The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (63 page)

“Good morning, sir,” cried a very dapper little man, with a beaming smile, who had come up behind us. He was soberly dressed, almost with elegance, though businesslike, and had on striped
pants, a frock coat, and a bowler hat. His nose was long and thin, his eyes very sharp and black, and his mouth a perfect straight line across, with what seemed like no lips at all, unless he broke into a smile, which for some reason I thought was made for reasons of business.

“May I introduce myself—Junius T. Peters, on commission for a client who must, at the moment, remain anonymous.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir,” said my father, a trifle warily.

“Dear me,” said Mr. Peters, “it is awkward, is it not? For I have nothing to say, nothing at all, except to request, with apologies, that you be so good as keep the Government post office apprised of your address, by word if in the city, by dispatch should removal occur.”

“Mr. Peters,” said my father, growing slightly nettled, “I have no wish to be rude, but this is most unusual. A less patient man might regard it as an intrusion. Will you kindly state the nature of your business.”

“I
quite
understand,” said Mr. Peters, keeping pace with us, as we had all begun to walk away from the building. He made a ridiculous figure, for he hopped around like a tomcat in a patch of briers, trying to stay in step, shifting first to match my father and then me, hoping, it appeared, to draw us all in line. But he never did; I saw to that, not having much else to do at the moment.

“Yes,” he said, “your attitude is quite what one would expect. Doctor Sardius McPheeters,” he went on, with a shrewd, sidelong look, “of
Louisville?”

“Precisely.”

“Son Jaimie, diminutive of James. Aged fourteen?”

The humor of this odd little man began to appeal to my father, who realized now he was nothing but a harmless lunatic, so he said, “Wife Melissa, age unstated.”

Instead of being offended, Mr. Peters cried, “Aha! That was a fact I didn’t have, sir,” and whipping out a notebook, he wrote it down carefully.

At the end of the square, he stopped with an air of great decision, working his business smile again, and said, “In
my
mind, sir, identity is fully established, but when Client remains
in absentia
, as he must, all possible caution should be maintained.”

Suddenly my father spoke up, serious again, to say, “There’s something I think you owe us in this—tell me, if you will, should we expect
trouble
or
benefit
from your attentions?”

I could see the business smile opening and closing like a fish’s gills as the little man thought it over, wrestling with his conscience. Finally he gave a sigh, looking almost human, and asked, with a sharp glance:

“Sir, do you enjoy sound and restful sleep?”

My father started to nod yes, and Mr, Peters said briskly, “Client would not wish it disturbed. Good day, sir”—lifting his hat—“we shall meet from time to time.”

We watched him go, trim and proper, filled with respectability. At last, my father burst into a merry laugh. “Probably, I should resent it, but you know, somehow I couldn’t. The fact is, I
like
him.”

“So do I,” I said. “I really think he wanted to do better.”

“He did, didn’t he?”

On this odd note, we took up our life in San Francisco. Later in the day, we checked and found we had only ten dollars and a few pennies left. Plus a picayune that my father found in an otherwise empty gold sack back near Marysville.

Having to do something quick, we commenced a search for employment, but it was a discouraging job. I remember those first days as ones of endless street trudging, polite inquiries at first, anxious ones as the time passed, and then, after a week, something approaching despair.

Leaving the lodginghouse, we slept in a tent with four sailors. Our food was mostly biscuit and coffee, but in loitering around the waterfront, we often were given bits from the galleys, when friendly Scotsmen or Englishmen heard our story. The grand opportunity
that my father had mentioned seemed disinclined to turn up.

For two days in the second week we made six dollars a day wheeling dirt on the city streets, where gullies and ditches and ruts the size of a wagon were being filled in.

Then we visited the British Consul, who eyed my father’s garments sourly and said he would “place on file” our request for clerical work. But neither of us believed him, and we never heard from him again. Next day, we called on a Mr. Gillespie, the president of the New Wharf Company, which was building a bigger landing wharf for ships, forty feet long, but when my father, “pleading his Scotch name,” requested employment and wanted to show his papers, Mr. Gillespie “spurned them with cool civility,” as I find written in the Journals.

To make things worse, the sailors in the tents where we slept began to row about keeping us on. Two men said it was all right, but the others, whiny, oafish fellows, said we weren’t “making enough of a contribution.” So my father, leaving me behind so as not to witness his disgrace, went to call on a Mr. Austin, a Scottish baker, and came back with to loaves of bread, which he had begged, of course, and put the sailors in good temper for a while.

This tent of theirs not only was patchy but it was full of pinprick holes besides, and the canvas was worn so thin that a touch of your hand underneath caused the rain to come dripping through. It rained sheets one night and we lay miserable and shivery. It had got to be early November now, and while this San Francisco weather was never severe, you could suffer sleeping in a tent. The nights were often cold. Already on the sunny tops of the mountains, in plain sight beyond the city, a white eagle’s cap of snow could be seen on some mornings.

They said the climate here was unlike any other about, being entirely local. During the summer and fall, the wind blew from the west or northwest, directly in from the ocean. Then the mornings were warm and calm, but around noon, as a general thing, the ocean wind lifted to a regular gale, driving dust and paper and
filth over the streets so thick you had to shield your eyes. And always, at sunset, it died away to nothing, leaving a time of peaceful quiet. The early evenings were pleasant but after dark it turned so cool you could wear woolen clothing nearly any old time you chose. In the winter, they said, there was nothing but soft, gentle breezes from the southeast, with temperatures always mild, the thermometer rarely sinking below 50.

When the wind blew in from the ocean the rains seldom came, but when it blew from the land, in both winter and spring, showers were very common, just like April and May back home. From the standpoint of climate, San Francisco wasn’t any bad place to be destitute on the streets in this autumn of 1850.

I’ll say this for my father, he tried hard in those first weeks. No matter how low we got, he was up early and off to make his rounds, calling on this merchant and that, trying for honest work. Until lately the commerce of the city had been largely in the hands of a very few families, a Mr. Leidesdorff, from Denmark, a Mr. Grimes, Mr. Davis, and a Mr. Frank Ward, from New York. Their houses did a bustling business, using very large sailing ships, with Oregon, the southern Pacific coast, and the Sandwich Islands. From Oregon they brought lumber, flour, salmon and cheese, and from the Islands, sugar, coffee and preserved tropical fruits. The main articles traded in return were hides and tallow.

Before these gentlemen, California hadn’t any trade to speak of. Commercial houses of Boston and New York had hogged it all for years, sending out ships loaded with dry goods and knickknacks that did a retail business going from port to port, holding auctions right on deck when the rancheros came in from their back-country places. They charged some pretty fancy prices, too; common brown cotton cloth, for example, sold for a dollar a yard.

With the finding of gold, everything changed, of course. New businesses sprang up everywhere, money rolled in by the wagon-load, and probably the most noticeable, and worst, difference was the gambling halls. These now stood all over town, dancing a gay tune, to a silvery, golden tinkle, and there was trouble in them a-plenty. Often in the evenings, having nothing better to do, my father led me from one to another—the El Dorado, United States, Parker House—saying it would prove “educational.” But the truth
is, he was drawn by the excitement and the lights and the fiddler music and the sight of people gambling. They were noisy places; a body could see how they might get to be a habit. Most of them were combination hotel and casinos, their walls spread over with the splendidest kind of paintings—women, mainly, minus their shifts—the tables along both sides stacked high with gold and silver coins, musicians on a platform in the rear, polished plank in a corner near the entrance, where a “gentleman of the bar,” or bartender, served out what they called “the needful,” and several circles of men drinking each other’s health in that foolish-formal, over-warm complimentary way, likely hoping down inside that nobody would slop over and hit them.

Crowds were always streaming in and out, and rouged women with sweet faces were on hand everywhere, to act as a sort of mother, I reckon, although when one chucked me under the chin and said, “Here’s a saucy duckling,” my father pushed her away. He was downright rude, after she’d taken the trouble to introduce herself that way. The rackety laughter, shrill curses, shouts, money chinking, feet stamping, fiddles scraping, glasses pounding on the bar, and dealers crying out numbers was enough to flatten your eardrums.

One night a wholly innocent man was stabbed to death in a scuffle, right before me, and on another, half of the ceiling fell down where we were. Being nothing but calico tacked up, the rising night wind got between it and the roof. But it made a gaudy mess with drunks trying to crawl free, women screaming and busting out of their low-front dresses, dust everywhere, and a number of men that didn’t get hit laughing fit to kill.

In the daytime we continued our search for work. The old word of “opportunity,” which was to mean a big fortune in a hurry, hadn’t been mentioned for a while. What we worried about instead was keeping body and soul together. It sounds complainy, but I don’t remember once not being hungry along in that period.

We called on a Colonel Collier, head of the Customs House, who was very kind and said he would help us find something
soon, after my father showed him his medical documents and others. When we left, he said if a vessel arrived tomorrow, he could put us both on the payroll. Then we called on Mr. Edwin Bryant, who was formerly the alcalde of San Francisco, now a judge, and I don’t think we’d met such a good and interested man since we left home. He insisted on hearing every detail of my father’s story, after which he made us drink a glass of claret and loaned us five dollars. Leaving his house, my father had recovered a lot of his pomp and good cheer. But when we returned to the tent, those four sailors wouldn’t let us in any more. They threw out our ponchos and gear, and said, “Shift for yourselves; we’ve got troubles of our own.” That night we slept on a pile of shavings, collected from a half-built house, in a corner of an alley protected from the wind. Two days later we moved into an empty shed that the owner, a merchant named Dobbs, was planning to knock down for lumber but mightn’t get around to for upwards of a month yet.

Then, out of a clear sky, we made $13.50 working on the streets and returned Mr. Bryant the five dollars we owed him. My father said this was important, because it always paid to keep your credit alive, so we bought two comforts for four dollars, had two cups of coffee apiece at twelve and a half cents a cup, bought some cooking utensils for $3.10, bought some meal and sugar for $1.20, got a cloth cap for me for twenty-five cents and bought two razors for my father for fifty cents. Then we borrowed back the five dollars from Mr. Bryant. I began to see how finance, as my father called it, worked, and when he explained it, he got carried away so far he began to talk about opening a bank. But they already had a bank here.

Sleeping and cooking in the shed, picking up work on the streets, but not enough, and making the rounds the rest of the time, we hung on, but I still failed to see any signs of Opportunity turning up.

One evening down by Pacific Wharf, we ran across this man William Ebersohl, who was a street preacher. He was standing on some unloaded cargo, to be exact a brandy keg, and we stopped to listen.
He was a large-framed man, whose clothes, minister’s black, hung loosely on his large body, and had a whity-gray mane of long hair, a moustache and beard, a string tie, bushy black eyebrows, the bluest and clearest eyes I ever saw, a ruddy, outdoors complexion, strong, hawklike nose, and a wide mouth with a look of great determination. In spite of his gray hair, you didn’t get the feeling he was particularly old. He just grew that way.

Well, he had a fair-sized crowd, mostly hecklers, and he said, just as I find it in the Journals, “Gentlemen, I’m no croaker. I’m not here to bind and chafe, or make injudicious attacks on Romanism. I’ve been preaching regularly in the streets for more than ten years, seven of them among California gamblers and rum-sellers. Now I’d like to call your attention to the difference between a decent, well-behaved sinner and a violent, outbreaking sinner. Gentlemen, I stand on what I suppose to be a cask of brandy. Keep it bunged and spiled, and it is entirely harmless; nay, it answers some very good purposes; it even makes a good pulpit. But draw that spile and fifty men will be down here to drink up its spirit and wallow in the gutter, and before ten o’clock tonight will carry sorrow and desolation to the hearts of fifty families. A case in point is a congregation man we had at the Powell Street Methodist Church, a previous sinner, black as tar, with a history to shame a cutthroat criminal. But he’d heard the sweet word of Jesus, through your humble servant, and he straightened up like a sergeant, though his tripes burned for rum as a wolf ravens after gore—”

There was an interruption here when one of the hecklers sung out, “You ort to be ashamed, pinching off his mother’s milk like that.”