The result can be
imagined. The city was mainly of canvas either in the form of tents or
of crude canvas and wooden houses. The few substantial buildings stood
like rocks in a tossing sea. No attempt, of course, had been made as
yet toward public improvements. The streets were ankle-deep in dust or
neck-deep in mud. A great smoke of dust hung perpetually over the city,
raised by the trade winds of the afternoon. Hundreds of ships lay at
anchor in the harbor. They had been deserted by their crews, and, before
they could be re-manned, the faster clipper ships, built to control the
fluctuating western trade, had displaced them, so that the majority were
fated never again to put to sea.
Newcomers landed at first on a flat beach of deep black sand, where they
generally left their personal effects for lack of means of
transportation. They climbed to a ragged thoroughfare of open sheds and
ramshackle buildings, most of them in the course of construction.
Beneath crude shelters of all sorts and in great quantities were goods
brought in hastily by eager speculators on the high prices. The four
hundred deserted ships lying at anchor in the harbor had dumped down on
the new community the most ridiculous assortment of necessities and
luxuries, such as calico, silk, rich furniture, mirrors, knock-down
houses, cases and cases of tobacco, clothing, statuary,
mining-implements, provisions, and the like.
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