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. These were the beginnings of San Francisco. Burned to the ground three times in the early years of its existence, the city displayed an invincible fortitude and each time capitalized disaster to build anew with larger faith in its destiny. When again, in 1906, earthquake and fire devastated the city its phoenix spirit came to life. The Argonauts lived once more, magnificent in their resolution. The renaissance was a prodigy that made onlookers exclamatory. Jules Jusserand, Ambassador of France to the United States, phrased the wonder of it in majestic prose: "The page written by the inhabitants of San Francisco on the moving ashes of their city is not one that any wind will ever blow away." Survivals of the Past