San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 | Page 2

Stephen Palfrey Webb
without sympathy or affection, all tended to
make these trips, for the most part, all but intolerable, and in many
cases left feelings of 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
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