poverty and wealth, and with the red hand of devastation sweeping one
of the noblest centres of human industry and enterprise from the face of
the earth. It is this story of almost irremediable ruin which it is our
unwelcome duty to chronicle. But before entering upon this sorrowful
task some description of the city that has fallen a prey to two of the
earth's chief agents of destruction must be given.

San Francisco is built on the end of a peninsula or tongue of land lying
between the Pacific Ocean and the broad San Francisco Bay, a noble body
of inland water extending southward for about forty miles and with a
width varying from six to twelve miles. Northward this splendid body of
water is connected with San Pablo Bay, ten miles long, and the latter
with Suisun Bay, eight miles long, the whole forming a grand range of
navigable waters only surpassed by the great northern inlet of Puget
Sound. The Golden Gate, a channel five miles long, connects this
great harbor with the sea, the whole giving San Francisco the greatest
commercial advantages to be found on the Pacific coast.


THE EARLY DAYS OF SAN FRANCISCO.


The original site of the city was a grant made by the King of Spain of
four square leagues of land. Congress afterwards confirmed this grant.
It was an uninviting region, with its two lofty hills and its various
lower ones, a barren expanse of shifting sand dunes extending from their
feet. The population in 1830 was about 200 souls, about equal to that
of Chicago at the same date. It was not much larger in 1848, when
California fell into American hands and the discovery of gold set in
train the famous rush of treasure seekers to that far land. When 1849