embattled farmers of the Atlantic
coast should inherit before many years this potential Spanish settlement
on the Pacific.

In October, 1776, Padre Junipero Serra founded the Mission Dolores, the
third of the chain of missions extending from San Diego. Subsequently a
settlement was made at Yerba Buena Cove, and there was established the
pueblo of Yerba Buena which has grown into the city of San Francisco.

Things moved slowly in those days--so slowly that in 1784 the pueblo
had but fourteen houses and sixty inhabitants.

Let us turn back the hands of the clock to the time when the pueblo
straggled over the sand hills which faced the water of the bay of Saint
Francis, under the shadow of Loma Alta. What do we see? Where today the
Merchants Exchange Building, central office of San Francisco's
commercial life, heaves its bulk into the air was the cabin of Jacob
Leese, trader. Houses were few and far between, and business was
something to be done when there was nothing else to do.

From the Plaza, then but a block or so from the waterside, two main
roads trailed off through the sand dunes. One went to the southwest,
winding among the hills toward the Mission Dolores, and the other in a
generally northwesterly direction out past the lagoon of the washerwomen
to the Presidio of San Francisco, the seat of the military government.
Sleepy, content to bask in the sunshine that flooded its sand hills and
kept back the banks of fog that loomed above the higher eminence's
separating the cove from the ocean, Yerba Buena dreamed, not of the
future in store for it, but of the next fiesta, of the coming barbecue
at Miguel Noe's rancho, or of the projected cock fight on Sunday at the
Mission Dolores.

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