Bite-Sized Journaling
Shortly before I relocated back to the Detroit area from San Francisco, I developed a keen interest in the city of San Francisco and its history. One of my COVID pastimes has been to browse for rare and out-of-print books about the city's history that can be scooped up on the cheap. While I've been something of a digital millenial for most of my life, taking it for granted that "history" is something that can be understood from reading a series of Wikipedia articles or other scattered websites, I've come to appreciate that if you purchase a history book that's been out of print for half a century, it's going to contain droves of information that you're unlikely to find anywhere else.
While a lot of books center on the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of the city, I'm far more interested in everything that preceded that, from the establishment of the Mission in 1776 through the days of the Barbary Coast in the last 19th century. Included in this chronology are the days of the Gold Rush. When gold was discovered up at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, CA, in January of 1848, it actually didn't create much excitement initially. The few hundred people living in the tiny village of San Francisco thought that the owner of the mill, John Sutter, was simply spreading rumors with a profit motive. They assumed Sutter wanted people to make their way up to the mill and buy mining supplies from him.
It wasn't actually until several months later that Mormon elder Samuel Brannan went running through the streets with a bottle of gold nuggets, yelling "Gold! Gold from the American River!" that people got whipped into a frenzy and left their little village a ghost town to go mine gold up at the Mill. It would be reasonable to assume that the story of someone shouting about gold in the streets of San Francisco and starting the whole craze is just some apocryphal tale that stuck because it makes narrative sense, but in this case history validates that this sensationalist story is true. Brannan ran through the streets yelling about this, naturally, because he owned a store in town that sold mining gear and other supplies that gold seekers would need. (Which, as a result of the madness he provoked, he sold plenty of.)
Among the books I've perused, there is a classic one, readily available, called Three Years in California by Walter Colton, who was the alcade of Monterrey, just to the south of San Francisco, during the Mexican-American war and the gold rush a year or two later, from 1846-49. The book itself is a not-quite-daily journal of pithy entries that recount details about both the mundane duties he had to fulfill as mayor and some key events in the history of the state. It helps that he was a good writer who had a poetic flair for writing.
What I like most about the book is its consistency. The entries are short, and not always interesting, but he made a habit out of recording his day to day, and this accrued into an important historical work. I realized that I'd like to attempt to write shorter and more regular entries on here, instead of trying to weave together a couple of dozen unrelated ideas into some singular tapestry that I only manage to write up once every month or two, if that.
While I doubt that my writing will ever amount to anything that informs generations to come about important events in our era, I'd like to make a habit of writing short, even if ill-formed, entries on here. I've always written this for myself, much more than for the few other random people who might happen to accidentally read it, and I think a more steady cadence of daily scribblings is more likely to serve this end than trying to make every entry a perfectly crafted essay, which is just making the perfect the enemy of the good. (Or at least passably decent.)
While a lot of books center on the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of the city, I'm far more interested in everything that preceded that, from the establishment of the Mission in 1776 through the days of the Barbary Coast in the last 19th century. Included in this chronology are the days of the Gold Rush. When gold was discovered up at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, CA, in January of 1848, it actually didn't create much excitement initially. The few hundred people living in the tiny village of San Francisco thought that the owner of the mill, John Sutter, was simply spreading rumors with a profit motive. They assumed Sutter wanted people to make their way up to the mill and buy mining supplies from him.
It wasn't actually until several months later that Mormon elder Samuel Brannan went running through the streets with a bottle of gold nuggets, yelling "Gold! Gold from the American River!" that people got whipped into a frenzy and left their little village a ghost town to go mine gold up at the Mill. It would be reasonable to assume that the story of someone shouting about gold in the streets of San Francisco and starting the whole craze is just some apocryphal tale that stuck because it makes narrative sense, but in this case history validates that this sensationalist story is true. Brannan ran through the streets yelling about this, naturally, because he owned a store in town that sold mining gear and other supplies that gold seekers would need. (Which, as a result of the madness he provoked, he sold plenty of.)
Among the books I've perused, there is a classic one, readily available, called Three Years in California by Walter Colton, who was the alcade of Monterrey, just to the south of San Francisco, during the Mexican-American war and the gold rush a year or two later, from 1846-49. The book itself is a not-quite-daily journal of pithy entries that recount details about both the mundane duties he had to fulfill as mayor and some key events in the history of the state. It helps that he was a good writer who had a poetic flair for writing.
What I like most about the book is its consistency. The entries are short, and not always interesting, but he made a habit out of recording his day to day, and this accrued into an important historical work. I realized that I'd like to attempt to write shorter and more regular entries on here, instead of trying to weave together a couple of dozen unrelated ideas into some singular tapestry that I only manage to write up once every month or two, if that.
While I doubt that my writing will ever amount to anything that informs generations to come about important events in our era, I'd like to make a habit of writing short, even if ill-formed, entries on here. I've always written this for myself, much more than for the few other random people who might happen to accidentally read it, and I think a more steady cadence of daily scribblings is more likely to serve this end than trying to make every entry a perfectly crafted essay, which is just making the perfect the enemy of the good. (Or at least passably decent.)