n, their leader, printed the first newspaper,
_The California Star_, in '47. That year also the first alcalde, or
mayor, of the new town, Lieutenant Bartlett, appointed an engineer
named O'Farrell to lay out more streets. He surveyed Market Street and
mapped down blocks as far west on the sand-dunes as Taylor Street and
to Rincon Point or South Beach. He gave the names of such well-known
men as Kearny, Stockton, Larkin, Guerrero, and Geary to these streets.
Mission Street was the road to the Mission Dolores, and about this
time Bartlett ordered that the Presidio, the Mission, and Yerba Buena
should be one town and should be called San Francisco.

Then came the gold fever, and nearly every one left town to go to the
mines. Many people sold all they had to get money to buy mining tools
and food enough to live on till they struck gold. Men started for the
mines, leaving their houses and stores alone with no one to care for
goods or furniture.

But news of the finding of gold had reached other places, and soon
ships from the Atlantic coast, Mexico, and all over the world
began sailing into San Francisco Bay. In '49 the first steamer, the
_California_, arrived from New York, and soon five thousand people
were in San Francisco, where most of the supplies for the gold-fields
had to be bought. Many of the newcomers lived in canvas tents or
brush-covered shanties scattered about in the high sand-hills or in
the thick chaparral. Some houses were built of adobe bricks, and the
two-story frame Parker House was thought to be so fine that it rented
for fifteen thousand dollars a month. Some wooden houses were brought
out from the East in numbered pieces, like children's blocks, to be
put together here, and others thought to be fireproof were of iron
plates made in the East.

The first public school was opened in '48 and in the same building
church services were held Sundays. The first post-office was in a
store at the corner of Washington and Montgomery streets in '49. By
1850 the city had five square miles of land that had been cut down
from sand-hills or filled in on the mud-flats. The houses along the
city-front were built on piles, and the tide ebbed and flowed under
them. Long wharves for the unloading of ships ran out into deep water.
At Jackson and Battery streets a ship was used for a storehouse, and
after the earth was filled in this stranded vessel was left standing
among the houses. On Clay and Sansome streets the old h