n the south, which are as much a part of San
Francisco as Brooklyn and Staten Island are of New York, there would
be a population of more than 450,000. The growth, as will be seen, is
steady, and San Francisco offers to such as seek a home within her
borders, all the refinements and comforts of life, all that ministers
to the intellect and the spiritual side of our nature as well as our
social tastes and desires.

There can be no greater contrast imaginable than that between the San
Francisco of 1846, when Commodore Montgomery, of the United States
sloop of war _Portsmouth_, raised the American flag over it, and the
noble city of to-day. And no one then in the band of marines who stood
on the Plaza as the flag was unfurled to the breeze by the waters of
the Pacific, in sight of the great bay, could have dreamed of the
golden future which was awaiting California--of the splendour which
would rest on little Yerba Buena in the lapse of time. Yerba Buena was
the early name of the settlement. This was applied also, as we have
learned, to Goat Island. The pueblo was then insignificant and
apparently with no prospect of expansion or grandeur. There were only
a few houses there, chiefly of adobe construction, clustering about
the Plaza. The Presidio, west of the stray hamlet, and the Mission
Dolores, to the southwest, were all that relieved a dreary landscape
beyond. There were the hills covered with chaparral and the shifting
sands all around, and far to the south, where now are wide streets and
great blocks of buildings. The ground sloped towards the bay on the
east, and a cove, long since filled in, which bore the name of Yerba
Buena, extended up to Montgomery street. The population of the town
was less than a hundred; there was hardly this number in the Presidio,
and not more than two hundred people were connected with the Mission
Dolores. In 1835 Captain William A. Richardson, an Englishman, the
first foreigner to enter the embryo town, erected a tent for his
residence; and on July 4th, 1836, the second house was built at the
corner of Clay and Dupont streets. The story runs that the first
American to build a house in San Francisco proper was Daniel Culwer,
who also founded Santa Barbara. This pioneer was born in Maryland in
1793, and died in California in 1857. He lived long enough to see the
greatness of the city assured. But on that day when he finished his
modest house on the corner of New Montgomery and Market streets