SOCIAL SAN FRANCISCO

Social San Francisco during the early Fifties seems to have been a conglomeration of unexpected externals and surprising interiors. It was heterogeneous to the last degree. It was hail-fellow-well-met, with a reservation; it asked no questions for conscience’s sake; it would not have been safe to do so. There were too many pasts in the first families and too many possible futures to permit one to cast a shadow upon the other. And after all is said, if sins may be forgiven and atoned for, why should the memory of a shady past imperil the happiness and prosperity of the future? All futures should be hopeful; they were “promise-crammed” in that healthy and hearty city by the sea.

It was impossible, not to say impolite, to inquire into your neighbors’ antecedents. It was currently believed that the mines were filled with broken-down “divines,” as if it were but a step from the pulpit to the pickaxe. As for one’s family, it was far better off in the old home so long as the salary of a servant was seventy dollars a month, fresh eggs a dollar and a quarter a dozen, turkeys ten dollars apiece, and coal fifty dollars a ton.

In 1854 and 1855 San Francisco had a monthly magazine that any city or state might have been proud of; this was The Pioneer, edited by the Rev. Ferdinand C. Ewer. In 1851, a lady, the wife of a physician, went with her husband into the mines and settled at Rich Bar and Indian Bar, two neighboring camps on the north fork of the Feather River. There were but three or four other women in that part of the country, and one of these died. This lady wrote frequent and lengthy descriptive letters to a sister in New England, and these letters were afterward published serially in The Pioneer. They picture life as a highly-accomplished woman knew it in the camps and among the people whom Bret Harte has immortalized. She called herself “Dame Shirley,” and the “Shirley Letters” in The Pioneer are the most picturesque, vivid, and valuable record of life in a California mining camp that I know of. The wonder is that they have never been collected and published in book form; for they have become a part of the history of the development of the State.

The life of a later period in San Francisco and Monterey has been faithfully depicted by another hand. The life that was a mixture of Gringo and diluted Castilian-a life that smacked of the presidio and the hacienda,-that was a tale worth telling; and no one has told it so freely, so fully or so well as Gertrude Franklin Atherton.

“Dame Shirley” was Mrs. L.A.C. Clapp. When her husband died she went to San Francisco and became a teacher in the Union Street public school. It was this admirable lady who made literature my first love; and to her tender mercies I confided my maiden efforts in the art of composition. She readily forgave me then, and was the very first to offer me encouragement; and from that hour to this she has been my faithful friend and unfailing correspondent.

South Park and Rincon Hill! Do the native sons of the golden West ever recall those names and think what dignity they once conferred upon the favored few who basked in the sunshine of their prosperity? South Park, with its line of omnibuses running across the city to North Beach; its long, narrow oval, filled with dusty foliage and offering a very weak apology for a park; its two rows of houses with, a formal air, all looking very much alike, and all evidently feeling their importance. There were young people’s “parties” in those days, and the height of felicity was to be invited to them. As a height o’ertops a hollow, so Rincon Hill looked down upon South Park. There was more elbow-room on the breezy height; not that the height was so high or so broad, but it was breezy; and there was room for the breeze to blow over gardens that spread about the detached houses their wealth of color and perfume.

How are the mighty fallen! The Hill, of course, had the farthest to fall. South Parkites merely moved out: they went to another and a better place. There was a decline in respectability and the rent-roll, and no one thinks of South Park now,-at least no one speaks of it above a whisper. As for the Hill, the Hillites hung on through everything; the waves of commerce washed all about it and began gnawing at its base; a deep gully was cut through it, and there a great tide of traffic ebbed and flowed all day. At night it was dangerous to pass that way without a revolver in one’s hand; for that city is not a city in the barbarous South Seas, whither preachers of the Gospel of peace are sent; but is a civilized city and proportionately unsafe.

A cross-street was lowered a little, and it leaped the chasm in an agony of wood and iron, the most unlovely object in a city that is made up of all unloveliness. The gutting of this Hill cost the city the fortunes of several contractors, and it ruined the Hill forever. There is nothing left to be done now but to cast it into the midst of the sea. I had sported on the green with the goats of goatland ere ever the stately mansion had been dreamed of; and it was my fate to set up my tabernacle one day in the ruins of a house that even then stood upon the order of its going,-it did go impulsively down into that “most unkindest cut,” the Second Street chasm. Even the place that once knew it has followed after.

The ruin I lived in had been a banker’s Gothic home. When Rincon Hill was spoiled by bloodless speculators, he abandoned it and took up his abode in another city. A tenant was left to mourn there. Every summer the wild winds shook that forlorn ruin to its foundations. Every winter the rains beat upon it and drove through and through it, and undermined it, and made a mush of the rock and soil about it; and later portions of that real estate deposited themselves, pudding-fashion, in the yawning abyss below.

I sat within, patiently awaiting the day of doom; for well I knew that my hour must come. I could not remain suspended in midair for any length of time: the fall of the house at the northwest corner of Harrison and Second Streets must mark my fall. While I was biding my time, there came to me a lean, lithe stranger. I knew him for a poet by his unshorn locks and his luminous eyes, the pallor of his face and his exquisitely sensitive hands. As he looked about my eyrie with aesthetic glance, almost his first words were: “What a background for a novel!” He seemed to relish it all-the impending crag that might topple any day or hour; the modest side door that had become my front door because the rest of the building was gone; the ivy-roofed, geranium-walled conservatory wherein I slept like a Babe in the Wood, but in densest solitude and with never a robin to cover me.

He liked the crumbling estate, and even as much of it as had gone down into the depths forever. He liked the sagging and sighing cypresses, with their roots in the air, that hung upon and clung upon the rugged edge of the remainder. He liked the shaky stairway that led to it (when it was not out of gear), and all that was irrelative and irrelevant; what might have been irritating to another was to him singularly appealing and engaging; for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson. He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill to chat and to dream; he called it “the most San Francisco-ey part of San Francisco,” and so it was. It was the beginning and the end of the first period of social development on the Pacific coast. There is a picture of it, or of the South Park part of it, in Gertrude Atherton’s story, “The Californians.” The little glimpse that Louis Stevenson had of it in its decay gave him a few realistic pages for The Wrecker.

I have referred to the surprising interiors of the city in the Fifties. What I meant was this: there was not an alley so miserable and so muddy but somewhere in it there was pretty sure to be a cottage as demure in outward appearance as modesty itself. Nothing could be more unassuming: it had not even the air of genteel poverty. I think such an air was not to be thought of in those days: gentility kept very much to itself. As for poverty, it was a game that any one might play at any moment, and most had played at it.

This cottage stood there-I think I will say sat there, it looked so perfectly resigned,-and no doubt commanded a rent quite out of proportion to its size. It had its shaky veranda and its French windows, and was lined with canvas; for there was not a trowel full of plaster in it. The ceiling bellied and flapped like an awning when the wind soughed through the clapboards; and the walls sometimes visibly heaved a sigh; but they were covered with panelled paper quite palatial in texture and design, and that is one thing that made those interiors surprising.

At the windows the voluminous lace draperies were almost overpowering. Satin lambrequins were festooned with colossal cord and tassels of bullion. A plate-glass mirror as wide as the mantel reflected the Florentine gilt carving of its own elaborate frame. There were bronzes on the mantel, and tall vases of Sèvres, and statuettes of bisque brilliantly tinted. At the two sides of the mantel stood pedestals of Italian marble surmounted by urns of the most graceful and elegant proportions, and profusely ornamented with sculptured fruits and flowers. There was the old-fashioned square piano in its carven case, and cabinets from China or East India; also a lacquered Japanese screen, marble-topped tables of filigreed teek, brackets of inlaid ebony. Curios there were galore. Some paintings there were, and these rocked softly upon the gently-heaving walls. As for the velvet carpet, it was a bed of gigantic roses that might easily put to the blush the prime of summer in a queen’s garden.

I well remember another home in San Francisco, one that possessed for me the strongest attraction. It was bosomed in the sandhills south of Market Street,-I know not between what streets, for they had all been blurred or quite obliterated by drifts of sifting sand. It was a small house fenced about; but the fence was for the most part buried under sand, and looked as if it were a rampart erected for the defense of this isolated cot. Some few hardy flowers had been planted there, but they were knee-deep in sand, and their petals were full of grit. One usually blew into that house with a pinch of sand, but how good it was to be there!

Within those walls there was the unmistakable evidence of the feminine touch, the aesthetic influence that refines and beautifies everything. It was not difficult to idealize in that atmosphere. It was the home of a lady who chose to conceal her identity, though her pen-name was a household word from one end of the coast to the other. She was a star contributor to the weekly columns of the Golden Era, a periodical we all subscribed for and were immensely proud of. It was unique in its way. Of late years I have found no literary journal to compare with it at its best. It introduced Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and many others, to their first circle of admirers. In the large mail-box at its threshold-a threshold I dared not cross for awe of it-I dropped my earliest efforts in verse, and then ran for fear of being caught in the act.

Imagine the joy of a lad whose ambition was to write something worth printing, and whose wildest dream was to be named some day with those who had won their laurels in the field of letters,-imagine his joy at being petted in the sanctum of one who was in his worshipful eyes the greatest lady in the land! About her were the trophies of her triumph, though she was personally known to few. Each post brought her tribute from the grateful hearts of her readers afar off in the mountain mining camps, and perhaps from beyond the Rockies; or, it may have been, from the unsuspecting admirer who lived just beyond the first sandhill. This was another surprising interior. There was plain living and high thinking in the midst of a wilderness that was, to say the least, uninviting; the windows rattled and the sand peppered them. Without was the abomination of desolation; but within the desert blossomed as the rose.

There were other homes as homely as the one I preferred-for there was sand enough to go round. It went round and round, as God probably intended it should, until a city sat upon it and kept it quiet. Some of these homes were perched upon solitary hilltops, and were lost to sight when the fog came in from the sea; and some were crowded into the thick of the town, with all sorts of queer people for neighbors. You could, had you chosen to, look out of a back window into a hollow square full of cats and rats and tin cans; and upon the three sides of the quadrangle which you were facing, you might have seen, unblushingly revealed, all the mysteries and miseries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceanica; for they were all of them represented by delegates.

Of course there were handsome residences (not so very many of them as yet), where there was fine art-some of the finest. But often this art was to be found in the saloons, and the subjects chosen would hardly find entertainment elsewhere. The furnishing of the houses was within the bounds of good taste. Monumental marbles were not erected by the hearth-side; the window drapery was diaphanous rather than dense and dowdy. The markets of San Francisco were much to blame for the flashiness of the domestic interior: they were stocked with the gaudiest fixtures and textures, and in the inspection of them the eye was bewildered and the taste demoralized.

Harmony survived the inharmonious, and it prevailed in the homes of the better classes, as it was bound to do; for refinement had set its seal there, and you can not counterfeit the seal of refinement. But I am inclined to think that in the Fifties there was a natural tendency to overdress, to over-decorate, to overdo almost everything. Indeed the day was demonstrative; if the now celebrated climate had not yet been elaborately advertised, no doubt there was something hi it singularly bracing. The elixir of it got into the blood and the brain, and perhaps the bones as well. The old felt younger than they did when they left “the States,”-the territory from the Rockies to the Atlantic Ocean was commonly known as “the States.” The middle-aged renewed their youth, and youth was wild with an exuberance of health and hope and happiness that seemed to give promise of immortality.

No wonder that it was thought an honor to be known as the first white child born in San Francisco-I’d think it such myself,-and I’m proud to state that all three claimants are my personal friends.