Birds Of Prey And Passage Swooped And
Dived About Us, Wild Beasts Ranged Through The Oak Groves, And As
We Slowly Floated Out Of The Harbor With The Tide, Herds Of Deer
Came To The Water's Edge, On The Northerly Side Of The Entrance,
To Gaze At The Strange Spectacle.
On the evening of Saturday, the 13th of August, 1859, the superb
steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of
Passengers, and lighting
the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red,
green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms,
bound up from the Isthmus of Panama, neared the entrance to San
Francisco, the great centre of a world-wide commerce. Miles out at
sea, on the desolate rocks of the Farallones, gleamed the powerful
rays of one of the most costly and effective light-houses in the
world. As we drew in through the Golden Gate, another light-house
met our eyes, and in the clear moonlight of the unbroken California
summer we saw, on the right, a large fortification protecting the
narrow entrance, and just before us the little island of Alcatraz
confronted us, - one entire fortress. We bore round the point toward
the old anchoring-ground of the hide ships, and there, covering the
sand-hills and the valleys, stretching from the water's edge to the
base of the great hills, and from the old Presidio to the Mission,
flickering all over with the lamps of its streets and houses, lay a
city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. Clocks tolled the hour
of midnight from its steeples, but the city was alive from the salute
of our guns, spreading the news that the fortnightly steamer had come,
bringing mails and passengers from the Atlantic world. Clipper ships
of the largest size lay at anchor in the stream, or were girt to
the wharves; and capacious high-pressure steamers, as large and
showy as those of the Hudson or Mississippi, bodies of dazzling
light, awaited the delivery of our mails to take their courses up
the Bay, stopping at Benicia and the United States Naval Station,
and then up the great tributaries - the Sacramento, San Joaquin,
and Feather Rivers - to the far inland cities of Sacramento,
Stockton, and Marysville.
The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were densely
crowded with express wagons and hand-carts to take luggage, coaches and
cabs for passengers, and with men, - some looking out for friends among
our hundreds of passengers, - agents of the press, and a greater
multitude eager for newspapers and verbal intelligence from the
great Atlantic and European world. Through this crowd I made
my way, along the well-built and well-lighted streets, as alive
as by day, where boys in high-keyed voices were already crying
the latest New York papers; and between one and two o'clock in
the morning found myself comfortably abed in a commodious room,
in the Oriental Hotel, which stood, as well as I could learn,
on the filled-up cove, and not far from the spot where we used
to beach our boats from the Alert.
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