The City That Was | Page 7

The trouble was started by a sailor known as Kanaka Pete, who lived in
the What Cheer House, over a woman known as Iodoform Kate.
Kanaka Pete chased the man he had marked to the Little Silver Dollar,
where he halted and punctured him. The by-product of his gun made
some holes in the front of the Eye Wink, which were proudly kept as
souvenirs, and were probably there until it went out in the fire. This
was low life, the lowest of the low.
Until the last decade almost anything except the commonplace and the
expected might happen to a man on the waterfront. The cheerful
industry of shanghaing was reduced to a science. A citizen taking a

drink in one of the saloons which hung out over the water might be
dropped through the floor into a boat, or he might drink with a stranger
and wake in the forecastle of a whaler bound for the Arctic. Such an
incident is the basis of Frank Norris's novel, "Moran of the Lady
Letty," and although the novel draws it pretty strong, it is not
exaggerated. Ten years ago the police, the Sailors' Union, and the
foreign consuls, working together, stopped all this.
Kearney street, a wilder and stranger Bowery, was the main
thoroughfare of these people. An exiled Californian, mourning over the
city of his heart, has said:
"In a half an hour of Kearney street I could raise a dozen men for any
wild adventure, from pulling down a statue to searching for the Cocos
Island treasure." This is hardly an exaggeration. it was the Rialto of the
desperate, Street of the Adventurers.
These are a few of the elements which made the city strange and gave it
the glamour of romance which has so strongly attracted such men as
Stevenson, Frank Norris and Kipling. This life of the floating
population lay apart from the regular life of the city, which was
distinctive in itself.
The Californian is the second generation of a picked and mixed
ancestry. The merry, the adventurous, often the desperate, always the
brave, deserted the South and New England in 1849 to rush around the
Horn or to try the perils of the plains. They found there a land already
grown old in the hands of the Spaniards - younger sons of hidalgo and
many of them of the best blood of Spain. To a great extent the pioneers
intermarried with Spanish women; in fact, except for a proud little
colony here and there, the old, aristocratic Spanish blood is sunk in that
of the conquering race. Then there was an influx of intellectual French
people, largely overlooked in the histories of the early days; and this
Latin leaven has had its influence.
Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work
very hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock,
the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the
Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the Yankee.
He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral
rather than immoral in his personal habits, and easy to meet and to
know.

Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it off
from any other population of the country. This sense is almost Latin in
its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin blood.
The true Californian lingers in the north; for southern California has
been built up by "lungers" from the East and middle West and is
Eastern in character and feeling.
Almost has the Californian developed a racial physiology. He tends to
size, to smooth symmetry of limb and trunk, to an erect, free carriage;
and the beauty of his women is not a myth. The pioneers were all men
of good body, they had to be to live and leave descendants. The bones
of the weaklings who started for El Dorado in 1849 lie on the plains or
in the hill-cemeteries of the mining camps. Heredity began it; climate
has carried it on. All things that grow in California tend to become
large, plump, luscious. Fruit trees, grown from cuttings of Eastern stock,
produce fruit larger and finer, if coarser in flavor, than that of the parent
tree. As the fruits grow, so the children grow. A normal, healthy,
Californian woman plays out-of-doors from babyhood to old age. The
mixed stock has given her that regularity of features which goes with a
blend of bloods; the climate has perfected and rounded her figure;
out-of-doors exercise from earliest youth has given her a deep bosom;
the cosmetic mists have made her complexion soft and brilliant. At the
University of California, where the student body is nearly all native, the