Not Only
The Neighborhood Of Our Anchorage, But The Entire Region Of The
Great Bay, Was A Solitude.
On the whole coast of California there
was not a lighthouse, a beacon, or a buoy, and the charts were
made up from old and disconnected surveys by British, Russian,
and Mexican voyagers.
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.
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