These visits were so full of interest, with grandeurs and humors
of all sorts, that I am strongly tempted to describe them. But I
remember that I am not to write a journal of a visit over the new
California, but to sketch briefly the contrasts with the old spots
of 1835-6, and I forbear.
How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this
marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board
shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a
population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town
government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking together
of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth of a
city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times
in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars,
and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and
stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the
accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now (in 1859) the most
quiet and well-governed city of its size in the United States. But
it has been through its season of Heaven-defying crime, violence,
and blood, from which it was rescued and handed back to soberness,
morality, and good government, by that peculiar invention of
Anglo-Saxon Republican America, the solemn, awe-inspiring
Vigilance Committee of the most grave and responsible citizens,
the last resort of the thinking and the good, taken to only when
vice, fraud, and ruffianism have intrenched themselves behind the
forms of law, suffrage, and ballot, and there is no hope but in
organized force, whose action must be instant and thorough, or its
state will be worse than before.
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