Drink by Iain Gately

Author:Iain Gately
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781440631269
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-04T04:25:07+00:00

21 THE KING OF SAN FRANCISCO

After refreshing himself in the pure mountain air of Salt Lake City and taking a last “liquor up” with his traveling companions, Sir Richard Burton exited the United States via San Francisco. He paused on his voyage home in Mexico, where, even after eight months on the road through a nation in the making, he was shocked by the chaos and took “philosophical consolation in various experiments touching the influence of Mezcal brandy, the Mexican National drink, upon the human mind and body.” The tumult of Mexico, exaggerated by mescal, sweetened Burton’s perception of America, and in particular the last portion of its soil that he had touched. San Francisco, true to Richard Henry Dana’s prophecy, had become a considerable place, thanks to the gold rush.

It is hard to overstate the impact of the California gold rush on the American and global economies. America had always been short of specie; and now its citizens were digging it by the sackful out of the California and Nevada mountains—$550 million worth, in 1850s prices, in the first decade alone. The rumor that America had not just free land but free gold, too, spread around the world, and people from Pacific and Atlantic nations set out for the new Eldorado. Hundreds of ships of all descriptions piled into San Francisco Bay, where they were abandoned by their passengers and crews, who set off for the mines. Some boats were converted into bars and bunkhouses for the next wave of arrivals, others were stripped of their timbers, which were used to construct shanties in the sand dunes ashore. By 1850, a city of twenty-five thousand people had arisen, which had already won itself an international reputation as being the most expensive and lawless place on earth. Prices for accommodation, food, and clothing were between ten and a hundred times the prevailing rates in New York. A boiled egg cost a dollar, a quart of whiskey thirty dollars, “the rent of a tiny cigar store barely large enough for one man to stand in was $4,000 a month,” and it was cheaper to ship laundry to Honolulu or Canton than to have it done in situ.

The inflated prices were paid without a murmur by miners returning from the Sierras with their pockets full of nuggets and gold dust. Many were rich for the first time in their lives and wished to celebrate by spending their new wealth. Facilities were constructed in San Francisco to accommodate this desire—principally bars. Like the sailors of Dana’s generation, who, after months afloat, passed their hours ashore in drunkenness, the miners recovered from a stint in the mountains with a spree in San Francisco. Indeed, the city could be said to have arisen solely for the purpose of encouraging binge drinking, and as it grew it remained faithful to its original spirit.

The population of San Francisco was overwhelmingly male. In late 1849, its female residents were reckoned to number fewer than three hundred, the majority of whom were Hispanic prostitutes.

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