TWHP

The Players:     Junipero Serra    Mariano Vallejo    Sam Brannan    William Ralston   
San Francisco

And the Birth of the Modern World




San Francisco was a dismal backwater when gold was discovered in 1848, a cold, damp, wind-blown place founded on sand dunes situated around a cove now covered by the City's financial and commercial districts. Within a couple of years it claimed tens of thousands of inhabitants, and served as the gateway to undreamed of wealth and industry. Over the next two generations, it poured forth such amounts of gold, silver, and innovation that the City and the state it represented transformed the world.

For better or worse, San Francisco and its entrepreneurs controlled most of the West this side of the Rockies until the turn of the 20th Century, and to their restless energy we owe much now taken for granted. As the greatest capitalistic experiment ever known, it demonstrated as never before or since what free men could do when confronted by vast opportunity and the unfettered ability to exploit it. Attracting the most dynamic Americans in the country, San Francisco ended up with a population infused with a distilled essence of the national character at its best. Possessing all the qualities of self-reliance, a penchant for self-government and a spirit of optimism, tolerance and fair play, the new Californians set an example of what the future could portend, and the world has paid attention ever since the beginning of the phenomenon. They fundamentally changed America and the world beyond.

They were mostly younger men, under 30 years of age, already thinking about California because of Horace Greeley's imprecation to "Go West, young man." The first overland wagon trains had begun the trek in 1841, and over the next several years reports from California tantalized readers in eastern papers with tales of the rich, varied land beyond the horizon. The Mexican War of 1846 added impetus to the migration; Stevenson's Regiment of New Yorkers, mostly Irishmen, traveled by ship to California to take the state, and at the end of the conflict, they were left there. Additionally, however, thousands of new soldiers had gotten to see the world beyond their own, small towns, had come to know and work with other Americans from other states, and discovered in the course of the campaign strengths they didn't know they had. In the wake of the conflict, they knew how to live off the land and make do.

Missouri supplied others, of a different stripe. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 dictated that voters in those territories would determine whether they woud be slaveholding or free, the most virulent opponents of abolition traveled there from throughout the South and border regions, especially Missouri, which became a regional stronghold of pro-slavery adherents. Just like the soldiers, they knew how to live in the wilderness, and thrived in it. As did the men of Kentucky, the new land settled by Daniel Boone after the Revolution. Several generations of pioneers grew to maturity there by the time of the Gold Rush, and lengthy travel into the unknown held few fears.

Events across the world served also to fuel the explosion when the spark struck. The Revolutions of 1848--mass uprisings across Europe against monarchical government--created political discontents and refugees eager for a new order not to be had at home. In China, the Opium Wars of the mid-1840's ravaged the eastern coast as Britain established hegemony and thousands of Cantonese saw the upsetting of the old order. The same occurred with potato famine in Ireland. Latin America by 1848 had been free of Spain for a couple of decades, and despite all the talk of liberal democracy in the new, so-called republics, rule by despotic elites predominated and disillusioned the educated but frustrated.

News of the gold discovery brought them all, and San Francisco boomed as it funnelled them into the interior where they built communities beyond the reach of established authority--so they established their own. The City and the towns beyond became the grand melting pot, uniting diverse cultures into a new synthesis, where for the first time Americans, Europeans, Chinese, Australians, Hispanics, blacks and indians lived and worked side-by-side in a coarse equivalence. The outcomes surely differed for the different ethnic groups, sometimes due to circumstance, behavior or discrimination, but it was the first time so many widely divergent peoples achieved anything approaching the harmony manifest in California.

It resulted in many surprising effects. San Francisco boasted the finest, most varied cuisines; French bankers brought chefs from Paris, who had fresh produce and a profusion of wild meats and seafoods to work with that existed nowhere else. Chinese food, Mexican food and all manner of American and European dishes were available. Europeans also established a wine industry to complement the foods, and they brought cultured entertainment in the form of opera and classical music. As a result of the Mexican influence, California instituted the first laws granting women the right to own property; because of the general shortage of females, the state implemented the most liberal divorce laws anywhere. The dearth of women also offered the sex unparallelled opportunities to live as they saw fit; whether prostitute or matron, they often had free rein to behave on their own terms.

With their wit and bare hands, men built a tremendous infrastructure from nothing, a fully formed state evolved within a few years, and the rest of the United States reached out to embrace it, changing all previous assumptions about ways to do business, ways to live, ways to think. A new stereotype of the classic American took hold as the tight-fisted, closemouthed traditional New England Yankee was supplanted by the brash, boastful promoter for whom anything was possible. San Francisco and California injected the capitalist spirit with a new sense of reality and gave birth to the modern, global world

The gold, of course, played the greatest part in this boost to capitalism, because a new source of tangible wealth in vast amounts flowed eastward, flooding the economy with hard money and encouraging the government to replace often doubtful paper currrency with something of real value. The telegraph took on new importance as the most hopeful way to transmit valuable information across great distances. The clipper ship--the high-tech transportation marvel of the day--reached its apex in the desire to get to the Pacific Coast as quickly as possible, and the steamship was driven to new levels of reliability and sophistication for the same reason. The first railroad through a jungle met the same demand in Panama, one of the shortcuts to California, and surmounting the engineering obstacles inherent in that endeavor made impossible routes at least imaginable.


With the discovery of silver just over the Sierras in Nevada, a new stimulus exaggerated the forces already at play. Unlike with the gold--easily extracted by a couple of men and few tools--deep, hard-rock silver mining demanded big money, large machinery and technologies still undiscovered. The science of geology advanced at an unparallelled pace, and modern mining evolved from deep holes in the ground. Huge machinery of sizes never before seen pumped water out of the mines, and compressed air in, to supply oxygen and--another first--power for tools.

Stock market frenzies and manipulations took hold of the City in a way never to be seen until decades later on Wall Street, and news of the latest silver finds transfixed the world of finance as the biggest, fastest, most lucrative deals in history were made. International finance markets flourished to vertiginous heights, with bankers in New York, London and Paris feverishly looking for investment opportunities. Along the way, California's stewardship of the Nevada mines helped pay for the Civil War and fuel the growth in its wake. President Grant's reputation suffered greatly for the corruption said to have been fostered during his tenure, but his shortcomings are certainly mitigated by the fact that such opportunities presented after the conflict never existed before it, and a new breed of businessman and ethics exploded in the void. The best and worst of these trends emanated from California, and later robber barons just emulated the practices of insider trading, monopoly and conspicuous consumption.

The United States became genuinely united only after the building of the Trancontinental Railroad, an endeavor that would not have been attempted for decades had it not been for the momentous events in California and the lucky confluence of the right individuals--a visionary and some ambitious shopkeepers. As a result, the land between Nevada and Kansas opened to an inundation of settlers who subsequentlyly filled the void with towns, ranches, farms and factories. The Southern Pacific developed the first refrigerated cars to deliver California produce to the East, changing the eating habits of America. The railroad created a long-distance tourist industry that hardly existed before, published one of the first regional magazines, and brought forth the first chains of hotels and restaurants; they were staffed by a hundred thousand wholesome young women from the East, half of whom married and settled, bringing refinement to the most remote regions of the nation.

Meanwhile, men of San Francisco developed the Pacific Rim trade, and the states of Oregon, Washington and Alaska. They sent the first regular ships up and down the West Coast, they surveyed Alaska to such an extent the national government felt secure in buying it, and then they built the infrastructure for the territory. They did much the same for Hawaii. The most famous ships of the Spanish-American War were built in San Francisco, in shipyards founded by a youngster who came during the Gold Rush.


The land ruled by San Francisco proved to be the greatest canvas ever made available to the individual, and the men of California created visions of the future that amazed all who beheld them. It was the first time in human history that average men had an opportunity to amass great wealth, if only they worked hard enough, and had the sense to seize an opportunity and make the most of it.

Collectively, it was a great triumph for the individual, and a few score individuals accomplished in decades what nations and populations couldn't achieve in centuries. General Mariano Vallejo provided the leadership and diplomatic skills that changed a Mexican province into an American state. Sam Brannan, leader of a Mormon colony that never became such, supplied San Francisco with the skilled labor that built the early territory before the Gold Rush, and after it, he set up stores and real estate offices that made possible the later growth and development. William Ralston, a shipping clerk, became the great banker of the West, linking financial centers across the world, creating the facilities to extract Nevada silver, and building factories and industries to supply the state with all it might need. John Mackay was an Irish immigrant who wielded a pick in the Nevada mines before taking over the best of them, becoming one of the richest men in the world, and eventually linking the Far East to Europe with Transpacific and Transatlantic telegraph lines. Crocker, Stanford, Huntington and Hopkins were modestly prosperous merchants in Sacramento when they started the Transcontinental Railroad, accomplishing with their own initiative what the government would not. Crocker built banks and hotels; Stanford founded one of the world's great universities--one so progressive that it perhaps did more than any other institution in America to promote liberal causes; and Huntington constructed the greatest railroad network in the country, linked the cattle ranches of Texas with the packing houses of Chicago and established a modern shipbuilding industry in the South.

These men and their works fascinated America and the world for generations, and events in California became staples for newspaper readers everywhere for many decades; there was no comparable competition. Their wives went to Europe and overwhelmed the Continent with their lavish spending and wealthy, marriageable daughters. The first public divorces emanated from California, as well as the first liberated women. Gertrude Atherton scandalized American society with her novels of women who followed true love to perdition, while winning over the English with her daring spirit. The country's most beloved writer--Mark Twain--got his start there, and Jack London--the only American writer embraced by international communism--grew up there. Gertrude Stein--an Oakland girl--promoted modernism in the arts and letters with her Paris salons, while becoming an avant garde writer herself. Isadora Duncan invented modern dance.

Modern photography began in California as the best cameramen in the world headed West to document the natural and social wonders occurring, and motion picture photography was invented by Eadweard Muybridge as he atempted to settle a bet for Leland Stanford. After George Hearst opened up the West to mining and developed the richest mineral deposits in Montana and Colorado, he gave a newspaper to his young son; William Randolph Hearst changed publishing forever, heralding an era of sensationalized advocacy journalism that continues today. The first expressions of post-war discontent with the established order belonged to San Francisco's beatniks, the first expressions of student revolution derived from UC Berkeley's free speech movement, and all that came out of the '60s descended from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District. Los Angeles became the cultural center of the world because of its film and music industries, and the internet boom that now threatens those industries and innumerable others while building new ones, is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In the century-and-a-half since the Gold Rush, California has become one of the greatest influences in the world, for good or ill, and the size of its economy ranks it among the top 10 nations. Its like has never been seen before, and probably never will be again.

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