Complete Story of the San Francisco HorrorWhite, Trumbull
History
Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror
White, Trumbull
Disasters; Earthquakes; San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Calif., 1906; Vesuvius (Italy) -- Eruption, 1906; Volcanoes
In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from
business, went up to this grove and camp out for two weeks. And on the
last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle with poetic
words, music and effects done by the club, in praise of the forest. In
late years this had been practically a masque or an opera. It cost
about $10,000. It took the spare time of scores of men for weeks; yet
these 700 business men, professional men, artists, newspaper workers,
struggled for the honor of helping out on the Jinks; and the whole
thing was done naturally and with reverence. It would hardly be
possible anywhere else in this country; the thing which made it
possible is the art spirit which is in the Californian. It runs in the
blood.
Some one has been collecting statistics which prove this point. "Who's
Who in America" is long on the arts and on learning and comparatively
weak in business and the professions. Now some one who has taken the
trouble has found that more persons mentioned in "Who's Who" by the
thousand of the population were born in Massachusetts than in any
other State; but that Massachusetts is crowded closely by California,
with the rest nowhere. The institutions of learning in Massachusetts
account for her pre-eminence; the art spirit does it for California.
The really big men nurtured on California influence are few, perhaps;
but she has sent out an amazing number of good workers in painting, in
authorship, in music and especially in acting.
"High Society" in San Francisco had settled down from the rather wild
spirit of the middle period; it had come to be there a good deal as it
is elsewhere. There was much wealth; and the hills of the western
addition were growing up with fine mansions. Outside of the city, at
Burlingame, there was a fine country club centering a region of
country estates which stretched out to Menlo Park. This club had a
good polo team, which played every year with teams of Englishmen from
southern California and even with teams from Honolulu.
The foreign quarters were worth a chapter in themselves. Chief of
these was, of course, Chinatown, of which every one has heard who ever
heard of San Francisco. A district six blocks long and two blocks
wide, when the quarter was full, housed 30,000 Chinese. The dwellings
were old business blocks of the early days; but the Chinese had added
to them, rebuilt them, had run out their own balconies and entrances,
and had given it that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all
Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this,
they had burrowed to a depth equal to three stories under the ground,
and through this ran passages in which the Chinese transacted their
dark and devious affairs--as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in
slave girls and the settlement of their difficulties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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