At the isthmus they exchanged steamers, crossing the narrow neck of land on the backs of mules. To-day the journey is more rapidly and comfortably made in a railroad-car. Of the voyage on the Pacific nothing need be said. The weather was fair, and it was uneventful.
It was a beautiful morning in early September when they came in sight of the Golden Gate, and, entering the more placid waters of San Francisco Bay, moored at a short distance from the town.
“What do you think of it, Joe?” asked Charles Folsom.
“I don’t know,” said Joe slowly. “Is this really San Francisco?”
“It is really San Francisco.”
“It doesn’t seem to be much built up yet,” said Joe.
In fact, the appearance of the town would hardly suggest the stately capital of to-day, which looks out like a queen on the bay and the ocean, and on either side opens her arms to the Eastern and Western continents. It was a town of tents and one-story cabins, irregularly and picturesquely scattered over the hillside, with here and there a sawmill, where now stand some of the most prominent buildings of the modern city. For years later there was a large mound of sand where now the stately Palace Hotel covers two and a half acres. Where now stand substantial business blocks, a quarter of a century since there appeared only sandy beaches or mud-flats, with here and there a wooden pier reaching out into the bay. Only five years before the town contained but seventy-nine buildings—thirty-one frame, twenty-six adobe, and the rest shanties. It had grown largely since then, but even now was only a straggling village, with the air of recent settlement.
“You expected something more, Joe, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” admitted Joe.
“You must remember how new it is. Ten years, nay, five, will work a great change in this straggling village. We shall probably live to see it a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.”