San Francisco [antikvár]

First page: the Bay Bridge and downtown San Francisco; (previous pages) San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz Island and (facing page) the Golden Gale Bridge. On June 27,1776, as Thomas Jefferson was putting the finishing touches to the Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia, American history was also being made the width of a continent away. An expedition of Spanish Conquistadores, including a sergeant, two corporals, ten soldiers and two priests, was being led by Lieutenant José Morago to the edge of San Francisco Bay. They were looking to find a spot to build a settlement. They weren't the first Europeans to see the bay. That accomplishment is credited to Captain Caspar de Portola, who had led an expedition there seven years earlier. But Caspar was looking for a smaller harbor further up the coast and considered this one an obstacle in his path. He didn't bother trying to go around it, but turned around and went back to San Diego. It's hard to imagine why he wasn't excited about finding one of the world's greatest natural harbors, but easy to understand why he didn't want to go around it. It extends inland for more than thirteen miles and is over twenty-five miles wide. Portola was a soldier, not a sailor. And why, you might ask, hadn't the Spanish navy found this place on its own? After all, its ships had been sailing up and down the coast of California for more than 200 years by 1776. Not only that, but the great English explorer Sir Francis Drake had been in the territory, too. Back in 1579, he had discovered the little bay that Portola was searching for and claimed it for his Queen. How could they all have missed a 400~square-mile body of water protected by hills as much as 900 feet high? The hills are part of the answer. They do a good job of hiding what's behind them. And the relatively narrow channel that connects the bay to the sea is usually hidden under a fog bank. Today the hills and the fog are among the things that make San Francisco so charming. But back in the 16th century they prompted Spanish captains to echo the immortal words of Christopher Columbus and order their men to "Sail on!" God alone knows how much longer those hills would have kept their secret if the Spanish authorities in Mexico City hadn't decided that the time had finally come to send their missionaries north. The Franciscans established themselves at San Diego in 1769 and began a slow march up the coast. San Francisco Bay was an obvious place to build one of their fortified missions, and on October 4, 1776, the Feast of St. Francis, they dedicated the place to their patron. But the Saint wasn't smiling on them. Within a year almost all of the original settlers had pushed on further north, where their farms would be more productive. The little Mission of San Francisco was written off as a failure. The Presidio, the fort that protected it, was reduced to a handful of soldiers. During the War of 1812, British and American ships put in to the harbor, cmd there were occasional visits from Russian ships engaged in the fur-trade further north. But to all intents cind purposes, San Francisco was quite literally a backwater duringits first half-century as part of the "Known World" When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, it abandoned the outpost, which was in ruins by the time the Englishman Captain William Richardson built a combination house and trading post there fourteen years later. It may have been a ramshackle affair made of rough boards, but it was the beginning of a city. Word had spread that California was a veritable Garden of Eden by then, cind it wasn't long before Captain Richardson had plenty of neighbors. But growth was still slow. The Mexican authorities did all they could to keep foreigners out, but they were qtiickly outnumbered by radical Yankees. These same radicals took advantage of the 1846 war between Mexico and the United States to declare California a republic. The American flag was raised over the settlement they called Yerba Buena and the crew of an American fighting ship went ashore to start building a fort in case the Mexicans took it into their heads to come back. The ship's officers also drafted a set of laws for the town and ordered that its name be changed back to San Francisco. But even though they had chosen a Spanish-sounding name, there was no mistaking the fact that this was going to be an American city. All that was needed now was something to lure Americans to settle there. The catalyst, of course, ttimed out to be gold. But during the first few months following its discovery further north in 1848 the whole population of San Francisco seemed determined to get out of town. Sailors deserted their ships, shopkeepers shuttered their stores, laborers decided their labors would be more profitable elsewhere. Things got so bad that the town's first newspaper, the Californian, was forced to suspend publication. Its editor wrote, " the field is left half-planted, the house half-built and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pick-axes and the means of transportation to the spot where the average for all concerned is twenty dollars per diem." But there were some keys to success in those words.