The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [23]
Before the gold rush, San Francisco had been a desolate area of sand dunes and hills. Discovered by the Spanish in 1769, the area had served as a presidio, a military post, with little more than a chapel and some brush and tule huts, and for almost a century, it lay relatively untouched by civilized men. Then, in 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill near the Sacramento River.
Thousands of gold hunters descended on San Francisco, a great natural port, on their way to Sutter’s Mill. When the first prospectors arrived, they threw down planks as makeshift bridges between the wharves; these planks soon became city streets. Beyond the wharves sprawled hundreds of canvas tents and wooden shacks, connected by dirt roads that melted into mud swamps with each rainfall. Residents tottered over temporary sidewalks created from garbage dumped into the mire; one precarious path was made from sacks of flour, stoves, tobacco boxes, and even a grand piano. To build shanties and stores, they ripped apart the seagoing vessels they found rotting at the docks.
Between 1848 and 1850, this sleepy village of five hundred people exploded into a boom town of thirty thousand, roughly the size of Chicago. By 1851, when the Chinese began arriving by the thousands, it was one of the largest cities in the United States. But it exhibited none of the respectability of the older, staid communities of the East Coast. San Francisco was a roaring frontier town—boastful and ambitious, shameless in its filth and greed. It made no effort to hide its excesses or sins. Rowdy young men roamed the streets, determined to spend their gold as fast as they found it. The first two-story buildings in San Francisco were not churches, city halls, or courthouses, but hotels and casinos, and by 1853 the city enjoyed 46 gambling halls, 144 taverns, and 537 places that sold liquor. So dizzying was the pace of growth that within only a few years the newly rich had moved from their shacks to luxurious, palatial establishments, gorging on twenty-course dinners served to them on gold-plate dishes.
As in many gold rush towns, those who profited most handsomely were not just the miners, but those who supplied them with essential goods and services. Fortunes were made in small businesses, most started by former prospectors themselves, who reaped unheard-of profits selling food, equipment, and clothing. Eggs fetched a dollar apiece, and an 1848 price list showed a pound of butter selling for six dollars, a pair of boots for a hundred. Anticipating the needs of miners for rugged wear, Levi Strauss made pants out of denim tent canvas and created an empire. Those who provided domestic help, such as laundering clothes, also prospered. The granddaughter of one forty-niner recalls a local washerwoman wearing a shawl with a diamond brooch “worthy of an Empress.”
Women were scarce in San Francisco. Most prospectors were single, or chose not to bring their wives and children to this raw frontier. In a town with only one woman for every dozen men, the mere rumor of a female newcomer was enough to empty saloons and hotels, causing a stampede to the docks. In this respect, San Francisco hardly differed from the entire state: census reports show that 92 percent of California was male, and 91 percent were fifteen to forty-four years of age. Wrote one California pioneer woman, “Every man thought every woman in that day a beauty. Even I have had men come forty miles over the mountains, just to look at me, and I never was called a handsome woman, in my best days, even by my more ardent admirers.”
With these demographics, brothels inevitably flourished. Some enterprising women in San Francisco charged more than a hundred dollars a night—the equivalent of the price of a house, or about a year’s wages in other parts of the country. Entrepreneurs in the world’s oldest profession rode furiously on horseback from camp to camp, trying to fit as many clients as possible into their schedules.
In a city of young men on the make, violence was the rule in the settling of disputes. Rogues