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Forty-Niners
Augusto Ferran, Vista de San Francisco, 1850; oil on canvas; courtesy the Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley
In San Francisco
Once in San Francisco the forty-niners got their first taste of California. Some said San Francisco felt like home compared to the Latin American ports of Rio de Janeiro and Lima. Others remarked how different it was from other U.S. cities. Rinaldo Taylor of Boston wrote in December 1849:
“It is now a great place, such a one as the world never produced before. Crowded with people from all parts of the world, the Yankees & the Chinaman, jostling in the streets, while French, Germans, Sandwich Islanders, Chillians, Malays, Mexicans, etc in all their varieties of costume and language go to form a conglommoration of humanity, such as the world never saw before.”