San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 | Page 2

hate and desire for revenge to be afterwards prosecuted to bloody issues.
The miseries generally endured were however sometimes enlivened and relieved by the most unexpected calls for exertion. A passenger described his voyage from New York to San Francisco in 1849, in company with several hundred others in a steamer of small size and the most limited capacity in all respects, as an amusing instance of working one's passage already paid for in advance. The old craft went groaning, creaking, laboring and pounding on for seven months before she arrived at her destination. Short of provisions, every sailing vessel that was encountered was boarded for supplies, and almost every port on the Atlantic and Pacific was entered for the same purpose. Out of fuel, every few days, axes were distributed, and crew and passengers landed to cut down trees to keep up steam for a few days longer. He expressed his conviction that every point, headland, island and wooded tract on the coast from the Cape to San Francisco had not only been seen by him, but had resounded with the sturdy blows of his axe during the apparently interminable voyage. His experience, with the exception of the axe exercise, was that of thousands.
The extent to which the gold fever had impelled people on shipboard may be judged by the facts that from the first of January, 1849, five hundred and nine vessels arrived in the harbor of San Francisco; and the number of passengers in the same space of time was eighteen thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two. Previous to this time, one or two ships in the course of a year found their way through the Golden Gate and into the beautiful harbor of San Francisco in quest of hides, horns and tallow, and gave languid employment to two or three Americans settled on the sand hills, and engaged in collecting these articles of trade and commerce. In the closing days of 1849, there were ninety-four thousand, three hundred and forty-four tons of shipping in the harbor. The stream of immigration moved over the Plains, likewise; and through privation, fatigue, sickness, and the strife of the elements, passed slowly and painfully on to the goal of their hopes.
Thus pouring into California in every direction and by every route, this strange and heterogeneous mass of men, the representatives of every occupation, honest and dishonest, creditable and disgraceful; of every people under the sun, scattered through the gulches and ravines in the mountains, or grouped themselves at certain points in cities, towns and villages of canons or adobe. Perhaps never in the world's history did cities spring into existence so instantaneously, and certainly never was their population so strangely diverse in language, habits and customs. Of course gamblers of every kind and color; criminals of every shade and degree of atrocity; knaves of every grade of skill in the arts of fraud and deceit abounded in every society and place. In these early times gold was abundant, and any kind of honest labor was most richly and extravagantly rewarded. The honest, industrious and able men of every community, therefore, applied themselves strictly to business and would not be diverted from it by any considerations of duty or of patriotism. Studiously abstaining from politics; positively refusing to accept office; shirking constantly and systematically all jury and other public duty, which, onerous in every community, was doubly so, as they thought, in that new country, they seemed never to reflect that there was a portion, and that the worst, of the population, who would take advantage of their remissness, and direct every institution of society to the promotion of their own nefarious purposes.
Absorbed in their own pursuits, confident that a short time would enable them to realize their great object of making a fortune and then leaving the country, the better portion of the community abandoned the control of public affairs to whoever might be willing or desirous to assume it. Of course there was no lack of men who had no earthly objection to assume all public duties and fill all public offices. Politicians void of honesty and well-skilled in all the arts of intrigue, whose great end and aim in life was to live out of the public treasury and grow rich by public plunder, and whose most blissful occupation was to talk politics in pot houses and groggeries; men of desperate fortunes who sought to mend them, not by honest labor, but by opportunities for official pickings and stealings; bands of miscreants resembling foul and unclean birds which clamor and fight for the chance of settling down upon and devouring the body to which their keen scent hag directed them; all were astir and with but little effort obtained all that they desired. The offices were thus filled by rapacious