Running east and west, Sacramento, Clay, Washington, and Jackson Streets rise in almost impracticable declivity to the hills. Their tops, now inaccessible, are to be the future eyries of self-crowned railroad nobs and rude bonanza barons.
Scrubby chaparral, tenanted by the coyote, fox, and sand rabbit, covers these fringing sand hills. North and south, Sansome, Montgomery, Kearney, Dupont, Stockton, and a faint outline of Powell Street, are roadways more or less inchoate. An embryo western Paris.
Around the plaza, bounded by Clay, Washington, Dupont, and Kearney, the revelry of night crystallizes. It is the aggregating sympathy of birds of a feather.
The peculiar unconquered topography makes the handcart, wheelbarrow, and even the Chinaman's carrying poles, necessary vehicles of transit.
Water, brought in iron boats from Sausalito, is dragged around these knobby hills in huge casks on wheels. The precious fluid is distributed in five-gallon tin buckets, borne on a yoke by the dealer, who gets a dollar for two bucketfuls. No one finds time to dig for water. All have leisure to drink, dance, and gamble. They face every disease, danger, and hardship. They breast the grizzly-bear-haunted canyons in search of gold. No one will seek for water. It is the only luxury. The incoming and outgoing merchandise moves only a few rods from the narrow level city front. At the long wharves it is transshipped from the deep-water vessels, across forty feet of crazy wooden pier, to the river steamers. Lighters in the stream transfer goods to the smaller vessels beginning to trade up and down the coast.
In the plaza, now dignified by the RAFFINE name of "Portsmouth Square," the red banners of vice wave triumphant over great citadels of sin. Virtue is pushed to the distant heights and knolls. The arriving families, for sheer self-protection, avoid this devil's maelstrom. It sucks the wide crowd into the maddened nightly orgies of the plaza.
In the most pretentious buildings of the town, the great trinity of unlawful pleasures holds high carnival. Day and night are the same: drink, gaming, and women are worshipped. For the average resident there is no barrier of old which has not been burned away in the fever of personal freedom and the flood of gold.
A motley mass of twenty thousand men and women daily augments. They are all of full capacity for good and evil. They are bound by no common ties. They serve no god but pleasure. They fear no code. With no intention to remain longer than the profit of their adventures or the pleasures of their wild life last, they catch the passing moment.
Immense saloons are made attractive by displays of gaudy luxuries, set out to tempt the purses of the self-made autocrats of wealth. Gambling houses here are outvying in richness, and utter wantonness of wasted expense, anything yet seen in America. They are open always. Haunts abound where, in the pretended seclusion of a few yards' distance, rich adventurers riot with the beautiful battalions of the fallen angels. It were gross profanation to the baleful memories of Phryne, Aspasia, and Messalina to find, from all the sin-stained leaves of the world's past, prototypes of these bold, reckless man-eaters. They throng the softly carpeted, richly tapestried interiors of the gilded hells of Venus.
Drink and play. Twins steeds of the devil's car on the road to ruin. They are lashed on by wild-eyed, bright, beautiful demons. All follow the train of the modern reigning star of the West, Venus.