d the population had increased to eight
hundred and twelve.

The news of the placers practically emptied the town. It would be
curious to know exactly how many human souls and chickens remained after
Brannan's _California Star_ published the authentic news. The commonest
necessary activities were utterly neglected, shops were closed and
barricaded, merchandise was left rotting on the wharves and the beaches,
and the prices of necessities rose to tremendous altitudes. The place
looked as a deserted mining-camp does now. The few men left who would
work wanted ten or even twenty dollars a day for the commonest labor.

However, the early pioneers were hard-headed citizens. Many of the
shopkeepers and merchants, after a short experience of the mines,
hurried back to make the inevitable fortune that must come to the
middleman in these extraordinary times. Within the first eight weeks of
the gold excitement two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold dust
reached San Francisco, and within: the following eight weeks six hundred
thousand dollars more came in. All of this was to purchase supplies at
any price for the miners.

This was in the latter days of 1848. In the first part of 1849 the
immigrants began to arrive. They had to have places to sleep, things to
eat, transportation to the diggings, outfits of various sorts. In the
first six months of 1849 ten thousand people piled down upon the little
city built to accommodate eight hundred. And the last six months of the
year were still more extraordinary, as some thirty thousand more dumped
themselves on the chaos of the first immigration. The result can be
imagined. The city was mainly of canvas either in the form of tents or
of crude canvas and wooden houses. The few substantial buildings stood
like rocks in a tossing sea. No attempt, of course, had been made as
yet toward public improvements. The streets were ankle-deep in dust or
neck-deep in mud. A great smoke of dust hung perpetually over the city,
raised by the trade winds of the afternoon. Hundreds of ships lay at
anchor in the harbor. They had been deserted by their crews, and, before
they could be re-manned, the faster clipper ships, built to control the
fluctuating western trade, had displaced them, so that the majority were
fated never again to put to sea.

Newcomers landed at first on a flat beach of deep black sand, where they
generally left their personal effects for lack of means of
transportation. They c