Authors: H.W. Brands
The better restaurants did an enormous business. In July 1851, M. L. Winn, who had made his start in San Francisco manufacturing candy and selling it on the street, opened a restaurant called the Fountain Head. Eighteen months later he added a second restaurant, the Branch. By the spring of 1854 the
Commercial Advertiser
—one of several papers published in San Francisco—would report that the two establishments served an average of 3,000 patrons daily, with 5,000 being unremarkable on a busy day. Winn’s monthly beef bill ran to $8,000; for flour he paid $4,000. His ice bill for one month was $2,000; this allowed him to serve as many as 1,500 glasses of ice cream in a day.
T
HE DATE OF THE
opening of the Fountain Head was not happenstance. Just two months earlier, a predecessor restaurant Winn owned burned to the ground, along with much of the rest of San Francisco.
Fire was the most harrowing civic problem of Gold Rush San Francisco. Especially at the start, when San Franciscans were too busy to build with stone and mortar, and instead threw up tents and wood-frame structures, the city suffered repeated conflagrations. The first occurred on Christmas Eve of 1849. It began at six o’clock in the morning, in Denison’s Exchange, on the east side of the plaza, and spread in both directions, destroying
a whole line of structures along Washington Street, between Montgomery and Kearny. A million dollars of property was consumed by the flames; more would have been lost if not for the decisiveness of the firefighters in razing buildings in the fire’s path, creating a fuel-free zone that starved the blaze.
Partly because the city was so new, and partly because the buildings lost were so insubstantial, almost no one wasted time mourning the destruction. Within weeks the ruined structures were replaced by fresh ones, and, amid the city’s continuing growth, they were joined by many others. Consequently, when a second fire broke out, on May 4, 1850, it wreaked havoc even greater than the first. “Before eleven of the forenoon, three immense blocks of buildings, with a few trifling exceptions, were totally destroyed,” Frank Soulé explained. “A great many buildings were torn down or blown up by gunpowder to stay the progress of the flames; and, among others, nearly the whole erections in Dupont Street were voluntarily destroyed to prevent conflagration spreading on that side.” Less civic-minded than the Dupont owners were those city-dwellers who refused to join the bucket brigades without being paid in advance. At least some of the reluctant busied themselves mining the ashes of buildings already lost. One recent arrival found his first gold amid the smoking ruins; sending his wife a lithograph of Portsmouth Square, with the destroyed hotels and other buildings marked in pencil, he enclosed a coarse grain of gold. “I put into this a little piece of gold that I picked up on the square…. The place I picked it up is marked by a cross thus X.” Others caught on to the idea, and soon scavengers were sifting the rubble for the gold dust that had been secreted in the buildings now burned.
As before, reconstruction commenced almost before the flames died out. “New buildings were begun to be erected while the sites of the old were hot with smoking ashes,” Soulé said. “While even one extremity of the old tenement was still blazing, people were planning the nature of the new erection, and clearing away the embers and rubbish from the other scarcely extinguished end.” The energy of the rebuilders was greater than their ability to learn from experience. “In a wonderfully short time the whole burned space was covered with new buildings, and looked as if no
fire had ever been there; although it was generally remarked that these were even more unsubstantial and inflammable than those which had just been destroyed.”
The bulk of the new construction was completed in time for the city’s third fire, which broke out only six weeks after the second. This one apparently started in the creosote-clogged chimney of an old house that had been converted into a bakery; the brisk summer winds fanned the flames and spread them to adjacent buildings. Property damage exceeded that of all the previous fires together and was estimated at five million dollars. This time San Franciscans took at least partial heed of their recent history; the buildings that went up over the ruins included a larger portion of masonry structures than before. And the inhabitants of the city began organizing into fire companies, with pump engines, hoses, and ladders purchased ahead of the next round of burning.
These preparations paid off three months later, in September 1850, when a fourth fire broke out. The fire companies quickly answered the alarm and, despite running low on water, managed to hold the losses to less than a million dollars. The citizens once more rebuilt, and congratulated themselves on having found the answer to this civic scourge.
J
ESSIE FRéMONT MISSED
the first four fires, but not the fifth. During the spring of 1851, awaiting the birth of her third child, she moved with John and Lily to San Francisco, to a prefabricated house shipped from China and fitted together on site like the pieces of a puzzle, without nails. The baby—a boy—arrived on April 19 and was named after his father.
Besides the name, John Jr. inherited his father’s knack for surviving close calls. On the fifteenth day after his birth—and on the first anniversary of the great fire of May 4, 1850—the city once more burst into flames. This fire was the worst of all, and was made more terrible by the misplaced confidence that had crept over the city since the last fire. Heinrich Schliemann, a German merchant operating out of St. Petersburg (and the man who would become famous as the uncoverer of ancient Troy) was brand
new to the city. “I arrived here last night and put up at the Union Hotel on the Plaza,” he recorded.
I may have slept a quarter of an hour, when I was awakened by loud cries in the street: “Fire, fire,” and by the awful sounds of the alarm-bell. I sprang up in all haste and, looking out the window, I saw that a frame building only 20 or 30 paces from the Union Hotel was on fire. I dressed in all haste and ran out of the house, but scarcely had I reached the end of Clay Street when I saw already the hotel on fire from which I had just run out. Pushed on by a complete gale, the fire spread with an appalling rapidity, sweeping away in a few minutes whole streets of frame buildings.
Neither the iron houses nor the brick houses (which were hitherto considered as quite fireproof) could resist the fury of the element: the latter crumbled together with incredible rapidity, whilst the former got red-hot, then white-hot and fell together like cardhouses. Particularly in the iron houses people considered themselves perfectly safe, and they remained in them to the last extremity. As soon as the walls of the iron houses got red-hot, the goods inside began to smoke. The inhabitants wanted to get out, but usually it was already too late, for the locks and hinges of the doors having extended or partly melted by the heat, the doors were no more to be opened.
Jessie Frémont smelled the smoke about the time she heard the shouts and alarm bells. Her husband fetched blankets and a grass hammock on which his wife and namesake might be evacuated if necessary (Lily was expected to run). He then organized the servants and some neighbors into an emergency crew that hung water-soaked carpets and canvas over the sides of the house. A fortuitous shift of wind aided their efforts, and although the fire did more damage than any of the previous ones—dozens of people were killed, and the entire business district was destroyed—the Frémonts’ home was spared.
Almost unbelievably, yet another fire broke out the following month. This time the Frémonts weren’t so lucky. Jessie and Lily watched from the window as the fire companies battled the flames, which seemed to be moving away from the Frémont home. A sudden reversal of wind took all by surprise. A maid grabbed the baby and seized Lily by the arm, and raced away. A manservant scooped up Jessie and carried her off as the first sparks fluttered down onto the roof. Taking refuge with a neighbor, Jessie encountered a Frenchwoman who had likewise only just escaped the flames, and was nearly in shock. “Her wild fevered gaze was fixed on her burning home,” Jessie recalled. “Suddenly, with a crazy laugh, she rose and offered me her seat—‘C’est votre tour, Madame; your house goes next,’ she said.” And so it did.
John Frémont had returned to the Mariposa after the May 4 fire, relieved that his family had survived unharmed; on hearing of another fire he saddled his swiftest horse and raced back to San Francisco. When he saw the smoldering ruins of his house he naturally feared the worst. Only after some frantic searching did he find Jessie and the children, lodged with a friend among the sand dunes behind the city.
Jessie put on a brave face, but the destruction of her home was a jolting reminder of how unsettled life in this new country could be. The gold from the Mariposa continued to pour in, but all their money couldn’t buy them the most basic form of security. “It is more disagreeable than you can realize without the experience, to be burnt out,” she confided to a friend, several weeks after the fire. She was grateful that the servants and some neighbors had managed to save most of the family’s irreplaceable personal items. “Still, the new house was a sudden unchosen place, and I felt shipwrecked.”
A
S SAN FRANCISCANS REBUILT
yet again, they took two lessons from the fires. The first was that fire prevention was something absolutely essential to stable civic life. Reconstruction after the sixth fire went more slowly than before; new buildings featured solid brick walls up to three feet thick, iron shutters and doors with sufficient play to allow for
expansion, and large rooftop tanks of water piped to allow dowsing of the premises at the first spark. As a result, although the corporate seal of the city still sported the mythic Phoenix, the bird got a rest during the next few years.
The second lesson was that not all those fires were accidents. The frequency of the blazes, and especially the fact that the May fire of 1851 occurred on the exact anniversary of the May fire of 1850, inclined many San Franciscans to smell arson in the smoke. Fire may have been the city’s foremost problem, but crime came a close second.
Yet it was a problem the city was slow to confront, for reasons related to the gold fever but also to the demographic diversity of San Francisco. Crime initially concentrated in parts of the city frequented by foreigners, leaving the American majority to go about their business unmolested. Only when the transgressions touched closer to home did they take notice.
Vicente Pérez Rosales experienced the process personally. With his fellow Chileans, Pérez felt the hostility many Americans directed toward foreigners, who were accused of stealing wealth—that is, gold—that ought to be reserved to citizens of the United States. The hostility prompted recurrent efforts to keep foreigners out of the goldfields, ranging from a foreign- miners’ tax to physical intimidation. The xenophobia was far from universal; merchants like Sam Brannan and mine owners looking for cheap help were happy for immigration from any source. But the antiforeign feeling persisted among those who suffered from the competition.
As it applied to the Chileans—and other Latin Americans, with whom the Chileans were casually lumped—the xenophobia gave rise to a belief that Chileans lay behind much of what went wrong in California. One day Pérez Rosales’s compatriot álvarez—the one who led the abortive mutiny on the
Stanguéli
—happened to be near a group of Americans who lost a shovel; the Americans accused álvarez of theft, calling him, for good measure, a “son of a nigger.” álvarez spoke no English, and the Americans no Spanish, but when they wrapped a rope around his neck and threw the loose end over a tree limb, their meaning became clear.
Pérez Rosales reached the scene of the hanging at this critical juncture, and reckoned desperately how he might save his shipmate. Knowing
that Americans respected Frenchmen more than Chileans, and guessing that these rowdies couldn’t tell a Chilean accent from a French one, he cast himself as a countryman of the immortal Lafayette. He declared that álvarez was the only protector the French in Chile ever had, that álvarez had once saved him from death, and that surely the Americans would wish to honor the memory of the Revolutionary War hero by sparing álvarez now.
The ploy worked, and álvarez was set free. But the Chileans continued to encounter trouble. Their skill in the goldfields earned them the resentment of their neighbors, who by force and other means drove them off the best claims and in many cases out of the diggings entirely. A sizable contingent returned to San Francisco, some to try their hand at commerce there, most to seek passage home. (One enterprising Chilean merchant named Wenceslao Urbistondo set the pattern for what became a striking feature of San Francisco’s urban topography. Urbistondo owned a ship that had been abandoned by its crew and was now hemmed in by a hundred others likewise marooned. Realizing that the ship had become, for all intents and purposes, a permanent part of the landscape, he made it even more so. He felled his masts to build a bridge to shore, effectively extending the street that had ended at the waterfront. Other shipowners followed his example, and eventually dirt and sand were hauled in to fill the spaces between the hulks. Soon Yerba Buena Cove began disappearing beneath the advancing city.)
By midsummer of 1849 about a thousand Chileans, joined by a smaller number of Peruvians and Mexicans, formed a colony at Clark’s Point, just north of the cove. Their reputation as gold miners preceded them, and they were generally believed to be richer than the run of their neighbors. The larcenous among San Francisco’s inhabitants eyed them hungrily.
Leading the larcenous was a band of rowdies called the “Hounds.” The hard core of this gang were Mexican War veterans from New York who had been mustered out in California and hadn’t returned home. Several of the Hounds had been schooled in the notorious Five Points and Bowery gangs of New York City, and they established headquarters in a large tent they
dubbed “Tammany Hall.” Claiming to be a mutual defense association (hence the name they subsequently adopted: “Regulators”), they in fact preyed upon their neighbors, especially the Chileans.