Today’s newspapers sometimes attack each other, but the fine art of editorial mudslinging has sadly declined since its heyday in the 19th century. Even before the Gold Rush, San Francisco’s two rival newspapers provided their readers with enough invective to make the late Warren Hinckle nod approvingly from his celestial barstool.
The California Star, published by an ambitious young Mormon businessman named Samuel Brannan, became San Francisco’s first newspaper when its initial issue appeared Jan. 9, 1847. California’s first paper, however, was the Californian, whose inaugural issue had appeared five months earlier in Monterey. When Publishers R.C. Semple and Walter Colton moved it to San Francisco in May 1847, the city’s reading public of 370 or so people had two newspapers to choose from.
Newspapers in the mid-19th century bore little resemblance to their modern counterparts. Standards of reportage were lax, to put it mildly, and editors felt free to pursue their own agendas. Both the Californian and the Star made frequent use of supposed letters they had received, published under pseudonyms like “Sand Hills,” “Cato” or “A Voter,” which were obviously written by the editors themselves and which they used to flay the other paper.
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One of the main points of contention concerned the Town Council — the forerunner of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.
The Town Council came into existence in September 1847, nominally to assist George Hyde, the town’s alcalde — a position that combined the functions of judge and mayor. But the relationship between Hyde and the Town Council was fraught from the beginning. At the council’s very first meeting, its six members proposed launching an investigation of the alcalde’s office, but Hyde refused to allow it. This led the Star, under 19-year-old Editor Edward Kemble, to denounce Hyde’s actions as “high-handed and improper.”
As Rand Richards explains in “Mud, Blood and Gold: San Francisco in 1849,” the real issue between Hyde and the council was one that plagued San Francisco from its beginning: shady land speculation.
Hyde, like most of the city’s politicians and leading citizens — including Brannan — was eagerly buying as much real estate as he could, using various tricks to get around restrictions limiting the number of lots he could acquire. Because of a law that allowed the alcalde to sell the town’s lots for a fixed price of $12, Hyde was able to sell the lots to cronies, buy them back and then resell them at large profits.
Incensed by Hyde’s self-dealing, or wanting to get in on the action themselves, Brannan and more than 50 other residents petitioned California’s military governor to remove Hyde from office. Hyde survived the ensuing investigation, but resigned under pressure in April 1848.
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Meanwhile, the venomous sniping between the two papers continued. It was usually over the council, often over the money that it appropriated for civic improvements.
By January 1848, several projects were under way or completed: A reeking saltwater lagoon at Jackson and Montgomery streets was nearly filled in, Broadway’s terminus was being extended from a muddy morass to the waterfront, and construction had begun on a schoolhouse on Portsmouth Square, just south of the Star’s office.
Other projects, however, had stalled for lack of funds. This state of affairs was hardly scandalous, but the anticouncil Californian treated it like Watergate.
On Jan. 12, 1848, the paper ran a letter under the signature of “Cato,” denouncing the council’s “astounding follies” and “enormous evils.”
“They have exhausted the town treasury, not a dollar remains,” Cato thundered. “The present appropriations exceed the amount due to the town. Improvements have been commenced, a large amount of money expended upon them and now they are to stand unfinished, to war against the elements and decay. … Where has (the money) gone? Into whose pockets?”
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In response to this noisy but completely evidence-free accusation, the Star ran a letter signed “A Voter,” which contemptuously derided the Californian as being “loaded with low invective and billingsgate slang — abusive epithets, and void of one word of truth to support the charges so lavishly urged against one branch of the town authorities.”
The Californian, added A Voter, had “been reduced to a level with the low, anonymous, scurrilous issues of some of the eastern presses, belching out the most nauseating venom.” Its attacks, the piece added, “are like the quills of the porcupine, standing out in bold and disgusting relief to the hideous object pointing them.”
The Californian could hardly remain silent. On Jan. 19, it fired back with a letter by one “Slathearn,” who wrote, “There is certainly something in the atmosphere that we inhale, or the food we eat in San Francisco, that causes some of its inhabitants to generate large quantities of gass (sic).”
Slathearn repeated Cato’s charges, again with no evidence, but now added the argument that since there was almost no money in circulation in the town, it was unwise to try to raise funds for the appropriations by selling lots. In fact, San Francisco was so low on cash that in February 1848 town Treasurer William Leidesdorff was unable to pay a $500 bill owed for street improvements and had to offer the contractor $300 of his own money, plus a note.
The Star responded by pointing out that Californian Editor B.R. Buckelew owned land at the foot of the Broadway wharf and thus had a financial interest in preventing the construction of one of the projects that was on hold, a Clay Street wharf. A few weeks later it accused Alcalde Hyde of gaining “absolute control” of the Californian, which would explain its incessant attacks on the council.
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The whole feud, along with both papers, came to an abrupt end soon after gold was discovered on Jan. 24, 1848. The two papers ran tiny stories about the bonanza in March. Both editors were initially dismissive, but by June both had closed down their papers and, with every other able-bodied man in San Francisco, headed for the diggings. Kemble’s final editor’s note ended, “Hasta luego.”
A future Portals will explore life in pre-Gold Rush San Francisco, from divorces to attitudes to Indians to a drunken homicide.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]
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The last trivia question: What was magnate Charles Crocker’s “spite fence”?
Answer: When a homeowner refused to sell his Nob Hill property to Crocker, who owned all the adjoining land, the enraged plutocrat built an enormous fence that blocked light from the offending house.
This week’s trivia question: Who had the first garden in San Francisco?
Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.
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