In to the Yukon

by William Seymour Edwards

FOURTEENTH LETTER.
SAN FRANCISCO.

Los Angeles, October 12, 1903.

We slept in the old, famous, and yet well-patronized Palace Hotel, and on which the Fair estate has just renewed a mortgage for another term of years.

In the morning we essayed to have a look at the city, and so took a long, wide electric car devoted to that purpose. A ride of thirty miles, and all for the price of only “two bits”! We circled around the city, we traversed its streets and avenues, climbed and descended its multitude of hills, went everywhere that an electric car might dare to go, and were given the chance to try the cable trams when the declivity was too steep for anything to move that did not cling.

The sunshine was delicious, the watered lawns and watered flowers superb, the unwatered, blistered sand spaces, vacant lots and dust-laden winds dreadful.

The city pleased and disappointed me. It is an old city—half a century old—old for the driving West, and mainly built of wood. Miles and miles of small, crowded, two-story, wooden dwellings, sadly needing a coat of paint, and mostly constructed thirty or forty years ago. A town once replete with vigor, that has slumbered for several decades, and is now reviving into life again. The vast mansions of the bonanza kings, the railway lords on “Nob Hill,” are now all out of date and mostly empty of their former occupants. The Fairs, the Mackeys, the O’Briens are dead, their heirs scattered to the winds. The Crokers, the Stanfords, the Huntingtons are reminiscences. The street urchins know them no more. Fashionable San Francisco has moved to another hill. The tenement quarter of the town has crept to their very doors. But the business section of the city has not moved as it has in New York. It stands just where it always stood. The Palace Hotel, once the glory and boast of the Pacific Slope, is still the chief hostelry of the town; and yet the city is instinct with a new life. Its lively, hustling thoroughfares are full of a new vigor; a new tide of Asiatic and Oriental commerce has entered the somewhat somnolent city. All this, the magic result of the battle of Manila Bay, and the new relation of the United States to the far east. Where the Pacific Mail S. S. Co. sent a single monthly ship across the Pacific five years ago, now six lines of great freight and passenger steamships are unable to satisfy the increasing demands of trade. Now twenty steamers and a multitude of sailing craft come to deliver and take cargoes, where few or none came six years ago. On the land side, too, there is progress. The A. T. & Santa Fe Railway has broken through the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway Company, so cleverly and firmly fastened by Huntington and his friends; and there are hopes that other lines may yet establish independent relations with the city. Along with this new growth of commerce have come a new throng of energetic men, and new fortunes are being made—and more widely distributed. The city, the commercial center, the ocean port, are all growing at a steadier, healthier gait than in the ancient feverish days of bonanza kings and railroad magnates. For awhile, San Francisco was “in the soup,” so to speak. Its rich men were leaving it, did leave it; its sand-lots proletariat threatened to gain the upper hand; its middle class, the people making and possessing only moderate incomes, were doubtful of a success that to them had not yet come. To the north, sleepy Portland had wakened up; Seattle and Tacoma had been born; and in the south, Los Angeles had risen, like a phœnix, from the torrid sands. But San Francisco did not stir. Then Dewey sank the fleet of Montejo; the nation quickened with a consciousness that she was a world-power; that the trade and commercial dominance of the Pacific lands and isles and seas were rightly hers, and in a night San Francisco found herself re-endowed with new life.

After the tramway ride, we spent an afternoon strolling about through the business streets and along the docks and wharves, viewing the many new shops, splendid modern stores, quite equaling, in the sumptuous display of their wares, the great trading centers of New York and Chicago, and noting the volume of wholesale traffic on the down-town streets, the jobbing center, and the busy stir along the waterfront for several miles.

No finer sight have we seen than when we stood near the surf-washed rocks, famous as the home of the sea-lions, and, turning our gaze toward the wind-tossed billows of the Pacific Ocean, beheld eight or ten full-rigged ships and four-masted barques converging on the narrow entrance of the Golden Gate, coming in out of the west, laden with the teas and silks and commerce of the Orient, their multitudinous sails all set before the breeze, like a flock of white-winged sea birds, while slipping among them a steamer from Honolulu and another from Nome came swiftly in.

Another day we were ferried five miles across the wide bay toward the north, to the pretty suburban residence section of Sausalito, and there taking an electric road were brought to the foot of Mount Tamalpais, and then changing to a climbing car were pushed ten miles up near 4,000 feet into the air, to the top of a volcanic cone that rises out of sea and bay, and dominates the landscape for many miles. Below us, at our feet, lay the great Bay of San Francisco and the city itself, with its green, garden-like suburban villages, the many islands, the ships of war and of commerce, the narrows of the Golden Gate; and, westward, the Pacific Ocean, with the distant Farallon Islands, outposts of the Orient, while far to the east, peeping above the clouds, gleamed the snow-capped summits of the Sierra Nevadas.