Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/122

 determined purpose. They would bring civilization and culture to San Francisco. Nothing could stop them.

Aloof from the tumult of the city in fact as well as in spirit, they lived far up on Montgomery street at the corner of Vallejo.^^ They were so far out from the muddy, planked town that toiling Charley Kimball missed them entirely on his rounds in the fall of 1850 when he was collecting names for the first San Francisco Directory.

The beginning of the eventful year of 1851 found Mrs. Waller sharing with other good Presbyterian ladies in plans for the formation of an orphan asylum society which late in January of that year^^ became the San Francisco Ladies Orphan Asylum Society. Her husband, however, was concerned with more worldly matters and was planning to run for Recorder on the Whig ticket. At the April election, the second^ ^ to be held under the city charter, nearly six thousand votes were cast.^^ Charles J. Brenham was elected Mayor, and Royal H. Waller became San Francisco's second recorder, succeeding Frank Tilford, the first recorder.^^

The recorder in those days was a police judge. He heard the usual run of misdemeanor cases: petty theft, trespass, disorderly conduct and drunken- ness, disturbance of the peace, and the failure of peddlers and small fry to pay their license fees. Drunks, hoarse-voiced barmaids, sneak thieves from Sydneytown, and highly painted females of obvious occupation paraded through his court room on the lower floor of the City Hall (the former Graham House), a veranda-hung edifice at the corner of Kearny and Pa- cific Streets.^^

In the spring of '5 1, William Walker, editor of the San Francisco Herald, was waging relentless war on Judge Levi Parsons, demanding impeach- ment.^^ Walker put the same fury into his job as editor as he later put into waging the wars of an insurrectionist in Mexico and Nicaragua. But the storms which swirled around the City Hall never touched Judge Waller. He conducted his court with dignity and solemnity, punishing the guilty and releasing the innocent with a final parental word of warning.

But among the fellow citizens of Judge Waller were many who shared Walker's dissatisfaction with the local courts. Men from every strata of so- ciety talked of "perjured witnesses" and "corrupted juries."^^ They openly declared that they would do something drastic if the courts continued to release the notorious and guilty. On one side of the benign recorder raged roaring mobs, plundering and terrifying the town. On the other gathered an incipient mob pledged to enforce the law with stout rope if necessary. If the judge had said anything regarding the proposed Committee of Vigi- lance and the gangs known as "the Hounds" and "the Ducks," he undoubt- edly would have cleared his throat testily and declared, "A plague on both your houses!"