Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/265

 very fond of sugar-plums), gambling houses of the worst repute, and drinking-shops innumerable. Being narrow and crowded, and full of loaded drays, drunken sailors, empty packing-cases, run-away horses, rotten cabbages, excited steamboat runners, stinking fish, Chinese porters, gaping strangers, and large holes in the planks, through which you may perceive the water, it is best to be careful in walking down Long Wharf, and to turn neither to the right nor to the left. 17

Long Wharf furnished many an item for the Alta, since the open-air shops were a constant invitation to petty thieves. The poHce could not be expected to do much about such minor matters. So the merchants kept cowhide whips and administered punishment immediately.18 On at least one occasion a po- liceman, or a man who was wearing a policeman's badge, ran away when he was called on to remove a Mexican cook, cleaver in hand, from the person of a drunken Scot who had been behaving badly.19 When the usual activities of its denizens are considered, it seems rather captious of the editor of the Alt a to be so opposed to the sign on Long Wharf which said, "Shampooing is done by a Lady." 20

The first impression of the city from the waterfront was one of utter con- fusion, with houses jumbled here and there. Holinski was surprised to find that this was an optical illusion due to the inequalities of the ground, and that like all other cities of the United States San Francisco was built on a regular plan and had straight streets. ^^ Of the general appearance of the city, a British visitor, Borthwick, says:

Everything bore evidence of newness, and the greater part of the city presented a makeshift and temporary appearance, being composed of the most motley collection of edifices, in the way of houses, which can well be conceived. Some were mere tents, with perhaps a wooden front sufficiently strong to support the sign of the occupant; some were composed of sheets of zinc on a wooden framework; there were numbers of cor- rugated iron houses, the most unsightly things possible, and generally painted brown; there were many important American houses, all, of course, painted white, with green shutters; also dingy-looking Chinese houses, and occasionally some substantial brick buildings; but the great majority were nondescript, shapeless, patchwork concerns, in the fabrication of which, sheet-iron, wood, zinc and canvass, seemed to have been em- ployed indiscriminately; while here and there, in the middle of a row of such houses, appeared the hulk of a ship, which had been hauled up, and now served as a warehouse, the cabins being fitted up as offices, or sometimes converted into a boarding-house.22

Pringle Shaw, a British Tory, states that on the sides of the surrounding hills there were flimsy wooden houses propped up by stilts. Shaw, who inter- preted unfavorably nearly everything that he saw as a symbol of democracy, considered these to be emblems of the frail republican government which was Hable to be overturned at any moment because of its utter worthless- ness.^^ A French observer, Frignet, notes that all American towns had a sur- rounding fringe of wooden houses which were expected to be replaced by more permanent structures as the city grew.^* Apparently there was nothing good to be said for the environs of San Francisco. Saint-Amant, a friendly French government official, says that there was no law about the disposal of dead bodies, and on the outskirts of the city one saw nothing but these evi-