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,