage or for saloons and lodgings. The brig Euphemia served as San Francisco's first prison. Most were cannibalized for planking, canvas, cordage, and spars to supply the hurry-up construction of San Francisco.*

Even before they could get ashore, passengers encountered the competitiveness and raw economic force of life in California. Small boats hooked onto the sides of arriving ships and business agents climbed on board, eager to learn if the cargo contained merchandise in short supply in the volatile San Francisco market. A captain in luck, with, say, thousands of boots or a cargo of bricks, might receive competing bids beyond his wildest fancies. Pushing on board as well, employment agents tried to hire from among the passengers mechanics and tradesmen with sorely needed skills—carpenters, clerks, draymen, masons, blacksmiths, printers. The captain of the schooner Alhambra, arriving from New Orleans, reported in October 1849 that on dropping anchor off San Francisco "there was a great rush of hotel keepers and 'restaurateurs' [looking] for cooks and waiters. They bid as high as three hundred a month for my black cook."

Most of the joint-stock companies, so efficiently organized in the optimism and innocence of hometown planning, disbanded on arrival in San Francisco or within a few days of reaching the diggings. They succumbed to the inevitable antagonisms of their trying journeys, or because members quickly learned that mining in 1849 could not be conducted by an unwieldy group working under directions from a president or field officer. More disappointing, companies that came by sea had to sell their cargoes into the ebb and flow of the fast-changing market. With members anxious to get to the diggings, no one wanted to wait for advantageous prices; so they sold, hoping for the best. As with cargoes, so with their ships, once expected to serve as headquarters for mining operations. Sold into the glutted market, even the finest brigs and schooners brought only a fraction of their value in any other port. In all, a bewildering introduction to a wild world that seemed to defy all their expectations.

Eager as the passengers were to get ashore, San Francisco seemed even more eager to receive them. Across tidal mudflats the wharves of 1848 were extended in the summer of 1849 and through 1850 to reach deep water, so ships could unload passengers and cargoes without the need for small craft between ships and shore. In the race to gain profits by providing these landings, competing wharf companies used steam pile-drivers to sink timbers of Oregon fir deep into the mud. Over these supports they laid down planking thirty to sixty feet wide. Of the twelve wharves eventually built, the most prominent and successful—the Central (or Long) Wharf—gained a length of eight hundred feet by December 1849 and reached out over two thousand feet a year later.

To provide storage—at high rental fees—for the millions of dollars of imports stacked on these wharves and along the muddy shore, some companies moored storeships (taken from the ghost fleet) along their wooden avenues, while others erected warehouses on pilings. Their competition grew so fierce that sabotage crews sometimes worked at night to pull up a competitor's newly driven pilings or to cut mooring cables.**

As aggressive waterfront construction pushed out to deeper water, San Francisco seemed to a worldly Chilean goldseeker to be "a Venice built of pine instead of marble. It is a city of ships, piers, and tides. Large ships a good distance from the beach serve as lodgings, stores, and restaurants. . . . The whole central part of the city sways noticeably because it is built on pilings the size of ships' masts, driven down into the mud."

Once ashore, the passengers entered the even more bizarre life of a boomtown given over entirely to business, speculation, and entertainment, a place hurriedly improvised to profit from its unique and powerful location as the portal to the gold regions. During July 1849 the number of men landing from ships totaled 3,565— and women, 49. They all needed shelter and food, sought in boardinghouses and hotels, eateries and saloons, recently opened in whatever structures could be quickly put together. But these businesses were already overcrowded, so most newcomers slept in temporary shelters: tents, wood-framed dormitories covered with sail canvas, wooden shanties, here and there deck cabins lifted whole from ships, and a few sheet-iron "houses" imported from the States. Using lumber from Oregon at a cost of $600 per thousand feet, business men intent on fast profits pushed their high-priced workers to complete frame buildings, while others, more confident of San Francisco's future, invested in two- and three-story brick buildings, all to be rented at prices far beyond the most brazen avarice of landlords back east.

At the Parker House on the Plaza, a small room rented for $1,800 per month; two other rooms went for $2,400 per month. The building's annual income exceeded $150,000. For a nearby canvas tent, fifteen by twenty-five feet, called Eldorado, tenants paid $40,000 annually. Some landlords took in $50,000 monthly, "One's mind cannot immediately push aside its old instincts for values and ideas of business," wrote Bayard Taylor for the New York Tribune when he spent a few days in San Francisco in August 1849. "Men dart hither and thither, as if possessed with a never-resting spirit. You speak with an acquaintance, a merchant perhaps. He utters a few hurried words of greeting, while his eyes send keen glances on all sides of you. Suddenly . . . he is off, and in the next five minutes has bought up half a cargo, sold a town lot at treble the sum it cost, and taken a share in some new and imposing speculation." A boardinghouse-keeper in a letter home complained, "This place is not fit for anything but business. No one spends a minute for anything else."

Through the fall of 1849 the rush increased. During September nearly six thousand passengers landed at San Francisco, described three months later by a goldseeker from Boston as a place "the world never produced before. Crowded with . . . Yankees & the Chinaman jostling each other in the streets, while French, Germans, Sandwich Islanders, Chilians, Malays, Mexicans, &c &c in all their varieties of costume and language go to form a congrommoration of humanity." As intrigued as they were by the exotic costumes and peoples thronging San Francisco's muddy lanes, many Americans felt an instinctive resentment toward so many foreigners who had arrived with the intent of taking gold that rightfully belonged to U. S. citizens.

Of all the businesses that mined the pockets of Americans and foreigners alike, from bathhouses and billiard rooms to saloons and "dens of lewd women," none reached the prominence and profitability of gambling, offered under simple canvas tents no less than under the gilt chandeliers of elaborate "palaces." When they left home, most goldseekers had vowed to resist California's infamous temptations. Once in San Francisco, however, very few could turn away from a visit to the Parker House, the Bella Union, the Aquila d'Or, or many other gaming halls where success could be properly celebrated with the best liquor and cigars, or disappointment assuaged with friendly, understanding talk. And as everyone knew, the walls displayed life-sized paintings of naked women, while at the faro and monte tables live women—their bosoms partially, thrillingly exposed—laughed, smoked, and drank among the male patrons. In these invigorating surroundings, a few bets seemed justified—to anticipate success in the mines, to add to winnings from hard-worked claims, or, with just a little luck, to gain at last what the diggings had capriciously withheld.

 

*During 1850, 1,521 ships entered San Francisco Bay – but one of many statistics supporting the judgment that San Francisco’s sudden rise from an almost unknown village to a center of worldwide maritime trade “stands unprecedented in the annals of navigation.”

**In the frenzy of waterfront businesses and schemes, companies and individuals could make great fortunes. Among the many ships pulled ashore and held in place with pilings to serve as storehouses, saloons, and lodgings, the 400-ton Niantic earned for her owners in 1849 and 1850 a monthly rental income of $20,000. A carpenter from Connecticut who specialized in driving pilings headed home in the fall of 1850 with $65,000 (a millionaire in today's dollars).

 

 

J. S. Holliday is the author of The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (1981). Holliday is Director Emeritus of the California Historical Society and former Director of the Oakland Museum of California; Associate Professor of American History at California State University, San Francisco; and Assistant Director of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.