Things moved slowly in those days—­so slowly that in 1784 the pueblo had but fourteen houses and sixty inhabitants.

Let us turn back the hands of the clock to the time when the pueblo straggled over the sand hills which faced the water of the bay of Saint Francis, under the shadow of Loma Alta.  What do we see?  Where today the Merchants Exchange Building, central office of San Francisco’s commercial life, heaves its bulk into the air was the cabin of Jacob Leese, trader.  Houses were few and far between, and business was something to be done when there was nothing else to do.

From the Plaza, then but a block or so from the waterside, two main roads trailed off through the sand dunes.  One went to the southwest, winding among the hills toward the Mission Dolores, and the other in a generally northwesterly direction out past the lagoon of the washerwomen to the Presidio of San Francisco, the seat of the military government.  Sleepy, content to bask in the sunshine that flooded its sand hills and kept back the banks of fog that loomed above the higher eminence’s separating the cove from the ocean, Yerba Buena dreamed, not of the future in store for it, but of the next fiesta, of the coming barbecue at Miguel Noe’s rancho, or of the projected cock fight on Sunday at the Mission Dolores.

To this port came occasionally a Yankee whale ship for fresh water, or some enterprising trader with shawls and combs and trinkets for the women, to barter for hides and tallow with the dons from the south and the great interior ranchos.

Up the coast some Russians had established a settlement, much to the disquiet of the authorities, who looked upon this as an encroachment of barbarians menacing Spanish power.  Rezanov, plenipotentiary of the Czar, was a man of charming personality, however, and was able to lull the suspicions of the indolent Spanish officials and lay his plans for a coup that never took place.  From afar Britain looked with interest upon this strip of coast with its matchless harbor, and regretted that Drake had not discovered it when he wintered his ship close by in 1579.  Thus Yerba Buena sprawled and dreamed in the sunshine, unmindful of the web of destiny being woven about it.

Followed then the war with Mexico and the occupation by the officers and men of the United States sloop-of-war Portsmouth under Commodore John Montgomery, who broke the American flag to the breeze in the Plaza.

In 1848 gold was discovered by James W. Marshall in the tail-race of General Sutter’s mill, El Dorado county, and almost overnight San Francisco was transformed from a hamlet into a pulsing city, overcome with the rush of newcomers, the population in two years growing almost to twenty thousand.

California became a state in 1850 without ever having gone through a probationary period as a territory.  In the late sixties the great Comstock Lode, in Nevada, poured a flood of wealth into San Francisco, and in 1869, one hundred years after the first white man looked upon San Francisco Bay, came the railroad, bringing an increasing influx of people from the East.  The opening of the markets of China and Japan led to the establishment of a trade that has made San Francisco the focal port of the West.