In the meantime the city boasts one splendid driveway that, with a connecting link completed, will rank with the famous roadways of the Old World.
Only a decade or two ago the Presidio (it still bears its Spanish appellation) was an isolated military post separated from the city by several miles of barren, sandy thoroughfares. Now some of the handsomest homes crown the hill tops about it, and owe their chief attraction to the glorious views of bay and shore that they command. To start some fine afternoon toward sunset from one of these homes and take a drive around the cliffs is an experience not soon to be forgotten.
A few blocks run brings you to a stone gateway, its posts topped with eagles; you turn sharply to the right through a grove of eucalypti, swing round a curve and then you stop the motor. From the red Macadam roadway upon which you stand, the hills fall gently in a broad amphitheatre to the barracks and parade grounds laid out symmetrically along the shore, and teeming with soldier life. Beyond, the waters of the bay mirror the azure of the sky—a blue, tinged with green, like those half-dead turquoises that they sell in the marts of Tunis. The North Beach hills, thick-studded with the modest homes of the city’s alien population, gleam white against the Contra Costa Mountains—verdant in winter, tawny and dry in summer—with the lumpy silhouette of the Monte Diablo, the Devil’s Mountain, poking over the shoulder as if it, too, wished a peep at so fair a prospect.
Across the stretch of intervening water, stern-wheeled river steamers ply northward to San Pablo Bay; on through the Carquinez Straits and up the Sacramento River, their silhouettes varied once in a while by some grim battle-ship or cruiser steaming to the Navy Yard at Mare Island, headquarters, home and hospital for all our ships in the Pacific. Anchored in the middle of the bay, Alcatraz lies terraced with batteries, low, forbidding, while to the north rise the hills of Marin County bathed in purple shadows and clustered around the base of Tamalpais. The whole scene is suffused with the rosy flush of the westering sun that gilds the islands, warms the greens of the eastern sky, and blushes the hills with its ardent glances.
One turns from the picture with regret, only to follow on to new vistas. You wind through groves of evergreens and eucalypti out into the open meadows, a riot of flowers in springtime, that top the cliffs above the Golden Gate. The famous straits lie just below, Fort’s Point antiquated bastions on their hither shore fronting the white-washed walls of the harbor-light on the Point Bonita bluffs opposite.
To take up the thread of our historical narrative, the presidio remained a possession of Spain’s until 1824 when Mexico finally became free from its mother country and the flag of Mexico took the place of the banner of Castile and Aragon at the Golden Gate.
In 1846 the American flag was raised in all of the presidios of California, an interesting chapter of national expansion far too large for abridgment here. In 1849 commenced the era of San Francisco’s prosperity and presidio’s importance with the discovery of gold in California and the onset of the hordes of goldseekers who came through the Golden Gate.
The presidio was visited by Richard H. Dana in 1859 and is described by him:
I took a California horse of old style and visited the Presidio. The walls stand as they did, with some changes made to accommodate a small garrison of United States troops. It has a noble situation and I saw from it a clipper ship of the very largest class coming through the Gate under her fore and aft sails. Thence I rode to the fort, now nearly finished, on the southern shore of the Gate, and made an inspection of it. It is very expensive and of the latest style. One of the engineers is Custis Lee, who has just left West Point at the head of his class, a son of Colonel Robert E. Lee who distinguished himself in the Mexican war.
The fort with the “expensive equipment” to which he refers is Fort Winfield Scott, which was seven years building and cost $2,000,000. It is now out of date, but is a picturesque feature of the harbor and is of service to the presidio authorities of the present in various minor capacities.