The Bad Old Days Of San Francisco

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32068, 16 August 1969, Page 4

The Bad Old Days Of San Francisco

The Wilder Shore. By Stephen Longstreet W. H. Allen. 326 pp.

The bad old days of San Francisco are splendidly recreated in this racily-written and gaily-illustrated book. The author is an advocate of more history on the human level and describes his contribution as “an informal social history of an era of sinners and spenders and some remarkable men and women.” To put it together, he has delved into unpublished letters, news stories, journals and diaries with his two major sources being the day book, of a man-about-town wine merchant and the unpublished memoirs of a sporting house madam. His own lively drawings—ss in all—are laconically in tune with the colourful prose of the narrative.

Mr Longstreet is mainly concerned with San Francisco after gold was discovered in the American River in 1848 when flotsam and jetsam from all over the world poured into the West Coast ■ of America to hunt gold with licentious energy. From a rough collection 4f canvas tents and board shanties, the i town soon boasted 50,000 resi-

dents. Thousands of vessels in the harbour were deserted by their gold-fevered crews but the enterprising townsfolk dragged the abandoned hulks up the beach and converted them into hotels, grog shops, gambling joints and brothels and filled in the shoreline to make more building land available. The bustling, lawless, sensual town was a background for characters like Joaquin Murietta, the stage coach robber, Sam Brannan, leader , of the Vigilantes, Levi Strauss, creator of denim work-pants, and the notorious Lola Montez and her rubber spider dance.

In Sydney Town (later named the Barbary Coast), “Sydney Du<!ks” (Australian convicts) peddled every conceivable form of sin—-there was an average of one murder a night and a dozen robberies and assaults, not to mention a steady trade in shanghaied sailors, Thousands of Chinese had also settled in the town to specialise in their own brands of vice. But the gold and later the arrival of the railroad meant wealth and the rise of the new rich with their flashy mansions and opuleqt tastes. The early days of cj-Jje fun and frolic were minified—camp beans .gave way to “pate

maison” and crab legs poulette, and it was not an uncommon step from the role of prostitute in the parlour house to hostess and wife on Nob Hill. Modem scientific methods and large combines saw the eclipse of the goldpanning miner but San Francisco’s vice district turned to new customers, the many sailors visiting what was by then a great port. The Barbary Coast . was proudly claimed to be as notorious as any sailor’s harbour in the most dissolute city in the world. And it was not that the police and authorities were powerless—graft and corruption were rife, underworld crime syndicates led to gang warfare and political despotism ran the city. After describing the great fire of 1906, the author sadly reports that the city was never the same again. “The great raunchy days of the Gold Rush had to subside into the historic past, old buildings, rats’ nests, even the solid stone of the robber barons was gone. What would come would still make room for laughter, the cavorting and carrying on. But San Francisco belonged to another era; as if the twentieth century had come to it just a little late—l9o6.”