In my walks through the city I found its climate agreeable rather for work than idleness. Sauntering or lounging is as little possible as it is in London. The summer is not yet ended; and in the summer at San Francisco it is cold after eleven in the day—strangely cold for the latitude of Athens. The fierce sun scorches up the valleys of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento in the early morning; and the heated air, rising from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled by the cold breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa Range is unbroken but by the single gap of the Golden Gate, and through this opening the cold winds rush in a never-ceasing gale, spreading fanlike as soon as they have passed the narrows. Hence it is that the Golden Gate is called “The Keyhole,” and the wind “The Keyhole Breeze.” Up country they make it raise the water for irrigation. In winter there is a calm, and then the city is as sunny as the rest of California.
So purely local is the bitter gale that at Benicia, ten miles from San Francisco, the mean temperature is ten degrees higher for the year, and nearly twenty for the summer. I have stood on the shore at Benicia when the thermometer was at a hundred in the shade, and seen the clouds pouring in from the Pacific, and hiding San Francisco in a murky pall, while the temperature there was under seventy degrees. This fog retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San Francisco Bay. The entrance to the Golden Gate is narrow, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake, Viscaino, sailed past it without seeing that there was a bay, and the great land-locked sea was first beheld by white men when the missionaries came upon its arms and creeks, far away inland.
The peculiarity of climate carries with it great advantages. It is never too hot, never too cold, to work—a fact which of itself secures a grand future for San Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked. At a San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not American. Even the lean Western men and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the winds. The high metallic ring of the New England voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, California must have been that fabled province of Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever a man‘s age when he entered it, he never grew older by a day. To dogs and strangers there are drawbacks in the absence of winter: dogs are muzzled all the year round, and musquitoes are perennial upon the coast.
The city is gay with flags; every house supports a liberty pole upon its roof, for when the Union sentiment sprang up in San Francisco, at the beginning of the war, public opinion forced the citizens to make a conspicuous exhibition of the stars and stripes, by way of showing that it was from no want of loyalty that they refused to permit the circulation of the Federal greenbacks. In this matter of flags the sea-gale is of service, for were it not for its friendly assistance, a short house between two tall ones could not sport a huge flag with much effect. As it is, the wind always blowing across the chief streets, and never up or down, the narrowest and lowest house can flaunt a large ensign without fear of its ever flapping against the walls of its proud neighbors.
It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Californian English have the old-world type. With less ingenuity than the New England Yankees, they have far more depth and solidity in their enterprise; they do not rack their brain at inventing machines to peel apples and milk cows, but they intend to tunnel through the mountains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with its waters irrigate the Californian plains. They share our British love for cash payments and good roads; they one and all set their faces against repudiation in any shape, and are strongly for what they call “rolling-up” the debt. Throughout the war they quoted paper as depreciated, not gold as risen. Indeed, there is here the same unreasoning prejudice against paper money that I met with in Nevada. After all, what can be expected of a State which still produces three-eighths of all the gold raised yearly in the world?
San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities bid fair to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands beneath the sun. New Englanders and Englishmen predominate in energy, Chinese in numbers. The French and Italians are stronger here than in any other city in the States; and the red-skinned Mexicans, who own the land, supply the market people and a small portion of the townsfolk. Australians, Polynesians, and Chilians are numerous; the Germans and Scandinavians alone are few; they prefer to go where they have already friends—to Philadelphia or Milwaukee. In this city—already a microcosm of the world—the English, British, and American are in possession—have distanced the Irish, beaten down the Chinese by force, and are destined to physically preponderate in the cross-breed, and give the tone, political and moral, to the Pacific shore. New York is Irish, Philadelphia German, Milwaukee Norwegian, Chicago Canadian, Sault de Ste Marie French; but in San Francisco—where all the foreign races are strong—none is dominant; whence the singular result that California, the most mixed in population, is also the most English of the States.
In this strange community, starting more free from the Puritan influence of New England than has hitherto done any State within the Union, it is doubtful what religion will predominate. Catholicism is “not fashionable” in America—it is the creed of the Irish, and that is enough for most Americans; so Anglicanism, its critics say, is popular as being “very proper.” Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is flourishing in California, and it seems probable that the church which gains the day in California will eventually be that of the whole Pacific.
On Montgomery Street are some of the finest buildings in all America; the “Occidental Hotel,” the “Masonic Hall,” the “Union Club,” and others. The club has only just been rebuilt after its destruction by a nitro-glycerin explosion which occurred in the express office next door. A case, of which no one knew the contents, was being lifted by two clerks, when it exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and breaking half the windows in the city. On examination it was found to be nitro-glycerin on its way to the mines.
Another accident occurred here yesterday with this same compound. A sharp report was heard on board a ship lying in the docks, and the cook was found dead, below; pieces of a flask had been driven into his heart and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was examined, and found to be common oil; but this morning, I read in the Alta a report from a chemist that traces of nitro-glycerin have been discovered by him upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands says that the ship on her way up had called at Manzanilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a merchant‘s office, emptied it of its contents, the character of which was unknown to him, and filled it with common vegetable oil.
Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerin has been the nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes they care little, but the freaks of the devilish oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in the Nevada mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself a demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and then the slightest friction will explode it—that, on the other hand, it goes off if heated. If you leave it standing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are that it undergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it explodes; and no lapse of time has on its power the smallest deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the oil will crystallize, and then its strength for harm is multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed by earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerin.