Lighting Out for the Territory: Samuel Clemens...Mark Twain

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Biographies & Memoirs
Author:	Roy Morris, Jr.

“If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will *have* to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them - if the people you go among suffer by the operation.”
― Mark Twain, "Roughing It" (1872)

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Picture a twenty-six year old Mississippi riverboat pilot in 1861 who has just lost his livelihood with the coming of the American Civil War. First he is grabbed off the streets of his home town, Hannibal, Missouri, by a squad of Union troops. He and another pilot are dragooned down river to St. Louis to be interviewed by a major in the regular army about operating a steam boat up the Missouri. Luckily a few beautiful ladies come to visit the major and the young men, one known as Samuel L. Clemens, makes a hasty escape out the back way of the office and hides out with relatives in town unit he can get back home.

Next he joins up with a band of self-appointed Confederate guerrillas. After two or three weeks fighting a nasty horse and mosquito bites and foul weather young Sam and his "Marion's Rangers" decide this business of war is a damn sight over-rated.

Luckily, his older brother, Orion Clemens, has managed to use his links with the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party in Missouri to secure a position from the Lincoln Administration as Secretary to the Territorial Governor of Nevada (or Was-hoe, as some called it.) Orion, a bit of a dim bulb in political affairs, needs an sharp assistant. Would his savvy ex-riverboat pilot be in need a job "out in the territory" where the Civil War is no more than a distraction? Yes, Sam figures, there is a need there and so he obliges.

Mark Twain recounted his adventures in a book called "Roughing It" in 1872. The book was a best-seller at the time--the second best seller in a row for the newly married author, couple years after his sharp and satirical Americans-in-Europe travel book, "The Innocents Abroad, Volumes I and II".


Before he became what many critics later called "the first authentic American writer", Twain had a colorful career as a government secretary, silver prospector in boom-town in Nevada and California's Sierra Nevada. He also was a speculator in mines and lost a potential fortune from bad company and ill luck. Finally he took up journalism--something he had done a bit of already as a printer with his brother's newspaper in Hannibal and also in contribution to papers in New Orleans while a river boat pilot.
After his travels in and across half the Pacific, he became a full-time writer and lecturer--making a lot of enemies with his acid tongue and satirical pen of the anti-Chinese police forces and the political humbugs, roughneck miners and swindlers he dealt with. He was lucky frankly that he didn't gert shot in those days, as many a desperado who disliked nosy journalist might have put a hole through him. But Twain also made a lot of friends, including for a time another excellent Western writer, Bret Harte, who gave him a job on a magazine in San Francisco for twelve dollars a week at a time when Twain was at his lowest ebb, down to his last dime and considering suicide after a big silver deal he was counting on fell through.

Later, Twain had to beat it out of San Francisco, partly for writing a story about how the police mistreated Chinese crime victims and partly for being friends with a fellow named Bill Gaines who had a habit of skipping out of town after bail hearings. He later sailed off to the Hawaiian Islands and the lecture he gave to San Franciscans and other cities made him as more famous as a humorist for a time then a writer.

It was a story he leard from a bartender about a certain "Jumping Frog" in a mining town called "Jackass Hill" that later became the inspiration for his first famous story, 1865's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County".

This makes for a great read for those interested in Mark Twain's early career. Roy Morris--who had already written several books about the Civil War period from a military and cultural perspective--puts in all the best parts of Twain's travel book as well as clearing up the record of some of "the stretches" (exaggerations) Twain told his readers at the time. The book gives us both the real follies and fortunes of Young Sam and also his budding and ultimately successful career out West, where he emerged by 1867 as 'Mark Twain", the most famous young author on "the Pacific Slope" in America.

Morris book follows the Clemens' stagecoach adventures along the Oregon Trail to a side route to Nevada, and later his travels and writings on San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands. Twain was a natural traveller and "Roughing It" is a fine book. This book by Morris deepened even further my appreciation of the great author. Morris captures and picks out the best passages of Twain's narratives of his young life and adds dimension to his ability to wander and record the people and customs of a place--"with a few stretchers" by The Great Man for entertainment value.

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“It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.”
― Mark Twain, on the first California Gold Rush a decade earlier than he arrived, "Roughing It"

Friday Funny, American Edition: Police Squad (In Color!) Intro and "Naked Gun 2 1/2" (1991)

After subjecting television viewers to a slew of mediocre television crime shows, spawned in the 1960s and 70's (with stoic, rigid and near-humorless law-and-order spouting walking manikin-coppers) from the likes of actor/producer Jack "Dragnet" Webb and Quinn Martin ("Streets of San Francisco", "Cannon" ,et al) producers David and Jerry Zucker finally did something about it.

After making a big pop culture success "Airplane" in 1980, they turned their attention to lampooning the old-style cop procedural with a short-lived six -episode series in 1982 called "Police Squad".

The show featured Canadian-born Leslie Nielsen, an actor previously trapped as a guest star in formal and uninspired roles as urban cops and detectives, as Frank Drevin of "Police Squad, A Special Branch of the Police Force".

The ratings were not good but the show took on a cult following in VHS releases. A big screen adaptation, "Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad" (1988) was a success. Nielsen was perfect in his comic turn on this material, and the actors and actresses around him spoofed some of the same stoic cops, femme fatales and one-dimensional big-time crime bosses they had played previously. Two more film sequels followed. Later Nielsen spent the last part of his career doing take-off films playing authority figures (vampires and U.S. Presidents) gone zany.

"The Candlestick Park Affair": The Beatles Last Public Concert

(below) An ad for the last Beatles concert, held in "beautiful" Candlestick Park in the 1960s.    The place, soon to be torn down now, was a noted civic boondoggle. Seen today, it makes most modern city sewage treatment plants  look like the Taj Mahal.  And I'm a fan of the place! 

One of the oddities for Beatles geeks like me is that their last group concert for regular fans was held at what was probably one of the worst public venues for watching any public thing in North America. 

Candlestick Park--built in 1960-- was the home of the San Francisco Baseball Giants and, later, the city's  NFL franchise, The Forty-Niners. It was a cold, cavernous wind-swept arena located smack on the coldest end of the city.    

I refer to Candlestick Park in San Francisco, where, on August 29, 1966, the Fab Four played a gig before 25,000 fans.  This date was my sixth birthday but I was too young to have rock music much on my radar in those days and my parents, both pushing forty year of age, were into Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Herb Alpert, Tom Jones (my mother was, at least) and symphonic music to care about a modern rock act, no matter how many headlines they made. 

 

I read later it was cold at Candlestick that night.  That wouldn't surprise me at all. I've been to dozens of Giants games there and a couple rock and jazz concerts and, believe it or not, San Francisco can get really cold in August.  Not Buffalo or Norway cold, but cold enough at night to feel like you're freezing even if technically you're not. To go to a night game, you had to dress like you were going skiing.        

 

 

Here's some lowdown in the concert itself, from "The Beatles Bible" website:

http://www.beatlesbible.com/1966/08/29/candlestick-park-san-francisco-final-concert/

"The Park's capacity was 42,500, but only 25,000 tickets were sold, leaving large sections of unsold seats. Fans paid between $4.50 and $6.50 for tickets, and The Beatles' fee was around $90,000. The show's promoter was local company Tempo Productions.

"Candlestick Park was the home of the baseball team the San Francisco Giants. The stage was located just behind second base on the field, and was five feet high and surrounded by a six-foot high wire fence.

"The compère was 'Emperor' Gene Nelson of 1260 KYA FM, and the support acts were, in order of appearance, The Remains, Bobby Hebb, The Cyrkle and The Ronettes. The show began at 8pm.

"I was the MC, and, as any Giants fans will know, Candlestick Park in August, at night, was cold, foggy and windy. The funniest thing this night was one of the warm-up acts, Bobby Hebb. He stood up on the stage at Candlestick Park, with the fog, and the wind blowing, and he was singing 'Sunny'! It was tough anyway to work a ballpark as an MC, especially as The Beatles were taking their time to get out. I was trying to entertain a crowd that was shouting, 'Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.'

"The dressing room was chaos. There were loads of people there. The press tried to get passes for their kids and the singer Joan Baez was in there. Any local celebrity, who was in town, was in the dressing room. They were having a party in there. They were having a perfectly wonderful time, while I was freezing my buns off on second base!

'Emperor' Gene Nelson
'The Beatles Off The Record", Keith Badman

 

Except for Paul, the Beatles apparently had seen enough of the touring grind.  And American attitudes toward the group in some places had changed for the worse. John had made some comments in a British newspaper early in 1966 about the band "being "more popular than Jesus" and wondering if Christianity would evaporate first, or would rock and roll go away.  Little was made of it in England; a lot was made of it months later when the American press got wind of the "we're more popular than Jesus" remarks.  Radio stations, mostly in the South, banned Beatles records.  Their records were burned by some church groups. The Klu Klux Klan thought themselves  righteous enough to picket a couple of their stadium dates. 

 

By the time the four superstars got to Los Angeles they were ready to go home, but the promoters threatened to sue manager Brian Epstein and the band so they went on up to the worst major open-air venue on the West Coast.  In 1964 and '65 they had played in the Cow Palace to a huge crowd and it was a success.  Why they didn't play just play there again seems strange to me.

Here's a bit from their last press conference on the tour in San Francisco. As you can see by now John and the group are tired of defending themselves and  the whole controversy.  I doubt California fans worried about what Lennon said months ago.  They fans wanted to hear the music.

 

  

 

      In those days, what I personally knew about the Beatles came from a silly cartoon series on Saturday mornings. It featured some guys with Brit accents pretending to be the voices of The Lads.  The music was real Beatles music and I and my classmates could at least sing catches of the popular early music that had swept the nation, more or less, starting in 1964. 

There was one person among the 25,000 I did know, and when I think of the Beatles in this period a guy in my old neighborhood comes to mind.   Joey O'Leary was a teen-aged kid of about fifteen I think when Beatles came around. He was  an older brother of a next-door playmate of mine, Tim.   Joey (or Joe, Jr.) was a HUGE Beatles fan. He also dug Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix and that love of music turned onto his wanting to start his own band.    

Joey, like hundreds or thousands of  others guys,  put together his first band about the time The Beatles broke up in 1970.  Joey had a lot of Beatle posters and I remember hearing their later albums playing over and over when he and his friends would gather for band meetings.  Tim and I got to play a couple  of the albums when we got a little older. Truth is, it took me a few more years to get into the more mature Beatles albums.  It wasn't that I didn't like them, but at 12-13 years old "Eleanor Rigby" and "Revolution #9" sounded a  lot less accessible than "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Ticket to Ride".  

 Joey and the guys--the next-oldest brother Danny was in the band, too, I think--played a bit professionally around the San Jose area. I remember hearing him playing that guitar over and over from across the wooden fence that separated us. He and the band would also rehearse in the family garage.  Tim and I sat on the curb outside the garage in the late evening to hear the group.  The music got loud. My parents put up with it--they were friends with the family.  But one of the neighbors on the other  side of the street called the cops one night around dusk on a Summer night. 

At first, this was exciting stuff for Tim and myself.  Cops on Latimer Avenue!  I was both scared and excited to be on the periphery of it all. The cops left soon and the music stopped.  

His band never got far, he tried going solo for a while but nothing worked. Nothing much seemed to work out for Joey, except girls dug him and from what I saw they were all looked impossibly pretty.   Joey must have had some of the swagger of a John Lennon because they weren't after him for his money .  If all you needed was "love", Joey was not unlike a Beatle. And he had a couple other things in common with John Lennon, none of them to do with limousines, professional offers,  or music royalties. 

Joey fell into hard drugs somewhere along the way, but, unlike a rock star, he had a harder time paying for his habits. Some crimes here and there got him before a judge.  He got sent into the Marines to avoid real jail time--a popular option for young men at the time.  Then he went into prison after the Marines couldn't mold him and let him loose.  Then back  into hard drugs and into crime.  His parents disowned him after he beat up his dad one late night out in the front of their house. My parents forbid me to go near the O'Leary's house if Joey ever did show up at the house, which I never noticed he did. 

 Tim stopped talking about Joey very much.   

We moved away in late 1974 when my dad got a job promotion in another state. Joey himself died a year later at Christmas 1975 when a high-speed chase with some cops up in Oregon ended with he and his new "band" in a robbery getaway car hitting a concrete median on a highway overpass. He robbed a store, or so his mom told my mom in a letter. His mom wrote  about all these young, beautiful ladies who showed up for his funeral in long flowing dresses.  "Joey's Gypsies" Mrs. O' Leary called them.  

 I hoped Joey didn't suffer at the end. When he was sober and not high on other things, Joey was a nice guy.  The fact that he had all those Beatles records and played them on hot summer nights has become a part of the better memories of my youth.     

Some pics from the San Francisco part of the tour, featuring Joan Baez and Mimi Farmer as well. If you want to hear a bit of a recording of "Day Tripper" from the 35 minute Beatles set, it's featured on my main page this month.

NFL Football: Shootings and Viscous Beatings Now Part of "Fan Culture"?

(above, police try to get security situation established after shooting in the parking lot outside Candlestick Park, San Francisco after a Niner-Raider game on August 20th 2011.)


Last Saturday night, the San Francisco Forty-Niners and the Oakland Raiders played a meaningless exhibition football game. It was the so-called annual "Battle of the Bay". Normally this minor event, minor in all ways given the records of the teams these last seven or eight years, has all the newsworthiness of a 30-second wrap-up segment on local news or ESPN or NFL-TV.

Fan fights at football and baseball games at San Francisco's Candlestick Park and other venues are nothing new. I've been to Candlestick many times and saw how excessive taunters, drunken rowdies and plain stupid people would get into brief brawls before they were escorted to the holding pens to wait for the law to deal with them or just kicked out of the stadium.

I've witnessed fights--more like scuffles--among inebriates in the parking lots before and after the games. They were usually a mild distraction for people getting to and from the stadium and usually were not serious.

What happened Saturday is an exception, a ramping up of violence that now includes gunplay and fights that appear to be more related to some type of hooliganism on a broad scale.


Both teams have played some of the most really mediocre football in their respective NFC/AFC divisions over the past few seasons. The Raiders have been a shadow of their once legendary selves, as have the Forty Niners the onetime "Team of the 80's"' Just watching the Forty Niners new coach Jim Harbaugh and his staff trying to reboot 2005's Number One draft pick Alex Smith into the starting quarterback role--yet again--- after six seasons of sub-par play is painful enough.


But to see this low-rent rivalry turn so ugly is much, much worse and totally inappropriate.

Violence is never a great thing. But at a sporting event with kids and ordinary fans being put into danger over a lousy exhibition game is way over the top and needs to stop now.

Some thugs, strident fans, gang members, meth-addled gun hoods, whatever, decided it would be a good thing to come to a game and create havoc. Seventy people of both sexes were ejected from the game for fighting. (The normal is about twenty.) Shots were fired. Blood was spilled. At least one person is on the hospital with multiple gun-shot wounds. No arrests have been made in the multiple shootings mostly after the game, which raises serious questions about stadium security, which was supposed to be on heightened alert.

I was glad to see this morning that the 49ers have banned tailgating parties after the start of the games and will pull season tickets for any fans who instigate violence.

One can't expect a perfect world inside a sports exhibition. A friend of mine once got hit in the face for accidently spilling a part of his beer on a guy's shoes. I guess there is some connection between male pride and a sports event which brings out the pathetic losers who saw one too many Steven Seagal movies growing up.

But, given the prices that the NFL charges for their games and the parking fees and the concession prices, decent people with wives and children can and should expect reasonable security. If not, let their be no more "Battle of the Bay" exhibition or regular season games at candlestick until the cops and the 49er organization at least get their act together.

The San Francisco Giants Win 106th "World Series"! Their First Series Win Since 1954!

The last time The Giants won the Series they were playing in New York and Willie Mays (below) was their star player.  In 1954 Eisenhower was President and Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  The top television show in the USA was "I Love Lucy" with Lucille Ball and her bandleader husband Desi Arnez.  Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize that year for his novella "The Old Man and the Sea" and other great works. And gasoline was only 21 cents a gallon at the pumps in the 48 states of the Union!     

They have gone to the World Series four times since they moved the franchise to San Francisco.  The were eliminated twice in the Seventh and final games in 1962 and 2002.  But this time they won it all in a 3-1 victory in the fifth game, a win fueled  by a great double-digit strike out performance by Tim Lincecum and a game-breaking three run home run by the old man of the team, Edgar Renteria!  

It was about 42 years since my dad took me to Candlestick Park to see Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry face the Atlanta Braves in a regular season game.  The game tonight--and that final strikeout by ace "closer" Brian Wilson was a great moment for me and millions of Giants fans!  Whether this was their first year as a fan of the team of their 56th, this is a very sweet night for the fans of the Orange and Black!

This year was "Next Year"!   The Giants have made it!  Thanks  guys.       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Along Highway 101--Oregon and California Beaches and Towns

Here's a family taking a few pictures on beach near Coos Bay, Oregon. The area is known for its large sanddunes and unspoiled terrain.

A few shots of some Pacific landscapes and assorted near-by towns that I took last month on seperate trips in Oregon and Northern California.

Jacksonville, Oregon--Oldest Town in Southern Oregon

Along the old highway leading into town.

I took a trip up the road to Jacksonville, a town once called "Table Rock City" when it was founded in the 1850's. It still retains a good deal of its architectural past when it was rowdy and not so friendly (if you were Chinese or Native American) gold rush town. Hope you enjoy a few of the photos.



Here's a bit of video someone shot last Summer (above)

Super Bowl XXIII The Greatest Finish in an NFL Football Championship

My favorite Super Bowl hands down is the 1989 San Francisco 49ers--Cincinnati Bengals game.  It was the first one that featured a winning touchdown drive in the last three minutes of the game. Quarterback Joe Montana took his squad the length of the field.   Wide Receiver Jerry Rice caught 11 passes to set a record for the contest.  But it was the little-used receiver who was an off-season car salesman, John Taylor, who caught the winning pass. 

The Super Bowl is probably the most overhyped sports event on the globe. Many of the games are blow-outs, overshadowed  by too much commercial glitz.  But this one--at least for 49er fans--- lived up to the  hype.

In 2006, NFL.com voted this game the greatest Super Bowl of all time. The announcer was Lon Simmons, long time voice of the 'Niners. 

       

The Golden Gate Bridge And Other Destinations

The Bridge herself from a shot I took in May of this year up at the Marin Headlands north of the City. This area is part of the Presidio National REcreation Area. It was formally Camp Baker, a 19th and early 20th Century army outpost with bunkers up on the hills to ward off attack by sea. No hostilities ever occurred.

The Golden Gate Bridge always makes my heart skip a beat when I have driven over it. It was supposed to be impossible to build but it was. From 1933 to 1937, in the teeth of the Great Depression, one of the man-made wonders of the world rose from this great meeting of ocean, mountains and one of the most beautiful cities in North America.

It is a melancholy place as well, given the fog and such. Over 1,300 people have taken there lives here since it has been opened. Still, for most visitors, this is a grand spectacle that's hard to find anywhere else.

Some of the other photos were taken on my way back from The City, north along Interstate Five.

Cop Shooting in Bay Area Stirs Racial Divide

It happened on New Year's Eve, just three weeks before the Barack Obama Inaugural; a white police officer drew his gun and shot an already arrested and subdued black man dead in Oakland, California.   

 In this time of apparent progress toward a less racially tense society, this is reminiscent of the Rodney King beating back in Los Angeles in 1992 and other more lethel encounters between police and black suspects in Cincinnati, Detroit and other American cities.  One study indicated a black suspect apprehended or detained by police is eight times more likely to be shot and killed than a white suspect.

   The shooting was caught by bystanders on cell phone cameras who were watching the police dealing with a alleged  disturbance involving several young African-American men.   The victim, 22 year-old Oscar Grant (pictured above), a young father,  was surrounded by a passel of BART Transit Cops from  the train platform and was on the ground when killed.

It has since sparked outrage both in public meetings, on the Internet and the mainstream media, and has led to peaceful protests at Oakland City Hall as well as rioting and breaking windows and liting fires by splinter protesters in  downtown Oakland who went more militant after the demonstration ended.    

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "The unarmed man killed by former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle on an Oakland train platform early New Year's Day put up a brief struggle with officers but had been restrained and had both arms behind him when he was shot in the back, police investigators said."

Mehserle--a two year veteran of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Force--was arrested today, two weeks after the crime,  by the District Attorney in Oakland and Alameda County.  He is being extradited back to California from Nevada.  He faces a murder charge.

  

Although his lawyers have not mounted a defense as yet, the intial reason reportedly given by Mehserle was that he only meant to use his "taser" (or stun gun) on the victim.  Instead, he mistook his automatic pistol for the taser.  The taser weapon issued to BART cops has yellow markings and weighs 8-9 ounces.  The automatic pistol he mistook for the stun gun has no yelllow markings and weighs 22-24 ounces.  

 

Anybody could make a mistake, some might say,but this policeman wasn't trained to be "anybody".  He was trained to be able to use judgement to prevent things like this from happening. He had training for five months in a police academy to know how to react to stress, and he could and should  have been weeded out by his instructors if he failed the psychological battery of tests to determine his stress-coping skills. 

 

 And was not in a life threatening situation: Mehsehle had a suspect on the ground and he was surrounded by fellow officers.  The video tape makes that clear:

 

 

 

Perhaps it is some sign of progress that the man who did the shooting faces murder charges.  But what if this had occured in a less public place than a transit station and no civilian-operated cameras  had been available?  Might this have gone down as a necessary use of force, protected by the old police code of the "Thin Blue Line"?  We will never know, but suffice to say a new Presidential Election result and a new year have not abated old racial tensions for America.  

San Francisco/Barbary Coast, Part Two

Or maybe they were doing something less "arty" at their place of work --I'm not sure.

From Asbury book on San Francisco's Underworld, Chapter Ten "Company, Girls!":
"The location of every brothel on the Barbary Coast, whether crib, cow-yard, or parlor house, was indicated at night by a red light which burned before its door from dusk to dawn, and during the day by a red shade behind at least one of the front windows. From some of the parlor houses also flapped signs, gaudily painted on wood or metal, which bore the name of the establishment and, sometimes, pertinent information about its inmates. Madame Gabrielle’s bagnio in Dupont Street (Grant Avenue), which she rebuilt in Commercial Street after the fire of 1906, displayed an ornate sign which depicted a huge insect lying at ease in a bed of fragrant flowers, surrounded by sweet-faced, simpering Cupids. Her place was called the Lively Flea. Near-by, another and an equally flamboyant sign ornamented the entrance of the Parisian Mansion, which was owned by Jerome Bassity and Madame Marcelle. Also on Commercial Street, during the first year or so of the present century, was a very popular French bawdy-house before which swung the cast-iron figure of a rooster, painted a brilliant scarlet and with a red light burning in its beak. The talons of the metal bird clutched a placard on which was painted the legend: “At the Sign of the Red Rooster.” In the hallway of this brothel was a smaller replica of the figure, and a sign similar to that outside except that it bore a shorter synonym for “rooster.” The Red Rooster was the property of Madame Lazarene, who also owned several other resorts, some of which were in the name of her husband, Labrodet. Instead of using signs, some of the parlor-house proprietors in Commercial and other streets affixed to their front doors or walls brass or copper plates, on each of which was stamped the street number of the resort and the first name of the woman who operated it. One brothel-keeper in Sacramento Street, who had formerly conducted a tea-room, achieved undying fame in the middle eighteen-nineties by nailing to her door a copper plate on which had been engraved this startling announcement: MADAME LUCY
YE OLDE WHORE SHOPPE.

Not unnaturally, this sign attracted a great deal of attention, but Madame Lucy removed it within a few days at the request of the police."



Here's a bit more on early San Francisco from the Herbert Asbury book and other sources. The opening video is from a 1905 film taken by an unknown photographer. It represents the only moving picture footage of San Francisco's main thoroughfare that has survived from before the Great Earth quake and Fire of 1906. It was only rediscovered by accident in the 1980's. This footage was taken only ten years after the Lumiere Brothers' early short silent films were first shown in Paris.
The large tower in the background is The Ferry Building, which mainly withstood the terrible 1906 disaster and still stands today. Many of the other buildings in this shot were destroyed. One Market Street Building to be burnt to the ground was the Palace Hotel, the largest and most opulent of its kind on the West Coast.

The Barbary Coast, 1933, republished 2002 by Thunder Mouth Press

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Herbert Asbury

(Note: This is the first of a two-part review.)


"The Barbary Coast" is a gritty but fascinating background book on the social and political history of San Francisco. No major city in America ever had such a pedigree of chaos--going from a small coastal village of about 800 souls--called Yueba Buena under the Mexican flag---to a metropolis that exploded with teeming humanity after the discovery of gold in the Sacramento River area about 100 miles away from the Bay Area.


From 1848 onwards a whole city burst forth with tens of thousands of men out to make it rich either in gold strikes or in gambling, shopkeeping or pimping, banking or strong-arm robbery. In the first three years of San Francisco's s existence, much of the city was burned to the ground several times (often by arsonists, sometimes by accident.) Great houses built on steep hillsides and little shanty neighborhoods alike went up in flames. Every time the city rebuilt itself again starting almost before the smouldering wreckage of whole neighborhoods of canvas hovels brick-and-mortar businesses had to be pulled down and carted off. Many of the short-lived enterprises were built from wood pulled out of merchant ships that had been abandoned by their crews "en masse" to go to the where the gold was reported to be. One of the larger cast-off "hulks" was used as the city's only jail house.

It was a frontier city indeed, with all the hazards and potential that came with being so isolated and having hordes of mostly young men coming not only from from "Back East" but from China, France, Chile, Britain and her colonies, Mexico, et al, to make individual fortunes. Most of the men never got their personal El Dorado needless to say. Many died without their families knowing what became of them. Others barely made it home with the clothes on their backs. Some miners made their fortunes in back-breaking labor panning and digging along the Sacramento and Feather Rivers only to lose the precious gain in the gambling dens of the city. According to Asbury:

"Once their gold was exhausted, the spendthrift miners hurried back to the gold-fields, supported by a sublime faith that they would immediately make another rich find and so start anew the same vicious circle. Even those who hadn't enough left to furnish outfits or to pay their transportation to the diggings didn't lose hope entirely. Scorning to degrade themselves, as they thought, by performing ordinary labor, they diligently prospected the city streets, the vacant lots, and the sand-hills behind the town; many religiously panned the daily sweepings from stores, hotels, saloons, brothels, and gambling houses, which occasionally yielded a few ounces of gold dust."



The Mexican War had just ended before the famous Gold Strike at Sutter's Mill in January 1848. Many of the earliest "49ers" and "Argonauts" as they called themselves were back-east Americans who were pumped up with a sense of entitlement to all of California. They braved cholera via the wagon trains or malaria via the Panamanian Isthmus to get there. The new city had been a military outpost and cattle stockyard called "Yueba Buena" before 1848, settled by the missionaries and soldiers of the Spanish Empire in 1776 and later by the ranchers and merchants of Mexico (Of course the Bay Area was settled by Native-Americans long before that.) All of that legacy was stripped away by the gold fever of men rushing from the East to claim their new chunk of the USA.
Young white American criminals called "Hounds" attacked and murdered Hispanic and Chinese settlers in their respective little tent camps along the bay sides and the Pacific. After some of them were driven from town, new gangs took their place, mainly expatriate Australian ex-cons known as the "Sydney Ducks". These were non-gold seeking Aussies who congregated in a part of the city that was called "Sydney Town" before it was "The Barbary Coast". They were accused of setting fires in the city when the wind was blowing away from their neighborhood in order to go in arson-related crime sprees of homes and businesses.
Twice (in 1851 and 1856) the city was in such an uproar that the business men and other citizens formed "Vigilante Committees". They superseded what passed for due process of law among the often crooked politicians who modeled themselves after the Tammany Hall political machine that ran New York City at the same time. "Justice" came for many very fast and at the end of a hangman's noose for returning "Hounds", "Ducks" and any other criminal caught and tried by a quickly convened jury.
Other scofflaws charged with lesser offenses were lucky and got off with jail or banishment. Some innocent men who happened to look like wanted fugitives barely escaped capital punishment when the real criminals were found; many others suffered on thumped-up charges, especially Irish-Catholics, blacks and Chinese emigrants.




Saloons, gambling dens and houses of prostitution proliferated. The latter were quite popular and very expensive. Ashbury estimates that by the end of 1849, out of a population of between 20,000 and 25,000, only about 300 were women and an estimated almost two-thirds of those were prostitutes. While prostitution was legal in San Francisco until 1914, the "parlors", "houses" and low class "cribs" where women worked were also unregulated. Some women did quite well in the early days of the city, but most suffered the fate one associates with the modern sex trafficking trade in parts of North America, Asia and the Arab World.

One of the sadder chapters of the city were the large number of Chinese women imported in the 1860's and 70's to be de facto slaves to the Chinatown crime rings that ran the prostitution and opium dens in that part of the city. "The Slaves of Chinatown" were often taken right off a ship and given "contracts" by their employers which gave them little money and would add time onto their indentured tenure for any illness they suffered. Women of all races plying the oldest profession on the streets fared little better. Church organizations tried to stop some of the street activity but they were thwarted by the lack of other available employment for women and the graft that the police and City Hall officals for keeping the brothels open during periodic "reform campaigns".


Dens of gambling and drinking and a few bawdy theaters like the famous Bella Union were among the first structures in the city to be built of brick and mortar. Many men and not a few women made fortunes from the wide-open practices of vice that created "The Barbary Coast", which hugged the northern shore of the city just above the downtown area and the nearby piers. While other areas had their share of vice joints, The Barbary Coast was the civic epicenter of adult entertainment on the West Coast for decades after the gold ran out.



The forces of human greed enterprising corruption in the city far outstripped the foundations of reliable law and order needed to contain it. Within a few years, San Francisco was the 10th largest city in America and easily the largest west of St. Louis.

What would Steve McQueen drive?

In keeping with the San Francisco theme I've started, here's a inspired commercial from 1997 shot in The City By the Bay. It includes an computer-imagined Mc Queen (as Frank Bullitt) still zipping around the hills of San Francisco as in the 1968 movie, though this time with less urgency and in a German-made Ford Puma.

It looks like a nice car, but is it a worthy successor to the Mustang, especially the Mustang GTO? Ford only built the Puma for six years and it was only brought out in the Europe market.

Anyway, I'm glad Steve kept his original wheels, as you can see at 00:45. And, yes, he still has a bike, too.

San Francisco and Other Bay Area Sites, part two

What photo album of San Francisco would be coomplete without one of these little wonders. Believe it or not, I've only ridden in one of these once despite all my visits to the city.

Oscar Wilde said: "It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world."

I'm not sure about how San Fran stacks up to Heaven, but here is the last part of my photo series on a personal tour of the City By The Bay, with a little Oakland and Berkeley thrown in.

San Francisco and Other Bay Area Sites, part one

I start this album off with a classic "postcard" shot I took of the bridge, taken from the southern end of this incredible landmark, which opened in 1937.

This is a compilation of photographs I've taken over the years on my visits to my favorite American City and its suburbs. I've added a few other pictures from the web to round out "the tour" I offer here.