A Happy Ending

Despite San Francisco' shady beginnings, the new money elite began to want respectability, especially as the free spending gold rushers began to thin out and disappear.  They wanted to restrict "unseemly" activities to specific sections of town, far from the eyes of "proper" folks and impressionable children.  Schools and churches were planned and built, the streets were cleaned up and law and order was established.

By 1859 San Francisco was a premier city of the Far West.  Richard Henry Dana expressed his amazement upon the arrival of his second visit to the city after 20 years, "When I look out my windows in the morning over the city, with its storehouses, towers, steeples, court houses, theaters, hospitals...its daily journals, well filled professionals...when I look across the bay and behold the steamers, the freighters, passenger carriers...I can scarcely keep my hold on reality at all."

San Francisco had become the focus of dreams in the late 1840...at first the gaudy brothels, lively gambling halls and elegant mansions rising out of the hills.  After all the gold was panned and spent, society changed.  San Francisco became a city of respectable businesses, lawful government and a place to raise a family.  The transformation was completed in less than 10 years, leaving behind a city risen from the muddy flats of the 1840s to becomes one of the great American cities in the West.

Next time...another place, another rush.
___________________________________
Today in Pioneer History: "On July 20, 1969m at 10:56 pm, Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, speaks these words to more than a billion people listening at home: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."  Stepping off the lunar landing module, Eagle, Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon."