Word: franciscos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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California gold and Nevada silver built the mansions on Nob Hill (where Mark Twain dreamed of living some day), bought the elegant, satin-lined carriages that rolled over San Francisco's plank streets. They paid for San Franciscans' one-pound gold watches, their champagne (seven bottles to Bostonians' one), their imported building stone from China, accounted as well for San Francisco's 1,000 yearly suicides...
Gold gave San Francisco 13 dailies, several times as many weeklies, literary journals which flourished without advertising. These combined serious poems with miners' correspondence, frontier burlesque and tall tales with such polished articles as "An Epitome of Goethe's Faust," pirated novels such as Bleak House with condensed news columns called "Eastern intelligence." ("One of the pioneers of Washoe, James A. Rogers, blew his brains out, September 2nd. Cause: discouraged...
When Ambrose Bierce landed in San Francisco in 1866, a tall, blue-eyed ex-Civil War officer, he showed few signs of the savage misanthropy which marked his later work. According to Author Walker's researches, Bitter Bierce's misanthropy began two years after his arrival, when he became Town Crier for the satirical News Letter. Author Walker thinks Bierce enjoyed himself almost as much as did his readers. At any rate he was never sued for libel, shot at, even taken a poke at, in a country where editors' duels were commonplace. Bierce wrote the first...
...Indian woman, became a judge ("with one lawbook and two six-shooters," said oldtimers), married a romantic Oregon girl-poet named Minnie Myrtle whom he divorced because "Lord Byron separated from his wife, and some of my friends think I am a second Lord Byron." From San Francisco editors Poet Miller got rejection slips until his famous junket to England. Armed with a laurel wreath for Byron's grave, the manuscript of Songs of the Sierras, a pair of cowhide boots and a sombrero, he was taken up by Pre-Raphaelites, became the rage of Mayfair in no time...
While his fellow writers fled San Francisco to die in obscurity and in exile, found religions in New Jersey swamps, become monks, build roads, brood bitterly over their frustration, Poet Miller went back to the frontier, settled on a pleasant 100-acre Oakland hilltop, where he erected statues of Frémont, Moses, Browning, charmed club women with demonstrations of rainmaking, which consisted of chanting gibberish and turning on a concealed sprinkler on the roof. In general Joaquin Miller's career suggests that of the whole caboodle; he was perhaps the only one who really belonged there...