In the Footprints of the Padres

by Charles Warren Stoddard

ERHAPS it is a mile wide, that Golden Gate; and it is more bronze than golden. A fort was on our right hand; one of those dear old brick blockhouses that were formidable in their day, but now are as houses of cards. Drop one shell within its hollow, and there will be nothing and no one left to tell the tale.

Down the misty coast, beyond the fort, was Point Lobos—a place where wolves did once inhabit; farther south lie the semi-tropics and the fragrant orange lands; while on our left, to the north, is Point Bonita—pretty enough in the sunshine,—and thereabout is Drake's Bay. Behind us, dimly outlined on the horizon, the Farallones lie faintly blue, like exquisite cloud-islands. The north shore of the entrance to the Bay was rather forbidding,—it always is. The whole California shore line is bare, bleak, and unbeautiful. It is six miles from the Golden Gate to the sea-wall of San Francisco. There was no sea-wall in those days.

We were steaming directly east, with the Pacific dead astern. Beyond the fort were scantily furnished hill-slopes. That quadrangle, with a long row of low white houses on three sides of it, is the presidio—the barracks; a lorner or lonelier spot it were impossible to picture. There were no trees there, no shrubs; nothing but grass, that was green enough in the rainy winter season but as yellow as straw in the drouth of the long summer. Beyond the presidio were the Lagoon and Washerwoman's Bay. Black Point was the extremest suburb in the early days; and beyond it Meigg's Wharf ran far into the North Bay, and was washed by the swift-flowing tide.

San Francisco has as many hills as Rome. The most conspicuous of these stands at the northeast corner of the town; it is Telegraph Hill, upon whose brawny shoulder stood the first home we knew in the young Metropolis. After rounding Telegraph Hill, we saw all the city front, and it was not much to see: a few wooden wharves crowded with shipping and backed by a row of one or two-story frame buildings perched upon piles. The harbor in front of the city—more like an open roadstead than a harbor, for it was nearly a dozen miles to the opposite shore—was dotted with sailing-vessels of almost every description, swinging at anchor, and making it a pretty piece of navigation to pick one's way amongst them in safety.

As the John L. Stevens approached her dock we saw that an immense crowd had gathered to give us welcome. The excitement on ship and shore was very great. After a separation of perhaps years, husbands and wives and families were about to be reunited. Our joy was boundless; for we soon recognized our father in the waiting, welcoming throng. But there were many whose disappointment was bitter indeed when they learned that their loved ones were not on board. Often a ship brought letters instead of the expected wife and family; for at the last moment some unforeseen circumstance may have prevented the departure of the one so looked for and so longed for. In the confusion of landing we nearly lost our wits, and did not fully recover them until we found ourselves in our own new home in the then youngest State in the Union.

How well I remember it all! We were housed on Union Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, and directly opposite the public school—a pretentious building for that period, inasmuch as it was built of brick that was probably shipped around Cape Horn. California houses, such as they were, used to come from very distant parts of the globe in the early Fifties; some of them were portable, and had been sent across the sea to be set up at the purchaser's convenience. They could be pitched like tents on the shortest possible notice, and the fact was evident in many cases.

Our house—a double one of modest proportions—was of brick, and I think the only one on our side of the street for a considerable distance. There was a brick house over the way, on the corner of Montgomery Street, with a balcony in front of it and a grocery on the ground-floor. That grocery was like a country store: one could get anything there; and from the balcony above there was a wonderful view. Indeed that was one of the jumping-off places; for a steep stairway led down the hill to the dock two hundred feet below. As for our neighbors, they dwelt in frame houses, one or two stories in height; and his was the happier house that had a little strip of flowery-land in front of it, and a breathing space in the rear.

The school—our first school in California—backed into the hill across the street from us. The girls and the boys had each an inclosed space for recreation. It could not be called a playground, for there was no ground visible. It was a platform of wood heavily timbered beneath and fenced in; from the front of it one might have cast one's self to the street below, at the cost of a broken bone or two. In those days more than one leg was fractured by an accidental fall from a soaring sidewalk.

Above and beyond the school-house Telegraph Hill rose a hundred feet or more. Our street marked the snow-line, as it were; beyond it the Hill was not inhabited save by flocks of goats that browsed there all the year round, and the herds of boys that gave them chase, especially of a holiday. The Hill was crowned by a shanty that had seen its best days. It had been the lookout from the time when the Forty-Niners began to watch for fresh arrivals. From the observatory on its roof—a primitive affair—all ships were sighted as they neared the Golden Gate, and the glad news was telegraphed by a system of signals to the citizens below. Not a day, not an hour, but watchful eyes sought that signal in the hope of reading there the glad tidings that their ship had come.

The Hill sloped suddenly, from the signal station, on every side. On the north and east it terminated abruptly in artificial cliffs of a dizzy height. The rocks had been blasted from their bases to make room for a steadily increasing commerce, and the débris was shipped away as ballast in the vessels that were chartered to bring passengers and provision to the coast, and found nothing in the line of freight to carry from it.