San Francisco has perhaps no famous name that dominates the city as Franklin dominates Philadelphia; as Beecher, Brooklyn; as Carnegie, Pittsburg. But if great-hearted Thomas Starr King had lived longer, he might have been its crowning personality as he is now its most sainted memory. His inflexible loyalty and impassioned eloquence made him at the outbreak of the Civil War a commanding figure, if not the leading citizen of California.
Though only fifty years old, San Francisco has given to literature and art a few names that the world will not willingly let die. For forty years Joaquin Miller, the "Poet of the Sierras," has been a friend and neighbor of her hills and waters, telling in noble numbers the glories and the terrors of the strange new land "by the sundown seas." Here Bret Harte founded the Overland Monthly and with "The Luck of Roaring Camp" began his creation of Californian characters. What matters it if they never existed outside of his pages,—those drinking, dirking dare-devils, those tenor-voiced, soulful-eyed gamblers, striking sorrow to the hearts of ladies? For, touched by his genius, they exist for us there, in perennial charm and invitation.
HENRY GEORGE
Here, too, Henry George wrote his Progress and Poverty, a book that was a prophet-cry heard round the world, declaring that every man has a right to a foothold on the earth. Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Warren Stoddard, John Vance Cheney, Charlotte Perkin Gilman, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and Gertrude Atherton did here a deal of their early literary work,[17] but now have wandered away into the world, leaving behind them, however, a goodly group of critics, story-writers, and poets; painters, also, William Keith and the rest, who have caught into splendid captivity some of the immensities and radiances about them.
This is but an abstract and brief chronicle of the great city at the Western gate of the world. There she sits, the ultimate outpost of the passion of progress. Sleepless unrest, forever urging the peoples westward, land by land, now, at the end of centuries, begins to surge and thunder on the shores of Balboa's Sea. But this end is only a beginning—this great city is only the first of a chain of cities fated, under the star of empire, to spring into life on these circling shores, making the Pacific at last the greater Mediterranean of mankind.
