Historical.
The site of what is now the city of San Francisco was first permanently occupied by white men, September 17, 1776. The same year witnessed the entrenchment of a garrison and the establishment of a Mission.
San Francisco owes its origin to Catholic missionaries and Spanish soldiers. Father Junipero Serra led the missionaries—and virtually commanded the soldiers. The name San Francisco was given in honor of Saint Francis of Asisis, a city of Italy, the founder of the order of Franciscans to which Father Junipero belonged. The presidio, garrison or fort, was founded first, Sept. 17, and the mission about three weeks later, Oct. 9th. The site first chosen was near a small lagoon back of, that is, west of, what is now called Russian Hill, but the prevailing winds proved so high and bitter as to compel its early removal to the more sheltered spot, over a mile south, under the lee of high hills, and near the present Mission Creek. Here, at the head of what is now Center or Sixteenth Street, the old church still stands.
For nearly sixty years the mission stood, the nucleus of a little village of rude adobe houses, tenanted by a fluctuating population of Indians, Mexicans and Spanish—and the center of a military and religious authority, which upon more than one occasion made itself felt and feared for leagues around. The population rarely rose above four hundred and frequently fell to less than a hundred and fifty.
In 1835, Capt. W. A. Richardson put up the first pioneer dwelling, with rude wooden walls and sail-cloth roof. On the fourth of July of the next year, 1836, Jacob P. Leese finished the first frame house. This house stood where the St. Francis Hotel now stands,—on the southwest corner of Clay and Dupont streets, a single block west of the present City Hall. Leese had his store on the beach, which was where Montgomery and Commercial streets now intersect. Nearly seven solid blocks of made-land now stretch between where that old beach lay and the present water front. Other houses soon rose near that of Leese, and presently the villagers saw their little settlement fast approaching the dignity of a new town, and cast about to find a name. Nature caused it to spring out of the ground for them in the form of a species of aromatic mint, which, surrounding their dwellings, perfuming the morning air and supplying frequent and varied medicinal needs, had proved indeed, as the Spaniards called it, "Yerba Buena," the Good Herb. So the herb named the town, and the name "stuck" as the Californians say, for nearly a dozen years. During these years the houses grew in number, until 1847, when the town contained seventy-nine buildings,—thirty-one frame, twenty-six adobe, and the rest shanties—and these houses sheltered three hundred souls, or, at least, that number of bodies. On the 30th of January of that year, these three hundred dropped the old name Yerba Buena, and adopted the older one, which had belonged to the neighboring mission for nearly fourscore years. Thus the town also became San Francisco, and has ever since so remained. The first steamboat appeared in the bay, November 15th of the same year. In March, 1848, the houses had grown to two hundred, and the population to eight hundred and fifty. On the third of the next month, the first public school began.
New Year's Day, '49, the new city claimed a population of two thousand. Three days later the two previously published weekly papers merged into the Alta California, the earliest established of all newspapers now existing in the State.
The early miners were making from twenty to thirty dollars a day, getting "bags" of dust and "piles" of nuggets, and rushing down to "Frisco" to gamble it away. These were the "flush times" of the new city. Fresh eggs cost from seventy-five cents to one dollar apiece. For a beefsteak and a cup of coffee for breakfast one had to pay a dollar and a half, and a dinner cost him from two to ten or even twenty dollars, according to appetite and drinketite. Rough labor brought the old Congressional pay of eight dollars a day; draymen earned twenty dollars a day; and family "help" could hardly be had for forty, or even fifty, dollars a week. The great mass of the men lived in tents. Very few women had come, but those few were overwhelmed with attention; if one wished to cross the street in the rainy season, a score of brawny arms would fight for the privilege of gallantly wading through the sea of mud to carry her across the unpaved street.
Great fires came, four of them; the first the day before Christmas, '49—it burned over a million dollars worth; the second, May 4th, '50—it destroyed three millions dollars worth. A little over a month later, June 14th, 1850, the most destructive fire the city ever saw left it poorer by four millions of dollars; and on the 17th of the next September the fourth fire consumed another half million. Nearly nine million dollars worth burned in less than nine months!
Business thrived immensely. In 1852, more than seven vessels a day arrived at or departed from San Francisco. Commerce overdid itself. Long piers ran out over the flats where now solid blocks of lofty buildings have stood for half a score of years. Sometimes storms kept back the clippers; then prices went still higher. Between March and November, flour went up from eight to forty dollars a barrel, while the "Alta" came down from its usual broad and sightly page to the size of a pane of window-glass, fourteen by ten. Villainy flourished; drinking, gambling, robbery and murder held high carnival; the law did little, and did that little shabbily and tardily; so the people woke and resumed their original legislative, judicial, and especially their executive, functions.
In '51 and '52, and again in '56, they came nobly to the front, hung the worst villains who defied the common law, frightened away the others, restored order, established security for honest men, and resolved themselves again into law-abiding citizens. And thus, through perils of fire, social convulsions, and financial fluctuation, the cosmopolitan city has swept swiftly on until to-day, though having barely attained her majority, she stands in the first half-score of American cities. Every year she leaves a city or two behind in her steady progress toward the throne of the continent which she will surely occupy before the present century has fully fled.