The Barbary Coast

The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn’t been discovered in the auriferous sands of the Sacramento Valley, the development of San Francisco’s underworld in all likelihood would have proceeded according to the traditional pattern and would have been indistinguishable from that of any other large American city. Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of goldseekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent.

Before the beginning of the epochal movement which brought thousands of fortune-hunting adventurers to California within a period of half a dozen years, the cosmopolitan San Francisco of song and story didn’t exist, even in the imagination of its most optimistic and far-sighted booster. There was simply a straggling line of tents, slab shanties, and adobe huts stretching along the beach of Yerba Buena Cove, a horseshoe-shaped indentation in the western shore of the Bay of San Francisco, which has long since been filled in and built upon. Until the gold-seekers began to swarm through the Golden Gate and across the plains, the permanent population of the somnolent little village never exceeded a few hundred. Despite the possession of one of the finest natural harbors in the world, it was only an occasional port of call for whaling vessels, and a trading post of such minor importance that the Hudson’s Bay Company abandoned it after vainly striving for five years to establish a profitable commerce.

The Franciscan monks built a Mission two and one-half miles southwest of Yerba Buena Cove in 1776, and that same year the Mexicans established a Presidio, or fortified military post, near the Golden Gate. But it was not until 1835 that the first dwelling on the present site of San Francisco—a canvas tent supported by four redwood posts and covered with a ship’s foresail—was erected by Captain W. A. Richardson, an American who had been appointed harbor-master by the Mexican government. He called the settlement Yerba Buena, meaning “good herb,” the popular designation of a fragrant mint which grew in great profusion throughout the Bay district, and from which the native Californians brewed tea. The name was changed to San Francisco by order of the Alcalde, or Mayor, on January 30, 1847, a little more than six months after the American flag had been raised in the Plaza by Captain Montgomery and a detachment of sailors from the sloop-of-war Portsmouth. In memory of this latter historic event the Plaza was thereafter called Portsmouth Square, and the thoroughfare along the waterfront, now half a mile or so inland, was renamed Montgomery Street.

According to a census taken by the Board of School Trustees about a year and a half after the landing of Captain Montgomery, the population of San Francisco was approximately seven hundred whites, about half of whom were Americans, and a hundred and fifty Indians, Negroes, and Sandwich Islanders. The town contained two hundred buildings, including tents, sheds, and outhouses.

Captain John A. Sutter, a native of Germany, but until his middle years a citizen of Switzerland, arrived in California in 1839, after an adventurous career in Missouri, Oregon, Alaska, and the Sandwich Islands. He swore fealty to the Mexican government, was granted an enormous tract of land in the Sacramento Valley, and promptly took possession of an immense adjoining area, throughout which his rule was almost absolute. He called his kingdom New Helvetia, and as a capital founded a small settlement, Sutter’s Fort, which consisted of a few dwellings, a blockhouse for protection from marauding bands of Indians, and a general store operated by Samuel Brannan, a Mormon Elder who had been Brigham Young’s official representative in New York. On February 15, 1846, the day that the Mormons under Young left Nauvoo, Illinois, on their long march across the plains to the promised land of Utah, Brannan and a company of Mormon immigrants set sail from New York harbor in the ship Brooklyn. They were bound for the Pacific Coast, where they hoped to establish a colony in a country over which the United States had no jurisdiction. But the war with Mexico was won while the Brooklyn was at sea, and the ship sailed through the Golden Gate only a few days after Captain Montgomery had landed his sailors from the Portsmouth. The first thing Brannan saw when his vessel entered the Bay of San Francisco was the American flag flying from the Presidio. According to eyewitnesses, the Elder was so enraged that he flung his hat to the deck and cried in disgust: “There’s that damned rag again! “ (1a) Nevertheless, Brannan decided to land, partly because supplies were running low, and partly because dissension had arisen among the Mormons during the long voyage. He had excommunicated four of the leading men of the company for conduct which he described as “wicked and licentious,” and they in turn had accused him of improperly administering communal funds. These latter charges ultimately became the basis of a court action which was tried before the first jury ever impaneled in California. Brannan was acquitted.

Having settled his flock in tents and adobe huts near Yerba Buena Cove, Brannan hurried overland to meet Brigham Young. He tried unsuccessfully to induce the Mormon leader to abandon his plan of settling in the valley of the Great Salt Lake and urged him to lead the whole body of Mormons into California and build up a strong Mormon state in the territory surrounding the Bay of San Francisco, which he represented as possessing an incomparable climate and soil of extraordinary fertility. He thus became, perhaps, the first California booster, the founder of a long line of vociferous enthusiasts whose clamor has resounded throughout the land for more than eighty years. (1b) It is interesting, but, of course, fruitless, to speculate on what might have been the fate of Mormonism had Brigham Young listened to Brannan’s arguments. It is quite likely that the Church would have been disrupted by the discovery of gold and the resultant excitement and corruption, for not even a devout Mormon can always resist the temptation to lay up treasures on earth instead of in heaven.

Brigham Young had no notion that gold would ever be found along the Pacific Coast, but he shrewdly foresaw that any area with the advantages offered by California would be thickly settled. He told Brannan that it would be inadvisable to bring the Mormons in contact with competitive peoples, and that it would be fatal for them to attempt to colonize a seaport. Brannan returned forthwith to California, where he told the Mormons who had accompanied him to San Francisco that Utah was a poor land, and advised them not to join their brethren. In January 1847 Brannan established San Francisco’s first newspaper, the California Star, and soon thereafter opened his store at Sutter’s Fort. He declined to recognize the authority of Brigham Young, although he continued for several years to collect tithes regularly from the members of his flock. During the gold rush, when many California Mormons became wealthy, these amounted to considerable sums. None of this money was ever remitted to the Church at Salt Lake City, and when Brigham Young made formal demand for “the Lord’s share,” and also for a share of Brannan’s personal earnings, Brannan retorted that he would pay upon a written order signed by the Lord, and not otherwise. According to Asbury Harpending, an associate of Brannan’s in various business enterprises, Brigham Young several times dispatched his holy gunmen, better known as Destroying Angels, to San Francisco to deal with Brannan and collect the money by force. But the Angels were invariably met in the desert, and their wings clipped, by Brannan’s “exterminators,” fighting men whom he is said to have employed as a bodyguard for half a dozen years. (1c)

The Mormons never became powerful in San Francisco, and ultimately Brannan resigned from the Church and devoted himself successfully to his publishing, mercantile, and mining ventures. For almost twenty years he was an important figure in the growth of San Francisco, and his place in the history of the city is secure as the principal organizer of the first Vigilance Committee and as the head of another body which performed similar functions without using the name. In time, however, he became a drunkard, dissipated his fortune, and wandered to Mexico, where he died alone and in dire poverty.

In January 1848 Captain Sutter employed James W. Marshall, an itinerant contractor, to construct a mill on a fork of the American River, some sixty miles east of the present site of the city of Sacramento. Marshall found it necessary to cut a tail-race and divert a portion of the river’s current. The swift flow of water soon washed away the loose gravel and exposed a substratum glistening with tiny particles of gold, which Marshall gathered from the tail-race. (1d) There are innumerable accounts of what immediately followed. One story is that Captain Sutter arranged with Marshall to say nothing of the discovery until they had enriched themselves, but that they were betrayed by a female servant who overheard them discussing the find. Another has it that Samuel Brannan filled a small sack with nuggets and gold dust, and in great excitement rode through the countryside shouting: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” A third story is that Captain Sutter convinced Marshall that the gold was worthless pyrite, and for several weeks they threw away all that came into their hands, making no effort to work the deposits or in any way to develop the find. One large nugget, however, was sent to San Francisco to be exhibited as a curiosity and was examined by Isaac Humphrey, a native of Georgia, who had had considerable mining experience. Humphrey recognized the metal as gold and, despite the ridicule of his friends, hurried to Sutter’s mill and began prospecting. He struck a rich pocket almost immediately.

This was in March 1848, but it was not until the latter part of April that the people of San Francisco, and of other settlements in California and along the Pacific Coast, were convinced that gold had actually been found. Then they deserted their homes and abandoned their occupations and almost overnight moved en masse to the gold-fields. By May 1, 1848 at least two thousand men were scratching like hens in the sand and gravel of the Sacramento Valley. Within a few more weeks their numbers had been tripled by the arrival of Mexicans and natives of other Central and South American countries, who were probably the first persons not residents of the territory to dig for gold in California. Once the precious metal had been found, it seemed to be everywhere, and mining operations soon spread from the American to the Yuba and Feather rivers and then to all the ravines, gulches, and streams up to the Sierra Mountains. And of all the thousands who delved in the earth for riches none fared worse than Marshall, who had discovered the gold, or Captain Sutter, who owned the land upon which gold had first been found. Neither then nor thereafter did anyone ask Captain Sutter for permission to prospect his property, and the gold-hunters only laughed when he tried to exact a levy of ten per cent of all gold mined. Moreover, the swarming miners overran his fields, destroyed his crops, razed his buildings or appropriated them to their own uses, and killed his cattle. They even ruined his garden to obtain the particles of gold which clung to the roots of vegetables and tufts of grass. Eventually Captain Sutter lost everything he had, including title to his land. He spent his declining years in Washington, trying to obtain recompense from Congress. Having no special political influence, he failed. Marshall sold his share of the mill for about two thousand dollars, and it is doubtful whether he made much more during the entire gold rush. He appears to have devoted himself almost entirely to wearing his laurels as the discoverer, to quarreling with the miners over questions of landownership, and to boasting of having made new and important finds. Many thought he was withholding knowledge of richer deposits through sheer meanness, and the miners at length became so infuriated that they threatened to lynch him unless he divulged the location of the new fields. Since it was impossible for him to impart information he didn’t have, he fled the district, whereupon the miners wrecked the mill with such thoroughness that the spot upon which it stood has never been found.

Late in June 1848 Thomas O. Larkin, who had been American Consul at Monterey when California was under Mexican rule, wrote an enthusiastic letter about the discovery of gold to James Buchanan, later President of the United States, but then Secretary of State. Rapid means of communication and transportation were sorely lacking in those days, and except for Larkin’s report and a few private letters no word of the new Dorado reached the Atlantic seaboard until September 1848, when the Baltimore Sun published a short account, which was reprinted in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The news gradually filtered through to the middle west, and by the late autumn of 1848 several parties had started overland for California. Months were required to make the journey by wagon train, however, and before any of these companies arrived, the steamship California, first of the line of Pacific mail steamers, anchored in Yerba Buena Cove with the first gold-hunters from the Eastern and Southern states. This was in February 1849.

Thereafter they came in a steady stream. In less than a year after the arrival of the first shipload of immigrants, between forty thousand and fifty thousand men had passed through the Golden Gate en route to the gold-fields. By the middle of July 1849 Yerba Buena Cove and other anchorages in the Bay of San Francisco were crowded with useless shipping; no sooner had a vessel dropped anchor than the sailors, and frequently the officers as well, took possession of the lifeboats and started up the Sacramento River toward the mines. “For of all people,” wrote a historian of the period, “sailors were the most unrestrainable in their determination to go to the diggings; and it was there a common saying, of the truth of which I myself saw many examples, that sailors, niggers and Dutchmen were the luckiest men in the mines; a very drunken old salt was always particularly lucky.” (1e) Entire crews deserted their ships before either the freight or the passengers had been discharged, leaving the former to the mercy of thieves, and the latter to make their way ashore as best they could. Sometimes this was a very hazardous undertaking, for San Francisco then boasted but one small wharf, and it was necessary to load and unload most of the ships by means of scows, lighters, and small boats. For these craft it was well-nigh impossible to obtain crews except at exorbitant wages, and the men who could be hired were almost invariably without experience. During the height of the gold excitement, there were at least five hundred ships stranded in the harbor, some without even a watchman on board, and none with a crew sufficiently large to work her. Many of these vessels never sailed again. Some rotted away and sank at their moorings. Others were drawn up on the beach and turned into saloons and boardinghouses, remaining in use long after the filling in of the cove had begun and buildings were being constructed around them. One, the clipper ship Niantic, was sunk in shallow water about where Clay and Sansome streets now intersect, and became the foundation of the Niantic Hotel, a famous hostelry of the early days.

More than half of the immigrants who arrived after the first excitement of the gold rush had subsided remained in San Francisco and engaged in various businesses and speculations, many of which were infinitely more remunerative than digging for gold would have been. By the beginning of 1850 the city had a permanent population of at least twenty-five thousand, most of whom were adult males under forty, and had become the foremost American port on the Pacific, a distinction which it retained until the phenomenal rise of Los Angeles. Several streets were marked out along the foot of the sand-hills behind Yerba Buena Cove as soon as it had become evident that the town was destined to thrive like a veritable municipal mushroom, and a few were cut through the hills. But they were neither paved nor properly graded, and in consequence were extraordinarily uneven and irregular. One man’s habitation might be on the same street as that of his nearest neighbor and still be twenty to fifty feet higher or lower. Or it might perch on the side of a hill nearly thirty feet above the rim of a gulch that necessity had made an important thoroughfare. The continual passage of men, animals, and wagons soon cut up these makeshift highways until they were little more than gigantic mud-holes. Several times during the rainy season of 1849-50 horses, mules, and carts were sucked down into the mud, and the animals were drowned; and many men, trying to cross the streets while drunk, narrowly escaped similar deaths. (1f) In a vain attempt to improve conditions the city authorities purchased a great quantity of brushwood and dumped it into the streets, but it soon sank from sight, as did the boxes, barrels, and other refuse thrown out by the citizens. The mud at Clay and Kearny streets, in the heart of town, at length became so deep and thick that a wag posted this sign:

THIS STREET IS IMPASSABLE;
NOT EVEN JACKASSABLE.

There were not nearly enough dwellings in San Francisco to shelter even a small proportion of the new-corners, most of whom consequently were housed in leaky canvas tents or in hastily constructed board shanties with muslin or Osnaburg partitions. Many of the lodging-houses, and some of the more pretentious hotels as well, consisted simply of one or more large rooms, with bunks fastened to the walls, and rows of uncomfortable cots on the floor. To sleep in a bunk or a cot cost as high as fifteen dollars a night, although none had either springs or mattresses. Very few private rooms were available, and the cheapest rented for from two hundred to three hundred dollars a month, payable in advance. The best brought from five hundred to a thousand dollars for a similar period. Enterprising landlords also rented sleeping-space on tables, benches, and other articles of furniture at from two to ten dollars for eight hours. One man is said to have realized fifty dollars a night from the rental of half a dozen rickety old rocking-chairs. Another placed wide redwood planks on saw-horses and sold the right to sleep on them for three dollars, the occupant to furnish his own bedding. In all of these flimsy places roamed millions of flies, lice, and other noxious bugs and insects, besides the huge gray rats, which almost immediately began to infest the waterfront and the muddy streets. Many of these repulsive rodents attained such size and ferocity that they were more than a match for a terrier, and they often attacked sleeping men, biting large chunks from ears, noses, and cheeks. In several houses signs were displayed warning the guests to cover their heads. Even this didn't help much, however, for the thrifty landlord usually removed the covers from a man's body as soon as he was asleep and gave them to a late comer.

The cost of practically every commodity and of every sort of personal service was on a par with that of lodging. There were few men willing to perform the necessary menial tasks, and those who did condescend to undertake such work not only charged accordingly but insisted upon grandiloquent titles calculated to disguise and dignify their labors. Thus, the few washerwomen in the town put out signs announcing "Clothing Refreshed"; the porters who handled the baggage of travelers called themselves "baggage conveyors and transporters," and the waiters in the hotels and restaurants refused to respond unless addressed respectfully as ''Mister Steward.'' Fewer than a score of cooks were in private service, but they insisted, of course, upon being called "chefs." A notable exception to this foolery was Mammy Pleasant, a gigantic Negress from New Orleans, black as the inside of a coal-pit, but with no Negroid features whatever, whose culinary exploits were famous. She said flatly that she was a cook, and would be called nothing else. She arrived in the early part of 1850, preceded by her reputation, and was besieged by a crowd of men, all anxious to employ her, before she had so much as left the wharf at which her ship had docked. She finally sold her services at auction for five hundred dollars a month, with the stipulation that she should do no washing, not even dish-washing. This was the highest wage paid to a cook, although several others received as much as three hundred dollars a month. The porters refused to lift even the smallest piece of baggage for less than two dollars, the stewards commanded a daily wage of thirty dollars, and common laborers received from one to two dollars an hour. Washing cost twenty dollars a dozen pieces, regardless of size. So unsatisfactory was the work done by the ladies of the washhouses, however, that most of the gentry, the wealthy gamblers, and the rich miners sent their linen underwear and boiled shirts by clipper ship to Honolulu or Canton to be laundered with proper care. From three to six months were required for a garment to make such a voyage, but at least it was clean and wearable when it was returned. The cost of washing remained at the twenty-dollar level until the spring of 1850, when it was reduced to eight dollars a dozen and then to five, whereupon the Alta California commented: "There is now no excuse for our citizens to wear soiled or colored shirts. The effect of the reduction is already manifest—tobacco-juice-bespattered bosoms are no longer the fashion."

Vegetables in early San Francisco were luxuries that only the very rich could afford, despite the enormous yield of the near-by farms and ranches, some of which produced carrots a yard long, beets the size of small hogsheads, and cabbages from fifteen to twenty inches in diameter. Apples found a ready market at one to five dollars each, and eggs varied from ten to fifty dollars a dozen. In the restaurants a boiled egg cost never less than a dollar and quite often was several times that amount. Other foods sold at equally high prices. Tea and coffee cost from three hundred to four hundred dollars a barrel, and from four to five dollars a pound in small quantities. Wheat flour and salt pork each brought forty dollars a barrel, and a small loaf of bread, such as sold in New York for four cents, cost fifty to seventy-five cents in San Francisco. The same price was paid for a pound of common cheese.

Butcher-knives were thirty dollars each, shovels from fifteen to twenty-five dollars, and a tin wash-bowl, or pan, was considered cheap at five dollars. A blanket of the commonest sort could not be obtained for less than forty dollars, and boots of good quality cost a hundred dollars a pair. Cheaper footwear, however, was on the market at thirty to fifty dollars. Any sort of medicine, even a common pill, was ten dollars a dose, and laudanum and other drugs sold for a dollar a drop. A miner who suffered from insomnia once paid fifty dollars for enough laudanum to put him to sleep. The few doctors in the town would not write a prescription for less than one hundred dollars, and a quart of good whisky cost thirty dollars, which would be an extraordinary price even in these jolly days of Prohibition. A twenty-foot plank cost twenty dollars, but lumber in bulk was only five hundred dollars a thousand feet. The cost of a brick house was estimated at one dollar a brick. Common iron tacks of the smallest size, much in demand for fastening cloth partitions, were worth their weight in gold—a pound of gold bought a pound of tacks. Since gold was current at sixteen dollars an ounce (the rate of exchange established at a public meeting in September 1848), the tacks actually cost the purchaser $192 a pound. So far as the records show, this was the top price, although tacks seldom dropped below ten dollars an ounce for more than a year. By that time San Francisco had begun to pass the muslin-partition stage, and so many tacks had been imported that they couldn’t be given away. One merchandising genius is said to have brought in a whole shipload, most of which were eventually dumped into the bay at a considerable loss.

Rentals of hotels and other business structures, whether of boards or of canvas, reached even dizzier heights than did commodity prices. A single small store on Portsmouth Square, with a fifteen-foot frontage, brought $3,000 a month, and another, half a block away, rented for $40,000 a year. The rent of a tiny cigar-store barely large enough for one man to stand in was $4,000 a month, and the operator of a bowling-alley in the basement of the Ward House, which was erected on the square early in 1850, paid $5,000 a month to the owners of the property. The Parker House, a two-storey frame structure which had cost $30,000 to build, rented for $120,000 a year. Of this amount, half was paid by gamblers, who occupied the whole of the second floor. El Dorado, a gambling saloon which adjoined the Parker House, at Washington and Kearny streets, on the present site of the Hall of Justice, brought $40,000 a year to its owners, although it was nothing more than a canvas tent, fifteen by twenty-five feet. A small building on another corner of the square, occupied by a brokerage firm, rented for $75,000 a year; the proprietor of the United States Hotel, the first hostelry in San Francisco, paid $36,000 a year; and the United States government paid $7,000 a month for the board shanty which housed the Customs Office.

The first public entertainment in San Francisco after the beginning of the gold rush was a circus, which gave its initial performance early in the spring of 1849, in a vacant lot on Kearny Street near Clay. Another similar show was opened a year later, and soon afterwards a third. They were described by a contemporary historian as "mere tent structures, where, on rude benches, congregated crowds of easily satisfied and deeply interested spectators, and where springboards bounced men of various sizes successively over one, two, and three horses; and daring riders, on broad wooden saddles, jumped through hoops and over ropes, most fearfully to look at." To watch these exhibitions, the spectators paid three dollars for seats in the pit, five dollars for a box, and fifty-five dollars for private stalls. The first theatrical performance, a double bill presenting The Wife and Charles the Second, was given by a traveling troupe in January 1850, in Washington Hall, a flimsy board structure on Portsmouth Square which later became the town's most elegant brothel. The first actual theater was not established, however, until April of that same year, when a French vaudeville company gave several performances in a new building on Washington Street near Montgomery. A group of amateurs presented various plays at a new house called "The Dramatic Museum" during the summer of 1850, and in September of that year the curtain rose for the first time in the famous Jenny Lind Theatre above the Parker House saloon, which was owned by Tom Maguire, a celebrated gambler and sporting man of the period. The Jenny Lind was destroyed by fire within a few months, as was the wooden structure which replaced it. After the conflagration of June 22, 1851 Maguire built a new theater of stone, which was soon afterwards purchased by the municipal authorities for two hundred thousand dollars. For several years it was used as a City Hall.

Despite these various amusements, all of which were well patronized, gambling remained the principal diversion of the great mass of restless, turbulent, gold-hungry men who almost over night had transformed the once peaceful hamlet of San Francisco into a bawdy, bustling bedlam of mudholes and shanties. "While wages and profits were so high, and there was no comfort at their sleeping quarters," wrote the city's first historian, "men spent money freely at different places of riotous excess, and were indeed forced to pass their hours of leisure or recreation at drinking bars, billiard rooms and gambling saloons. Such places were accordingly crowded with a motley crew, who drank, swore, and gamed to their hearts' content. Everybody did so; and that circumstance was a sufficient excuse, if one were needed, to the neophyte in debauchery. . . .But of all their haunts, the gambling saloons were the most notorious and the best patronized. Gambling was . . .the amusement—the grand occupation of many classes—apparently the life and soul of the place. . . .The extensive saloons, in each of which a dozen. . .tables might be placed, were continually crowded, and around the tables themselves the players often stood in lines three or four deep, every one vieing with his neighbors for the privilege of reaching the board, and staking his money as fast as the wheel and ball could be rolled or the card turned. . . .Judges and clergymen, physicians and advocates, merchants and clerks, tradesmen, mechanics, laborers, miners and farmers, all adventurers in their kind—every one elbowed his way to the gaming-table, and unblushingly threw down his golden or silver stake." (1g)

The exact number of gambling places in early San Francisco was never determined, but there were at least several hundred; perhaps as many as a thousand. Probably no other American city of similar size ever sheltered so many games of chance in operation at one time. No effort whatever was made to suppress them, and very little to control them; until 1855 they were, indeed, licensed by the city, and any man who wished to do so might open a gambling house or set up his tables wherever he pleased, so long as he paid the regular license fees, and perhaps a bit extra for the politicians. The first state-wide anti-gambling law in California was passed by the Legislature during the winter of 1854, but its only effect was to close a few of the smaller establishments. It was never generally enforced, and the only conviction under it was that of a crooked faro dealer in Tuolumne. It was repealed in 1859, largely through the efforts of Colonel Jack Gamble, who lived up to his name by being one of San Francisco's most expert gamblers. In later years Colonel Gamble opened a road-house, with roulette-wheels and rooms for card and dice games, on the San Jose highway fourteen miles down the peninsula from San Francisco, but was compelled to abandon the resort in 1873, when the Legislature enacted another anti-gambling law which was actually enforced. (1h)

Practically all of the big games in gold-rush days were square, the gambler depending for his profits on his skill and the naturally large percentage in favor of the banker. If a sharper attempted to operate a brace game, he was fortunate if he was not killed or run out of town. In any event his tables were deserted and he was soon starved out. The most popular games were monte, faro, rondo, roulette, rouge et noir, and vingt-et-un. Poker was comparatively unknown, for the restive San Franciscans, and the miners who regularly risked the proceeds of their back-breaking toil, considered this prince of gambling games too slow. They would not sit still long enough to play it; they craved prompt and immediate action and insisted upon staking everything upon one spin of the wheel or the turn of a single card. It was not until the banking games began to decline in popularity that poker came into its own, although a few games were in operation as early as the fall of 1849, and several stiff sessions are recorded. In one, Tony Bleecker, of the mercantile firm of Bleecker, Van Dyke & Belden, is said to have lost thirty thousand dollars at a single sitting, to a syndicate of gamblers consisting of Jim Beckett, Jim McCullough, Jack Addison, and Dick Berry. (1i) Next day Bleecker insisted that he had been jobbed, refused to pay, and departed for Panama.

Portsmouth Square, the old Plaza of Mexican days, was the gambling center of the town until the gamblers were eventually driven out by the encroachments of business and changes in public and political opinion. All of the eastern side of the square, three-fourths of the northern, and a large part of the southern were occupied by buildings devoted exclusively to gambling, while tables were also available for play in the saloons and in the bar-rooms of the hotels. All ran wide open day and night, seven days a week, as did many other establishments in the side-streets and along the waterfront. Monte and faro lay-outs and various kinds of chuck-a-luck games were also operated, in good weather, on the streets and the plank sidewalks and in the center of the square, which at that time was little more than a windswept stretch of sand. The western side of the square was occupied by a few hotels and small stores, and an old adobe house, from the steps of which the Reverend William Taylor, a pioneer street preacher of the gold rush, daily fulminated against gambling and its attendant evils, while all around him the square fairly swarmed with the objects of his ecclesiastical blasts. The scene was thus described by Wilson Flint, in later years a California state Senator, in a letter to the Reverend Mr. Taylor:

"It was on a Sunday morning in December, 1849, when landing from the Panama steamer I wended my way with the throng to Portsmouth Square, this being at the time the great resort of the denizens of this rising metropolis. Three sides of the Square were mostly occupied by buildings which served the double purpose of hotels and gambling houses, the latter calling being regarded at the time as a very respectable profession. On the fourth and upper side of the square was an adobe building, from the steps of which you were discoursing from the text, 'The way of the transgressor is hard.' It was a scene I shall never forget. On all sides of you were gambling houses, each with its band of music in full blast. Crowds were going in and coming out; fortunes were being lost and won; terrible imprecations and blasphemies rose amid the horrid wail, and it seemed to me pandemonium was let loose." (1j)

The dens of iniquity against which the Reverend Mr. Taylor thundered so ineffectually on this and other occasions included such celebrated resorts as El Dorado, which is said to have been the first gambling house opened after the discovery of gold; the Parker House; Dennison's Exchange; the Empire; the Mazourka; the Arcade; the Varsouvienne; the Ward House; La Souciedad; the Fontine House; the St. Charles; the Alhambra; the Verandah; and the Aguila de Oro; all on or very near Portsmouth Square; Bill Briggs's place in Montgomery Street near Pine; and Steve Whipple's house in Commercial Street, later occupied by the Pacific Club.

Originally El Dorado was a canvas tent, but the tent was soon replaced by a large square room of rough boards, with a few small private booths partitioned off with muslin, where a man whose mind was elsewhere than on games of chance might entertain his inamorata of the moment. The walls were covered with costly paintings, extremely lascivious in character—which is to say they were principally pictures of nude women in various abandoned postures—and the furniture and fittings were of rococo elegance. At one end was a raised platform draped with bunting, flags, and colored streamers, from which an orchestra blared without cessation. At the other end was the bar, behind which were large mirrors of fine cut glass. (1k) Scattered throughout the room were the gaming tables, on which were huge piles of gold dust, nuggets, and gold and silver coins. Behind each table sat the dealer, or croupier, clad in the traditional white and black of the professional gambler. If accounts of the time are to be credited, every man who operated a game of chance in early San Francisco was apparently in the last stages of tuberculosis; he is almost invariably described as tall, thin, and cadaverous, extremely saturnine of countenance and monastic of habit. He was, likewise, a killer, and when he ensconced himself at his table to deal the cards or spin the roulette-wheel, his trusty double-barreled derringer was ever at his elbow, while in his pockets reposed at least one heavy revolver and a bowie-knife, razor-sharp. In the use of these weapons he was, of course, an expert. Says Hubert Howe Bancroft, California's foremost historian:

"The character of the typical gambler of the flush times is one of the queerest mixtures in human nature. His temperament is mercurial but non-volatilized. . . .Supreme self-command is his cardinal quality; yet, except when immersed in the intricacies of a game, his actions appear to be governed only by impulse and fancy. On the other hand his swiftest vengeance and cruellest butchery seem rather the result of policy than passion. . . .He is never known to steal except at cards; and if caught cheating he either fights or blandly smiles his sin away, suffers the stakes to be raked down without a murmur, treats good-humoredly, and resumes the game unruffled. United with the coolest cunning is the coolest courage. He is as ready with his pistol as with his toothpick, but he never uses it unless he is right; then, he will kill a man as mercilessly as he would brush a fly from his immaculate linen. . . .He accustoms himself to do without sleep, and if necessary can go for several days and nights without rest. . . .He deals his game with the most perfect sang froid, and when undergoing the heaviest losses there is no trembling of fingers or change of expression. . . .He is studiously neat in his habits, and tends to foppishness. . . ." (1l)

Such descriptions may be accurate enough, but at the same time it is not improbable that the tales of the death-dealing gambler which permeate the literature of early San Francisco are of a piece with accounts of the extraordinary honesty that is said to have prevailed during the first few months of the gold rush, despite the heterogeneity of the population and the fact that a large proportion of it was criminal. Among other stories difficult to believe, it is related that when the gamblers went to lunch or dinner, they left the mounds of nuggets, gold dust, and coin unguarded upon their tables; while the miner who wished to rid himself temporarily of the burden of a heavy sack of gold deposited it casually atop a hitching-post in a busy street. The historians responsible for these fairy-like tales of painful integrity, however, tell at the same time of two Chinese who passed twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit coin over the gaming tables of El Dorado and the Alhambra, and of another Chinese who snatched twenty-five thousand dollars from El Dorado and fled into a Grant Avenue cellar. (1m) Since that amount in gold weighs approximately one hundred and twenty pounds, he must have been a particularly hale and hearty Celestial. In any event the capture of this Herculean desperado unearthed several other dishonest men, who were industriously digging through the back wall of a bank.

When gambling in San Francisco was in its infancy, the dealers and croupiers were all men, but one night early in 1850 Mme Simone Jules, a strikingly beautiful Frenchwoman, with enormous black eyes and ebon hair, made her appearance at a roulette table in the Bella Union. She immediately became the center of masculine interest, and her table did such an enormous business that the other gambling houses were compelled to follow the Bella Union's example. Despite the vigorous editorial opposition of the Alta California, which declared indignantly that a gambling house was not a fit place for a woman, many of the games in the first-class places were thereafter operated by handsome and amiable ladies.

There was also great rivalry among the gambling houses as to which could offer its customers the best entertainment. El Dorado retained its wheezy old orchestrion to the end of its days, but also employed as many gifted soloists as could be procured. The Verandah presented a marvel who might well be called the daddy of the modern jazz trap-drummer. When equipped for a musical evening, he wore pipes tied to his chin, a drum strapped to his back, drumsticks fastened to his elbows, and cymbals attached to his wrists. All of these instruments he played more or less in unison at approximately the same time. Moreover, he patted his feet, which were encased in enormous hardsoled shoes, and with them made a tremendous clatter upon the floor. In several establishments women played harps and pianos, and each evening at the Alhambra a Frenchwoman performed upon the violin, for which she received daily two ounces of gold dust, or about thirty-two dollars. The Aguila de Oro had a Negro chorus during the autumn of 1849, which introduced spirituals into California; and the Bella Union offered a Mexican quintet, consisting of two harps, two guitars, and a flute. The shining star of the Bella Union, however, was the singer and violinist Charley Schultze, who first played in San Francisco, and probably in the United States as well, the tune of Aloha. To this famous Hawaiian air he sang: "You Never Miss Your Sainted Mother Till She's Dead and Gone to Heaven."

Ordinarily the stakes even in the largest of the gold-rush gambling houses ranged from fifty cents to ten dollars, but the aggregate was enormous; in some of the more important resorts the daily turnover sometimes exceeded $200,000. Occasionally considerable sums were wagered on a single play, and fortunes were won and lost in the course of a single evening. Gold dust worth $16,000 was once laid upon a Bella Union table as a bet, and a week later a drunken miner risked $20,000 on the turn of a single card. Jim Rynders, a prosperous gambler who was noted for the dazzling whiteness of his teeth, once won $89,000 in three days' play at faro in Steve Whipple's place, and not long afterwards lost $100,000 in the same establishment in a similar length of time. While in Europe a few years later, Rynders visited the Casino at Homberg Spa and offered to bet $25,000 on the red at roulette. The bank declined to accept the wager, and when the wheel was spun, the red won. The greatest game of faro of which there is record in San Francisco, and probably in the United States also, was played by Ed Moses in the early eighteen-fifties. Moses went into an opposition gambling house one afternoon, and at his request the limit was removed. At first he won heavily, but his luck deserted him and he was soon heavily in debt to the bank. He finally drew his I O U for $60,000 and played it straight on a single card. He lost, and left the gambling house poorer by $200,000 than when he had entered. (1n)

Two of the most celebrated of the early gambling-house owners were Bill Briggs, and Colonel J. J. Bryant, who operated the game in the Ward House, which he afterwards purchased and called the Bryant House. Briggs had what almost amounted to a mania for throwing small coins about the streets. He used to leave his place at four o'clock every morning with twenty-five to fifty dollars in small change in his pockets and go to the vegetable market, where the gamins of the town were collecting the refuse to feed their goats and cows. Standing on the sidewalk, the gambler tossed handfuls of coins into the street, laughing heartily as he watched the youngsters scramble for them. Briggs was the last of the old-time faro dealers to close his establishment; even after the enactment of the anti-gambling laws of 1873 he operated for several years behind heavily barricaded doors. About 1880, however, discouraged by repeated raids and the frequent destruction of his tables and furniture by the police, he quit, expressing his disgust at the reform wave which had engulfed him and declaring that San Francisco had become little more than a municipal Sunday school.

Colonel Bryant had political ambitions, and ran for sheriff in 1850 as the regular nominee of the Democratic party, at the first popular election for county officers ever held in San Francisco. His opponents were Colonel John E. Townes, who had been appointed Sheriff in 1849 and was now the choice of the Whigs; and Colonel Jack Hayes, the famous Texas ranger, who was an independent candidate. After his nomination Colonel Bryant's hotel was decorated with flags, bunting, and streamers, while a band of music daily played patriotic airs from the balcony and free lunches and drinks were dispensed to all who desired them, which was practically everyone in San Francisco. On election day the Colonel's supporters appeared in Portsmouth Square about noon with banners and signs on which were emblazoned the surpassing merits of their candidate. Preceded by a company of gayly caparisoned horsemen and several carriages filled with musicians, they marched noisily about the town. This display aroused so much enthusiasm among the voters that Colonel Bryant's election appeared certain, until Colonel Hayes suddenly made his appearance astride a magnificent black charger. Alone, with his long hair waving in the breeze, and handling his mount with the skill of the superb horseman, Colonel Hayes galloped back and forth, exhibiting, as the Annals of San Francisco puts it, "some of the finest specimens of horsemanship ever witnessed. The sight of the hero took the people by surprise and called forth the admiration and patriotism of the vast multitude of spectators. Men crowded around him on every hand, some seizing the bridle, others clinging to his clothing and stirrups, and each anxious to obtain a grasp of his hand. The noise and tumult terrified the spirited beast he strode, which reared and plunged amid the enthusiastic crowd, though so admirably managed as to do injury to none; when at length, his rider giving him the rein, he dashed into and along the adjoining street, followed and greeted by loud huzzas at every step." (1o)

This theatrical demonstration turned the trick. Colonel Hayes was victorious by a tremendous majority and soon afterwards was sworn in as the first regularly elected Sheriff of San Francisco.

Despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in early San Francisco was supremely confident that he would soon be able to return home with an incalculable amount of gold. Everything was conceived on a vast scale, and there was always plenty of cash available for any scheme that might be proposed, no matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed. No one hesitated to borrow money, although for several years the prevailing rates of interest ranged from eight to fifteen per cent a month, payable in advance, and even higher unless gilt-edged security was provided. Everyone was in such a hurry to get rich that few men were willing to bind themselves to any sort of contract for a longer period than a month, the time basis upon which nearly all business was transacted. Real estate that a few years before had brought enormous prices from speculators, fifty-vara (1p) lots which had been granted by the Alcalde upon payment of twelve to sixteen dollars, sold for tens of thousands. Fortunes were made with incredible rapidity in real estate, in building, in merchandising, at the gaming table, and in every conceivable sort of business and speculation; yet little was thought of or talked about except gold mining. Any occupation, however great the stream of profit, was regarded merely as a stopgap pending a lucky strike in the gold-fields; probably the only men who devoted themselves whole-heartedly to the business at hand were the gamblers. The town was filled with tales, seldom verified, of the few fortunate miners who were gathering fortunes in the diggings at the rate of five hundred, a thousand, and, in a few cases, ten thousand dollars a day; everyone heard of the man who had picked up a chunk of pure gold weighing thirteen pounds and worth thirty-five thousand dollars, and of the two men who had discovered an even larger nugget and had immediately left for the East to exhibit it at fifty cents a look. But practically nothing was heard of the thousands of hard-working men who were on the verge of starvation in the hills, nor of the thousands of others who, discouraged and disappointed, had returned to San Francisco and were living in squalor and destitution.

Gold worth forty million dollars was extracted from the sand and gravel of California in 1849, but very little remained in the hands of the men who had dug it from the earth. Thousands of miners worked only so long as they could withstand in comfort the roaring temptations of the brothel, the gambling houses, and the other fascinating flesh-pots of the city. Then, with their buckskin bags crammed with nuggets and gold dust, they hurried into San Francisco and forthwith embarked upon an orgy of wasteful and extravagant spending. Since very few had ever before possessed more than a bare living wage, they naturally had a decided preference for ostentatious display. They discarded their red shirts and homespun pants for broadcloth suits, boiled shirts, and plug hats; they flung nuggets and gold coins to the street boys and the beggars; they squandered their hard-earned fortunes on harlots, liquor, and games of chance; they paid hundreds of dollars for fruit, vegetables, and game out of season; they met without a murmur of protest the extraordinary expenses of common food and lodging. Many, at a loss how else to exhibit their prosperity, employed dentists to put their own gold into their teeth. If they had no teeth that required attention, they had good ones dug out and gold ones substituted. Scores of men had all of their teeth extracted and solid gold plates installed. (1q) Many who didn't care for the pain which in those early days invariably accompanied dental ministrations spent their money instead on gold watches and diamond pins and other showy articles of jewelry and personal wear. "Laboring men," wrote Borthwick, "fastened their coarse, dirty shirts with a cluster of diamonds the size of a shilling, wore colossal gold rings on their fingers, and displayed massive gold seals and chains from their watch pockets; while hardly a man of any consequence returned to the Atlantic states without receiving from some one of his friends a huge gold-headed cane, with all his virtues and good qualities engraved upon it."

Once their gold was exhausted, the spendthrift miners hurried back to the gold-fields, supported by a sublime faith that they would immediately make another rich find and so start anew the same vicious circle. Even those who hadn't enough left to furnish outfits or to pay their transportation to the diggings didn't lose hope entirely. Scorning to degrade themselves, as they thought, by performing ordinary labor, they diligently prospected the city streets, the vacant lots, and the sand-hills behind the town; many religiously panned the daily sweepings from stores, hotels, saloons, brothels, and gambling houses, which occasionally yielded a few ounces of gold dust.

It is small wonder that the correspondent of the New York Evening Post, after judiciously surveying the scene late in 1849, reported to his journal that "the people of San Francisco are mad, stark mad."