Los Angeles herald., 1906-04-28
RECoLLECTIoNs OF SAN FRANCISCO
Written for The Herald

When San Francisco went down on
the 18th 1t carried many a costly build
ing, but it buried for me thirty years of
the sweetest and most hallowed recol-
lections of an old mans eventful life.
l lacked about six months of being
eighteen years old when landed there
in 1858. and L am now well past the
patriarch's limit of the three score and
ten. My parents lived there thirty
years, with my two sisters long since
dead. / went to Oregon after living in
San Francisco sixteen years and there
was never a time UP to the present
hour that I did not look upon a trip to
San Francisco just as a schoolboy con-
templates his home-going on a vaca-
ton. On the Goth q man came to me
and offered me IS a day with all ex-
penses paid to go up to San Francisco
with him. My answer was a brief one:
Il wouldn't go with you for $40 and
L have not earned single dollar for six
weeks"
But that man, who is a sterling good
fellow by the way, could not contem-
plate what underlay my refusal. He
did not know that all the sweetest and
tenderest recollections of a long and
eventful life were bound up in the
smouldering ruins Of brick, steel and
mortar that was once called the Cold
en- City, and the "Queen of the West"
a title as poetic as it was merited.
/ landed on the 10th day of January,
1858, from Panama steamer, at the
old plaza Of San Diego and worked
aboard the old coal hulk Diana of the
Pacific Mail company for six months,
after which the old ship yas towed to
Benicia by the propeller Fremont. Two
years after that l went east and
brought out my mother and sisters by
the way of New Orleans. They are all
dead now, and for that reason San
Francisco is a hallowed spot in my
memory. There was no Cliff house. no
Palace hotel, no cable roads, no chutes,
in my boyhood days. There was only
one ferryboat running to Oakland-the
old Contra Costa-which sometimes
made the trip in two hours and some
times consumed ten, owing to shallow
water on the bar of Oakland creek. I
lived to see all these primitive condi-
tions outgrown by the march of a
grand and resstless civilization; and
then to hear of all being destroyed by
an earthquake and a fire, the number
of whose victims is not nor never will
be known to the great and busy world.
The man who never saw San Fran
cisco until within the past ten years
cannot correctly understand the scenes
in which l was a daily participant.
When / landed there nine men out of
every ten wore red vicuna hats made
in Peru and costing, from $2S to $35. I
wore one for seven years and then
threw it away. If you saw man on
those streets that did not wear a mus
tache you were safe in concluding that
he belonged to one of three classes-a
priest, an actor or a gambler. AS for
gambling, it was part of the daily ex-
istence of half the merchants and
business men in the city. There were
only three sizes of money at that time,
$40, So and half-dollars. 1t cost you
the first for your months room rent;
the second for dinner at Cazauran's,
Driard's or Madame Mondelet's, where
the vle~ol Bella Union once stood,
the vile old Bella union now stands;
and the last for a shave, q cigar or a
shine. l lived in San Francisco seven
years before L saw anything less than
a ten-cent piece, and for the first five
years they were available only for the
purchase of postage stamps or for daily
papers on the streets.
/ could get into boat, at the end of
Howard or Folsom street wharf, and
paddle up to a point on Market street
where the Grand hotel afterwards
stood. OF course the waters of the bay
came up to Montgomery street at
Jackson, but that was before my day.
Tardy as I seem to be, can recall the
day when there was no such thing as a
brick house on Montgomery street
south of Sutter nor on Kearny south
of Bush. L can remember an old three
story brick. building on Bush and
Kearny that was torn down to make
room for the building now occupied by
the Evening Post and before that by
the Chronicle, in which Charles De
Young was shot to death by young
Kalloch. That old building was called
Minerva hall and in it Miss Leslie
taught a dancing school. In the third
story of that building lived three actors
David C. Anderson, William Barry
and last, but not least, Edwin Booth.
A fellow had to go up there about 4
p m. to see this talented and witty trio
at their best.
Down on Montgomery street but