Such An Incident Is The
Basis Of Frank Norris's Novel, "Moran Of The Lady Letty," And Although
The Novel Draws It Pretty Strong, It Is Not Exaggerated.
Ten years ago
the police, the Sailors' Union, and the foreign consuls, working
together, stopped all this.
Kearney street, a wilder and stranger Bowery, was the main thoroughfare
of these people. An exiled Californian, mourning over the city of his
heart, has said:
"In a half an hour of Kearney street I could raise a dozen men for any
wild adventure, from pulling down a statue to searching for the Cocos
Island treasure." This is hardly an exaggeration. it was the Rialto of
the desperate, Street of the Adventurers.
These are a few of the elements which made the city strange and gave it
the glamour of romance which has so strongly attracted such men as
Stevenson, Frank Norris and Kipling. This life of the floating
population lay apart from the regular life of the city, which was
distinctive in itself.
The Californian is the second generation of a picked and mixed ancestry.
The merry, the adventurous, often the desperate, always the brave,
deserted the South and New England in 1849 to rush around the Horn or to
try the perils of the plains. They found there a land already grown old
in the hands of the Spaniards - younger sons of hidalgo and many of them
of the best blood of Spain. To a great extent the pioneers intermarried
with Spanish women; in fact, except for a proud little colony here and
there, the old, aristocratic Spanish blood is sunk in that of the
conquering race.
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