The by-product of his gun made some holes in the front of the Eye
Wink, which were proudly kept as souvenirs, and were probably there
until it went out in the fire. This was low life, the lowest of the low.
Until the last decade almost anything except the commonplace and the
expected might happen to a man on the waterfront. The cheerful industry
of shanghaing was reduced to a science. A citizen taking a drink in one
of the saloons which hung out over the water might be dropped through
the floor into a boat, or he might drink with a stranger and wake in the
forecastle of a whaler bound for the Arctic. Such an incident is the
basis of Frank Norris's novel, "Moran of the Lady Letty," and although
the novel draws it pretty strong, it is not exaggerated. Ten years ago
the police, the Sailors' Union, and the foreign consuls, working
together, stopped all this.
Kearney street, a wilder and stranger Bowery, was the main thoroughfare
of these people. An exiled Californian, mourning over the city of his
heart, has said:
"In a half an hour of Kearney street I could raise a dozen men for any
wild adventure, from pulling down a statue to searching for the Cocos
Island treasure." This is hardly an exaggeration. it was the Rialto of
the desperate, Street of the Adventurers.
These are a few of the elements which made the city strange and gave it
the glamour of romance which has so strongly attracted such men as
Stevenson, Frank Norris and Kipling. This life of the floating
population lay apart from the regular life of the city, which was
distinctive in itself.
The Californian is the second generation of a picked and mixed ancestry.
The merry, the adventurous, often the desperate, always the brave,
deserted the South and New England in 1849 to rush around the Horn or to
try the perils of the plains. They found there a land already grown old
in the hands of the Spaniards - younger sons of hidalgo and many of them
of the best blood of Spain. To a great extent the pioneers intermarried
with Spanish women; in fact, except for a proud little colony here and
there, the old, aristocratic Spanish blood is sunk in that of the
conquering race. Then there was an influx of intellectual French people,
largely overlooked in the histories of the early days; and this Latin
leaven has had its influence.
Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work very
hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock,
the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the
Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the Yankee.
