"Not I," said Kemble. "See here," he struck one fist into the palm of another. "All such balderdash is bad for San Francisco. We're trying to get ahead, grow, be a city. Look at the work going on. That means progress, sustained stimulus. And along come these stories of gold finds. It's the wrong time. The wrong time, I tell you. It'll interfere. If we get folks excited they'll pull out for the hills, the wilderness. Everything'll stop here.... Then, bye and bye, they'll come back--busted! Mark my words, BUSTED! Is that business? No."
He went off shaking his head sagely. Benito puzzled, half resentful, gazed after him. He abandoned the walk to the dock and returned with low-spirited resignation to his tasks at Ward & Smith's store.
For several months gold rumors continued to come. Citizens, fearing ridicule, perhaps, slipped unobtrusively out of town, to test their truth. Kemble was back from a trip to the so-called gold fields. Editorially, he made sport of his findings. He had seen feather-brained fortune-seekers gambling hopelessly with fate, suffering untold hardships for half the pay they could have gained from "honest labor."
Now and then a miner, dirty and disheveled, came in ragged clothes to gamble or drink away the contents of a pouch of "dust." It was at first received suspiciously. Barkeepers took "a pinch for a drink," meaning what they could grasp with their fingers, and one huge-fisted man estimated that this method netted him three dollars per glass.
San Francisco awoke to a famine in butcher-knives, pans and candles. Knives at first were used to gouge out auriferous rock, and soon these common household appurtenances brought as high as twenty-five dollars each. Candles ere long were the equivalent of dollars, and pans were cheap at five dollars each.
Still San Francisco waited, though a constant dribble of departures made at last perceptible inroads on its population. Then, one May afternoon, the fat was in the fire.
Samuel Brannan, who had been at his store in New Helvetia, rode through the streets, holding a pint flask of gold-dust in one hand, swinging his hat with the other, and whooping like a madman:
"Gold! Gold! Gold! From the American River!"
As if he had applied a torch to the hayrick of popular interest, San Francisco flamed with fortune-seeking ardor. Next morning many stores remained unopened. There were neither clerks nor proprietors. Soldiers fled from the garrison, and Lieutenant William T. Sherman was seen galloping northward with a provost guard to recapture a score of deserters. Children found no teacher at the new schoolhouse and for months its doors were barred. Cargoes, half-discharged, lay on the wharves, unwarehoused. Crews left en masse for the mines, and ships floated unmanned at anchor. Many of them never went to sea again.