Besides the gambling in cards there was gambling on a larger scale in city lots.  These were sold “On Change,” much as stocks are now sold on Wall Street.  Cash, at time of purchase, was always paid by the broker; but the purchaser had only to put up his margin.  He was charged at the rate of two or three per cent. a month on the difference, besides commissions.  The sand hills, some of them almost inaccessible to foot-passengers, were surveyed off and mapped into fifty vara lots—­a vara being a Spanish yard.  These were sold at first at very low prices, but were sold and resold for higher prices until they went up to many thousands of dollars.  The brokers did a fine business, and so did many such purchasers as were sharp enough to quit purchasing before the final crash came.  As the city grew, the sand hills back of the town furnished material for filling up the bay under the houses and streets, and still further out.  The temporary houses, first built over the water in the harbor, soon gave way to more solid structures.  The main business part of the city now is on solid ground, made where vessels of the largest class lay at anchor in the early days.  I was in San Francisco again in 1854.  Gambling houses had disappeared from public view.  The city had become staid and orderly.

CHAPTER XVI.

Resignation—­private life—­life at Galena—­the coming crisis.

My family, all this while, was at the East.  It consisted now of a wife and two children.  I saw no chance of supporting them on the Pacific coast out of my pay as an army officer.  I concluded, therefore, to resign, and in March applied for a leave of absence until the end of the July following, tendering my resignation to take effect at the end of that time.  I left the Pacific coast very much attached to it, and with the full expectation of making it my future home.  That expectation and that hope remained uppermost in my mind until the Lieutenant-Generalcy bill was introduced into Congress in the winter of 1863-4.  The passage of that bill, and my promotion, blasted my last hope of ever becoming a citizen of the further West.

In the late summer of 1854 I rejoined my family, to find in it a son whom I had never seen, born while I was on the Isthmus of Panama.  I was now to commence, at the age of thirty-two, a new struggle for our support.  My wife had a farm near St. Louis, to which we went, but I had no means to stock it.  A house had to be built also.  I worked very hard, never losing a day because of bad weather, and accomplished the object in a moderate way.  If nothing else could be done I would load a cord of wood on a wagon and take it to the city for sale.  I managed to keep along very well until 1858, when I was attacked by fever and ague.  I had suffered very severely and for a long time from this disease, while a boy in Ohio.  It lasted now over a year, and, while it did not keep me in the house, it did interfere greatly with the amount of work I was able to perform.  In the fall of 1858 I sold out my stock, crops and farming utensils at auction, and gave up farming.