On housing prices:
The San Franciscans at this moment, living in their rag palaces, or renting them at figures that would have sounded possible in the Arabian Nights . . . seemed more like madmen than ever. A correspondent of the New York Post gives with a half-serious fury and contempt an amusing account of the landlords of San Francisco:
“The people of San Francisco are mad, stark mad. A dozen times or more, during the last few weeks, I have been taken by the arm by some of the millionaires — so they call themselves, I call them madmen - of San Francisco, looking wondrously dirty and out at elbows for men of such magnificent pretensions. They have dragged me about, through the mud and filth almost up to my middle, from one pine box to another, called mansion, hotel, bank, or store, as it may please the imagination, and have told me, with a sincerity that would have done credit to the Bedlamite, that these splendid structures were theirs, and they, the fortunate proprietors, were worth from two to three hundred thousand dollars a year each.”
On the men:
Most of the citizens were young men. Their daily and most sober business was at best dangerously near gambling, and their nerves were constantly tormented by unnatural and yet for the time inevitable excitements of a perilously violent sort.
Their life was as a rule comparatively sedentary and they worked far more with their brains than with their hands. The San Franciscan of property and position . . . had all the mental labor that a man could need, and much more besides, [but] he had little or no true relaxation. Able and cultivated business men, who at home would have passed their evenings with their families or in some other pleasant social intercourse, or perchance in lecture rooms or in theaters, here toiled every night until ten or eleven o’clock over their accounts, and began afresh on each new morning, as soon as the light shone over the far-off blue summit of Mount Diablo, the old fierce struggle with the confusions of their business undertakings.
The self-absorption of this life was often something monstrous, and the consequences are no matter of mere theory. The insane asylum, which the state had very early to equip at Stockton, gave ample proof of the effects of this terrible nervous strain. The great number of patients at this asylum are a frequent subject of remark among writers about California. Indirectly, however, one sees the same dangers illustrated even in the case of perfectly healthy and normal men, who stood the mental if not the moral strain as well as possible, and liked it.
On the women:
There were some women in the city, but they were not exactly respectable persons, yet they were the sole leaders of society. They too gave it even in later years a certain grace and gaiety that makes one speak of them, with a curious sort of reverence. Just as one cannot easily remember who the men were that did not gamble in those days, so one fails to recall in looking back on the early years the women who were respectable. Doubtless such existed; but then they had that curious quality of respectable women — namely, they were somehow not conspicuous, especially in the public crowds.
On families:
Everyone has heard how, in San Francisco life, the family ties seemed sometimes almost as weak as the families were rare. Divorces were in proportion far too numerous and easy. Some men seemed to prize their wives the less because of the very fact that there were in the country so few wives to prize ...
To speak of the matter first from the side of the women concerned themselves, one’s acquaintances could not always be strictly chosen, nor one’s conduct absolutely determined by arbitrary rules. One had to adapt oneself to many people, to tolerate, in some people with whom one was thrown, many oddities, and much independence, so long as the essentials of good behavior and good purposes remained.
The difficulty, however, for certain well-meaning but foolish among the younger women who found themselves in the midst of all this new life was to sacrifice some of the nonessentials of social intercourse, as they knew them, without sacrificing anything either of their own personal dignity or of their true delicacy of feeling. Many such women failed to solve the problem. Little by little they sacrificed this or that petty prejudice which dignity would have counseled them to observe; and so erelong they were socially more or less distinctly and disastrously careless, both as to behavior and as to companionship. But such mild degeneration is not an element of strength in the union of a family. Men often prized their wives less because the wives grew thus foolishly lighthearted and were, on the whole, less to be prized.
Nor was there a lack of fault on the other side. If women fell into these unguarded habits, such as the custom of letting men who chanced to be their friends, and chanced to be lucky, give them, with careless Californian generosity, expensive presents on every occasion when these friends had made some new success in business, and if such “Californian” ways, however innocent in their beginning, led to misunderstandings in the end: still, on the other hand, husbands who found themselves absorbed in business rivalry with a community of irresponsible bachelors, and who accordingly lamented the hostages that they themselves had long since given to fortune, often neglected without reason their families and so in time lost the affection that they had ceased to deserve.
In short, as my mother (who, in the course of a few years, had occasion to hear of or to see a number of these broken California families) judged the too general trouble, it was one that might be said to lie in the lonesomeness of the families of a new land. The family grows best in a garden with its kind. Where family life does not involve healthy friendship with other families, it is apt to be injured by unhealthy if well-meaning friendships with wanderers.
On crime:
A merchant named Jansen was assaulted and robbed in his own shop by two men, who came in the evening, pretending to be customers. The crime, though not the first or the worst of its sort, seemed especially atrocious to the community, which chanced to be in a sensitive mood. The
Alta, usually a very sober and sensible paper, became a trifle overexcited: “How many men shot and stabbed, knocked down and bruised; and who has been punished for it? How many thefts and arsons, robberies, and crimes of a less note; and where are the perpetrators? Gentlemen at large, citizens, free to reenact their outrages.”Under these circumstances, however, who is to blame? The
Alta,with an amusing unwisdom, proceeds to make the lawyers who defend criminals the first persons responsible for the trouble. Such a lawyer is a “father to the thief and robber, aye, to the murderer, even.’’ ‘We cannot see how any honest man, knowing or having reason to believe another guilty, can ransack heaven and earth for arguments for shielding him from punishment.”Next to the lawyers, the courts and the police are most to blame. “The city would be infinitely better off without them. They are no terror to evil-doers.”
On fraud:
There were reasons why the public never learned just how much the energetic Meiggs had stolen. He never came back, and many people who lost by him felt henceforth a certain delicacy about explaining their relations with him. For the moment, however, Meiggs was regarded as an exemplary rascal, and men wondered how deep into the business life of San Francisco this sort of corruption had eaten.
If Meiggs, people added, had only been content with cheating his bankers, one could have forgiven him; but, as report insisted, he had cheated his washerwoman. That, men declared, was too bad, even for California.
On charity:
Side by side with these wild memories of a society where every man and woman, without any notable exception, went to the devil on his or her own chosen primrose path, one has to record, as sober fact, taken from one’s newspapers, such things as a very goodly array of churches, supported by active and not poverty-stricken societies. And “now the city is full of [church] societies.” In fact, “such an array of churches and societies are surely evidences enough of the sincerity, zeal, and success of the early spirit of moral reform.”
These societies have also done a large amount of charitable work; they have from the first established benevolent institutions, their exercises are well attended, and their undertakings well supported with money, so that, as one concludes: “We have said enough, we hope, to prove that not all, nor nigh all the citizens of San Francisco, are lost to everything but reckless dissipation. No city of equal size — few of ten times its age — can present such a list of men and institutions, who have accomplished so much real good with so little of cant and hypocrisy.
On NIMBYism:
A correspondent complains of a most noticeable and offensive establishment just about to be opened, “situated in the midst of respectable family residences, and on one of the most public thoroughfares.” ... There is no sort of privacy, the committee says, about the evils complained of. The best families of the town are daily and unavoidably insulted by the immediate neighborhood of impudent evil in its least bearable forms, all good women, all children, being alike subjected to this disgrace. The committee knows of no possible remedy that will not of necessity include a reorganization of the police force.
On neighborhoods:
In fact, as is plain, while there were numerous pure and happy homes in San Francisco, there was as yet no really clean, pure, and large neighborhood in the city to which respectable families could go for their dwelling-places and be safe. The struggle for a true and humane life was still a hand-to-hand fight in public with legions of loathsome little devils.
On great men:
Pioneer recklessness has as its correlate an extravagant tendency to hero-worship. The good fellow is easily adored in a new city — all the more easily because one has had no means to judge of his weaknesses by means of a lifelong acquaintance. The same general carelessness that tends to corrupt the morally weaker members of pioneer society expresses itself by trusting extravagantly any clever man whose manners are pleasing. The trust gives him more than his share of power, and the lack of public spirit in the community gives him a chance to abuse his privileges.
On boom and bust:
One who has grown up in new communities always listens with amusement to the enthusiasm of sanguine investors in the enterprises of some just settled portion of our territory, when they declare that the first stage of the life of the newly prosperous region is demonstrably only a faint indication of the continuous and unceasing future growth of its wealth. For, as the lifelong dweller in new countries knows, the enthusiasm of these early investors is as ruinous to them as it is valuable for the new country.
Their ideas are indeed, in one sense, well founded. What they hope for is certain to come in time, only for others, and not in general for them. The evolution of the new land will not be what they think, a steady growth in wealth. The first great commercial crisis of its history will be, in proportion to its wealth, the worst of all; and these sanguine investors will be destroyed like flies in autumn.
The second period of its growth, the winter-time of this great depression, when all but the very strongest of those early investors have become poor as church mice, is the true time for a cautious, hard-working, and shrewd man to make his appearance in the land. He will be wiser than his predecessors and far less extravagant. He will buy at low prices their half-abandoned property, and in later years they will bitterly reproach him, instead of themselves, for the wrong that gave him a chance to reap what they had sown. This law of the almost universal failure of the pioneers of a new country was well exemplified in San Francisco.
On ethics:
The undoubted recklessness of the society as a whole lay, however, not in the fact that everybody openly gambled or did worse; for not everybody was dissipated; but the true sin of the community did consist in its tolerance of the open vices of those who chose to be vicious. Truly respectable men, whether clergymen or not, did not elbow their way to the gaming-tables; but public opinion, for reasons that have often ere this appeared in these pages, was not stern enough towards social offenses, but believed in a sort of irreligious liberty that considered every man’s vices, however offensive and aggressive they might be (short of crime), as a private concern between his own soul and Satan. Here was the trouble, and in this respect only was the whole San Franciscan community alike responsible both for the early dissipations and for their inevitable consequences […]
[When journalist James King condemned gambling], one of the more good-humored of the gambling brotherhood, addresses King ... and begs the able editor to give up this absurd care about the ‘’public” good. I, he says, am one of “a large number who have long since ceased to worry their minds with schemes for the public welfare — a class, by the way, much more numerous than you imagine — who confidently look forward to the time when you will join their number, and rest from the thankless and unprofitable task which you have imposed upon yourself. You are pursuing a course that will certainly drive you to despair if persisted in.”
These are all excerpts from Josiah Royce’s 1886 book, * A History Of California From Conquest In 1846 To The Second Vigilance Committee In San Francisco: A Study Of American Character*, which terminates in 1856. I’ve edited only to remove dates, mentions of historical sources, and a few sentences about gold mines.
