Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/264

 five or six hundred ships for the most part "fixed to the quays of wood or fastened to the docks where the anchorage is easy and safe."^ Soule, one of the editors of the Daily Aha California during a part of 1 85 1, on October 3 1 counted 451 ships in San Francisco, 148 of which were store-ships.^

The city of San Francisco, as Mrs. Bates saw it, was situated on the south side of the entrance fronting the bay, about six miles from the ocean. The bay, from San Francisco due east, was about twelve miles in breadth. A range of high hills on this eastern shore bounded the view in that direction, and between the hills and the shore was the fertile plain called the Contra Costa.^ The city was built on a "semi circular inlet, about two miles across, at the foot of a succession of bleak sandy hills covered here and there with brush- wood." There remained hardly a vestige of San Francisco's predecessor on the site, the little village of Yerba Buena.^*^

Because wharves paid so well there was a rush to build them. There were nine by the close of 1 85 1. Cross streets were built between the older portions of the docks, and the enclosed spaces filled in. The construction of piers enabled ships to unload their cargoes directly, and the filling in of the mud flats furnished a level space for the building of the city. Front Street was really Front Street in 1851, but the unfilled spaces were so many and the grade so low that Montgomery, the third street west of Front, was flooded on one occasion. The piling was soon destroyed by marine worms. Some- times buildings fell before the steam shovel could fill the space beneath them with sand.^^ Old store-ships hemmed in by this process of bringing the land around them became warehouses, saloons, or hotels.^^ By 1851 "houses had been built out on piles for nearly half a mile beyond the original high water mark . . . "^^ Mrs. Bates attempted to cross one of the interstices between wharves on a cross-timber a hundred feet long and about twelve feet above the slimy water. She was about half way over when she suddenly became very dizzy and was obliged to get down on her knees and hold on to the tim- ber. Since it was the same distance back as it was forward, she finally made herself walk the narrow beam.^* Holinski complains mildly of the smell of tar and stagnant water.^^ Soule bluntly describes the low places as "accumu- lating a vast mass of putrid substances, from whence proceeded the most un- wholesome and offensive smells."^^

The wharves were used not only for the convenience of ships but also as building places. Long Wharf, which the British traveler, Frank Marryat, calls "the Central Wharf," is described by him with a vividness which his poor sentence construction does not dim:

The Central Wharf of San Francisco, which is nearly a mile in length, is for some dis- tance occupied on either side by Jew slopsellers; and, as these indefatigable gentlemen insist all over the world upon exposing their wares outside their shops, the first glance down Central Wharf impresses you with the idea that the inhabitants of the district have hung their clothes out to dry after a shower of rain. Scattered among the Jew shops are markets for vegetables and poultry, fishmongers, candy-sellers (the Long Wharfers are