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Emporium of the Pacific
In the fall of 1849, the village of San Francisco had barely 2,000 residents. Just one year later, the population had grown to nearly 35,000, and it had become the West’s first full-fledged city. A single house lot on Portsmouth Square grew in price from $16.50 to $45,000 in just three years. Everything was brought in by sea at first -- whisky, shovels, lumber all the way from the forests of Maine, even a cargo of cats, ferried in to take on the rats that ruled the waterfront. "It was one of the world's great commercial
empires, one of the world's great cities within a matter of 4 or 5
years. The simple reason was gold. There's no other way to explain it.
Half a billion dollars worth of gold was pulled out of California's
mines and streams between 1849 and 1860. Half a billion dollars in 19th
century money. That's an extraordinary amount of money. It absolutely
defined what the city was." Most of the gold the miners extracted from rivers, streams and hillsides washed into the pockets of merchants and bankers -- cooks, lawyers, stagecoach operators, saloonkeepers, madams -- anyone who filled their needs. On the corner of Washington and Grant Streets, an enterprising Chinese immigrant named Wah Lee opened California's first large hand laundry, charged five dollars a dozen to wash shirts -- and made a killing. Joshua Abraham Norton arrived in San Francisco with $40,000 in his pocket, and swiftly turned it into a quarter of a million by shrewd investments. But when prices collapsed, Norton was ruined. His mind snapped under the strain. At the peremptory request and
desire of a large majority of the citizens of the United States, I
Joshua Norton, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United
States.
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The Program | People | Places | Events | Resources | Lesson Plans | Quiz © 2001 THE WEST FILM PROJECT and WETA Credits |
“You came down after a year or so in the mines freezing
your butt off, working like a dog, living under absolute primitive
conditions. And here you got in San Francisco, a boat ride away, one of
the great metropolises with everything available to you, and you just
went crazy. You gambled, you bought, you whored around and you drank.
And the people who took your money were the ones who got rich. It's
just the way it was." 
When I landed here with my little company there were but
three families in the place and now the improvements are beyond all
conceptions. Homes in all directions, business brisk and money plenty.
Here will be the great emporium of the Pacific and eventually the
world. 
San Franciscans were delighted. Norton was given a special
uniform to wear while he wandered the streets, bowing graciously to
citizens he was convinced were his loyal subjects. Bartenders gave him
free drinks. The city directory listed him as "Norton, Joshua,
Emperor." And when he died, 30,000 of his former "subjects" turned out
for his funeral. 
"The town had a great sense of transience. Well,
transience always carries with it an air of possibility and that is one
of the great characteristics of San Francisco in the Golden Era. It was
still a time when a person could arrive and and seek out the possible.
Everything did seem possible. There were so many stories of people who
had risen from nothing to complete dominance. People who'd arrive in
San Francisco with 100 dollars in their pockets and ended up building
huge business blocks five years later. This was repeated over and over
and over again so that the town took on an air of a kind of rarified
demonstration of what the American Dream was all about, condensed,
packed into a few golden years."