Shipshape and Frisco Fashion

NATHAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

JOANNE: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

ED: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

NATHAN: And we’re going to start off today in Coloma, California a little town up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. 170 years ago this month, a man named James Marshall was working outside a sawmill. He saw something about the size of a pat of butter glinting under the water flowing from the mill. He called to a man named James Brown, who was working on the mill.

MALE SPEAKER: Mr. Marshall called me to him. I went and found him examining the bedrock. He said, “this is a curious rock, I’m afraid that it will give us some trouble.” Said I to him, “What makes you think so?” He said he had seen the blossom of gold.

JAMES DELGADO: That sun-struck speck of gold would spark the biggest mass migration of humanity by sea since the Crusades.

ED: That’s maritime archaeologist James Delgado, and that mass migration he’s talking about, that’s, of course, the California Gold Rush. Over the course of the gold rush, more than 300,000 people arrived from all over the world. They were trying to strike it rich, either in the goldfields or in the new boom-towns springing up across California. And no place saw miners or change arrive faster than San Francisco. By 1860, it would be a city of 60,000 people. But when gold was first discovered, it wasn’t quite so bustling.

JAMES DELGADO: San Francisco in January of 1848 was a small village perched on the end of a muddy cove, and a population of about 400 people. It was a sleepy little outpost at the edge of the world. Between January 1, 1849 and the end of the year, 764 ships just left American ports alone, and there were probably some 500 more that sailed from everywhere else around the world, including Hong Kong, Valparaiso, Chile, France, Great Britain, Denmark, Australia, you name it. Everybody came by sea. And so, as the ships started to come in, at first in the dozens and then up to 90, to 100 ships in any given week, it just simply overwhelmed San Francisco. One observer literally felt it was a forest of ships masts.

JOANNE: That forest of mass grew thicker each week. Because, while dozens of new ships were coming into the harbor, almost none were leaving. Most sailors jumped ship as soon as they arrived, eager to find gold themselves and captains couldn’t find anyone willing to take their places. So the ships stacked up in the Bay making it harder by the day to unload people and goods. On the shore, men crowded into makeshift tents wherever they could basically find a scrap of land. In other words, it was a mess.

JAMES DELGADO: San Francisco suddenly became this central hub, this [INAUDIBLE], this place in which all the shipping of the world was descending. You needed facilities to house, feed, water these people and to sell them what you thought or what they thought they’d need. So, how do you do that when lumber is $1 a foot, when a nail cost $0.25, when a brick’s $1? And we’re talking on a scale of times 10 in today’s money, if not more.

JOANNE: Some entrepreneurial ship owners saw an opportunity. They couldn’t leave, but all of a sudden there might be a profit in staying put. All they had to do was beach their ships in the mudflats on the edge of the village.

JAMES DELGADO: 275 of them were converted into floating buildings. They turned them into warehouses, they turned them into a bonded storage facilities for the government. They turned them into offices, they turned them into hotels, even private residences. There was a restaurant in one and the town jail was in a tiny little ship named Eufemia that was more right in the heart of the waterfront.

JOANNE: Almost over night, that forest of masts had transformed into a strange new floating city.

JAMES DELGADO: A Venice, as one guy called it, built of pine rather than marble. The only city in the world that he had visited other than Venice itself where Main Street was only visible at low tide and the entire central part of the city noticeably swayed as the tide and the wind moved the water.

JOANNE: As the years passed, San Francisco stabilized in more ways than one. A city government formed, tents and ships were replaced by timber homes and warehouses, and city fathers were desperate for more land to build on. So sand and rocks and trash were pushed out to fill the muddy Cove with solid land.

JAMES DELGADO: 75 of those ships ended up buried beneath the rapidly increasing and encroaching waterfront. The city front extends until finally, by order of the state, they pass a law stopping the filling because otherwise, they argued, San Francisco Bay would have been completely filled and Oakland would have been a suburb of the city. In that way, this “Venice of Pine” ultimately becomes solid ground by 1855.

JOANNE: Those boats are still buried under San Francisco’s downtown today. Delgado has excavated a few of them himself. He says it’s easy to look at the story of the ships as mere curiosity, but they reveal something deeper about what Americans were looking to claim when they came to San Francisco. And it wasn’t just gold.

JAMES DELGADO: The story of San Francisco is a metaphor for the gold rush, but it is not an accident. When gold was discovered, it tapped into longstanding American desires to take San Francisco Bay as this great port in the Pacific. To use it as a springboard for expanding into the Asian market, and, as well, to fulfill the dreams of manifest destiny and move the country from sea to shining sea. And it leaves us with a lasting legacy that, to this day, is somewhat mythologized.