San Francisco!

The Wildest City on Earth

After all those months, Jack finally rides a whale boat toward the Long Wharf — so ready to start digging that Mountain Jim has to joke, “Don’t start diggin’ up the streets — folks might not appreciate it.” A hilltop telegraph has announced the ship’s arrival, and it seems like all of San Francisco has turned out.

Seagulls flocked in the air like confetti.

— By the Great Horn Spoon!, Chapter 8

Jack is dazzled: there are “tattooed East India sailors and silent Chinese with pigtails,” Mexicans in long serapes, Chileans, mule skinners, businessmen, and miners “in jackboots and red flannel shirts, with the mud of the diggings still in their beards.” Peddlers shout from every direction — “Red flannel shirts, gents! They don’t show the dirt!” The whole city rang with hammers, because buildings were going up everywhere.

⚓ The Ghost Fleet

Here’s the wildest part: when ships arrived in San Francisco, the sailors would often abandon them and run off to find gold. The captains couldn’t stop them. So the empty ships just… sat there. At the peak, more than 700 abandoned ships clogged the bay. Fleischman describes the masts as “thick as a pine forest.”

Some of those ships were turned into stores, hotels, even jails. Others were buried as the city grew out over the water. To this day, when construction crews dig in downtown San Francisco, they sometimes hit the hull of a Gold Rush ship buried under the streets.

How Two Broke Travelers Got Their First Gold

Jack and Praiseworthy arrive with almost no money. So how do they get to the gold fields? Praiseworthy — the proper English butler — sets up shop on the wharf and cuts miners’ hair! He’d practiced on Jack during the voyage, and now he charges for it. Their “adventure in barbering” pays their expenses with gold dust to spare.

It’s a perfect example of the real Gold Rush truth: sometimes the smartest way to get gold wasn’t to dig for it — it was to provide a service to the people who did.

The People Who Were Already Here

The Forty-Niners weren’t arriving to an empty land. Californios — Spanish-speaking families who’d lived in California for generations — were quickly overwhelmed as 90,000 newcomers flooded in, and many lost the land their families had held for decades.

And California’s Native peoples, who had lived here for thousands of years, faced something far worse during these years. We’ll talk about that honestly at Stop 10. It’s a hard part of the history, but an important one — and Native communities in California survived it and are still here today.