The San Francisco call., 1898-01-23

single girl or boy who reads the
 Children's Page of The Call who
 is not interested in the Golden Jub-
 flee.
 They all know what it is about, of course-that we are celebrating the fif- tieth anniversary of an event which made California known as the Golden State" all over the world. They know, too, that all the old pioneer and all the Native Sons and Daughters, and all the adopted sons and daughters, and all the grandchildren of the State are very proud of their home and it's history, and anxious that the Jubilee shall be grand success. So while the older people are busy helping the matter along, l will tell the younger ones how San Francisco looked to me when I first came here.
 I was a little boy not 10 years old when my father decided to move from NewYork City to this place. It took forty days to make the journey, which is pleasure trip now, and five days and a half of that time were spent in crossing the IsthmuS of Darien, where except when crossing the GOrgona and sailing down the ChagreS rivers the children of the party were carried along in chairs strapped to the backs of black men, none of whom wore more than a hickory shirt and a ban dana handkerchief tied around his neck.
 My first impression of Californians. or at least of their dress was gained on the Cha gres. Our boat passed the bodies of three drowned men floating on the water, all wearing dark panta- looms and two having on red and one 8 blue shirt.
 What are those?" I asked the man who was hired to go with us because he could talk our language, and that of the natives also. and could manage our business with them. and he an- swered: Those are Californians who were going back to the States with their piles and were probably drowned, as often happens, by the capsizing of their canoes"
 Often since then have I thought of those drowned men, and the families in the East who never knew the fate of the loved ones that came to this far or new country to earn money for them and died while taking it home
 It was forty-seVen years ago in the early part of January that l first saw the city Of San Francisco. We came up from Panama on the steamship Ten nessee, one of the old line side-wheelers that made the voyage in fifteen days. and instead of coming straight into a dock, as steamers do now, she cast an- chor some distance from shore off what was then known as "Clark's Point" This same old Tennessee. by the way, was wrecked two years later near the North Heads.
 San Francisco was a queer-lookfne place at that time, very different from the big city from which I had come. and the people looked different from New Workers, too. I could see them from the deck, going about on shore and they were all dressed like the poor fellows in the river wearing red or blue shirts, dark trousers held up with red or blue silk sashes and yellowish- brown sOmbreros, or else white Pan anna straw hats.
 The houses were all small and built for use instead of beauty. Many of them were only Shanties, and there were a number of tents scattered round among them, and the whole town looked very strange to me, used as I was to the large buildings and hand some streets of my Eeastern home.
 On the eastern slope of Telegraph Hill, where the work of cutting down its sides for ballast and to make room for streets and warehouses had not yet been begun, were quite a number of hastily and roughly built houses, and on the top was the telegraph station, with its tall fag-staff, on which were great black arms that Signaled to the city below the arrival of vessels. To- ward the south in the direction of La Punta del Rincon the shore looked very unpleasing, and the whole view made me very homesick, so much so that told my parents: "I don't like this place; 1 want to go backn'
 When the time came to go ashore we were taken over the ships side into small boat, and rowed to little wharf not more than 200 feet long, which jut- ted out from the corner of Battery and Vallejo streets and ended in a short flight of steps. The distance from the steamer was about three blocks, but the boatman charged ten dollars for his service.
 Once on shore I became more home sick than before, for there were no women in sight and not boy or girl in the crowd at the landing. We were to go to the house of some friends who had come out about two months earlier and we rode from the wharf through the unpaved, unplanked, muddy streets up to the residence part of the town near Stockton and Vallejo streets, seat ed on our baggage in an old-fashioned