Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/268

 power. A conductor who blew a fish horn as a signal for people to get off the tracks stood on the back of one of the cars. When a man committed suicide by getting in the way of these cars the fact came out that they were piled so high with dirt that the conductor could not see the track. Another acci- dent, in which a man's leg was cut off, roused the city authorities to pass what the Alta called the "Leg Preserving Ordinance" which forbade dirt cars to go more than six miles an hour.

The excavating and filling in caused the houses to be on different levels from the streets. According to Borthwick:

The houses had been built before die grade of the different streets had been fixed by the corporation, and there were places where the streets, having been cut down through the hills to their proper level, were nothing more than wide trenches, with a perpendicular bank on either side, perhaps forty or fifty feet high, and on the brink of these stood the houses, to which access was gained by ladders and temporary wooden stairs ...

In Other places the houses were far below the street level and people climbed down ladders to their dwellings.

Because these changes were made without proper provision for drainage, cellars were flooded when it rained, there was a pool at the foot of Mont- gomery Street, and the lots which had embankments on all sides came to be ponds and depositories of all kinds of refuse. After the rains began in No- vember, the Alta said that it might be very amusing to some persons that the keepers of cellar eating places had been driven out like rats, but that it should be a warning to the city to provide storm sewers to carry away the water. The editor predicted that, as usual, goods damaged by water where cellars had been used for storage would be auctioned off for more than the undamaged goods would have brought. The water backed up on the lots between Montgomery and Jackson Streets to such an extent that by November 10 wags amused themselves by putting up signs saying: "Notice- Steamer Newsance will leave Lake Montgomery every morning, until fur- ther notice, for the Council Chamber. For passage. Apply to Capt. Ben Ham [Brenham] or Alder Man. Agents." "For Sale.— Water Lots. Inquire of the Humbugging Commissioners. Coupons taken at Par." The ponds filled with refuse of all kinds soon added their unpleasantness to the odors coming from the waterfront.

The "miasmas from the port" did not go up as high as Stockton Street. A fashionable residence street by the end of 1851, Stockton extended to the top of the hills from which there was "a panorama of great beauty." The fami- lies, however, were few in comparison with the single men who made up most of the population. Dwellings ranged from handsome wooden houses of three or four stories to tents, or even to encampments on vacant lots such as that described by the Alta. A French cobbler, his wife and three children, seemingly owning nothing but two boards, a bench, and a side of sole of leather lived out in the open.