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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.
The city comes of age
San Francisco then was by all accounts an intoxicating city whose many charms moved the historian-moralist B.E. Lloyd to advise parents in 1876
to look closer to their daughters, for they know not the many dangers to which they are exposed…and to mildly counsel their sons, for when upon the streets of this gay city they are wandering among many temptations.
The 1860s and ’70s marked the birth of the modern San Francisco, which has since then claimed to be the Athens, Paris, and New York City of the West but has never completely lost its mark of a wild beginning. As Rudyard Kipling was to observe after he visited the city in the 1890s, “San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.”
The 20th century
Expansion during the world wars
While the rest of the world was preparing for World War I, San Francisco held a highly successful World’s Fair—the Panama-Pacific International Exposition—to celebrate the new boost to Western commerce, the opening of the Panama Canal. During the Great Depression, 4,000 longshoremen competed for 1,300 jobs parceled out by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. The ILWU fought scabs and union busters at the port on “Bloody Thursday,” July 4, 1934, and then called a citywide general strike, the largest and most successful in the country’s history.
World War II made a significant impact on San Francisco’s prosperity, as it served as a major disembarkation for the Pacific theatre. Great shipyards were built around the bay, and some half million people came to work in the area’s war-related industries; many of them stayed on permanently after the war. The United Nations was born there in 1945, the result of the San Francisco Conference, which took place that year from April to June.