2 Jul 1849 Jahr - Booming SF

Beschreibung:

San Francisco was a wild place that summer of 1849, a village fast becoming a city, a vortex of human activity that never ceased nor even much slowed. In the year since Sam Brannan had paraded about the plaza shouting of gold on the American River, San Francisco had undergone a revolutionary transformation. The first effect of the gold discovery was to empty the town, as everyone left for the goldfields. This effect lasted several months, or as long as was required for the news of the discovery to reach the outside world and for the outside world to reach back. By early 1849, as the Pacific fleet of argonauts from Latin America and Australia started to arrive, the town began to fill up again, but with a population unlike that of any other American city. Not only was this new group more cosmopolitan—or foreign, to put the matter plainly—it consisted almost entirely of people who didn’t want to be there. The argonauts saw San Francisco as a way station to the mines; the sooner they could leave the town and get digging, the better.

The incessant rush lent a peculiar disorder to the place. Nothing appeared permanent; most of the buildings were actually tents: canvas tossed over a few boards and tied down against the winds that arose off the Pacific each afternoon and blew sand and dust everywhere

Viewed from the dunes that stood behind the city, San Francisco that summer looked like nothing so much as the bivouac of an army on the move—which essentially was what it was.

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