The city of the '49ers

With the discovery of gold, San Francisco picked up pace and direction. The modest village was at first almost deserted as its population scrambled inland to the Mother Lode, and then it exploded into one of the most extraordinary cities ever constructed. Some 40,000 gold hunters arrived by sea, another 30,000 plodded across the Great Basin, and still another 9,000 moved north from Mexico. By 1851 more than 800 ships rode at anchor in the cove, deserted by their crews.

Everybody except the miners got rich. Eggs sold for one dollar apiece, and downtown real estate claimed prices that would almost hold their own against modern-day appreciated values. Until the bubble burst in the panic of 1857, 50,000 San Franciscans became rich and went bankrupt, cheated and swindled one another, and took to violence all too readily. As The Sacramento Union noted in 1856, there had been “some fourteen hundred murders in San Francisco in six years, and only three of the murderers hung, and one of these was a friendless Mexican.” Two vigilance committees in the 1850s responded to the challenge with crude and extralegal justice, hanging eight men as an example to the others.

In 1859 silver was discovered in the Nevada Territory. The exploitation in Nevada of the Comstock Lode, which eventually yielded some $300 million, turned San Francisco from a frontier boomtown into a metropolis whose leading citizens were bankers, speculators, and lawyers, all of whom ate and drank in splendid restaurants and great hotels. By 1870 San Francisco boasted a population of nearly 150,000.