"Charles Warren Stoddard," photographer, date unknown. Larger.
Any wild place can be a paradise for curious boys, but combine a dangerous fascination with water with the wind-swept wilderness of San Francisco's Black Point region and you have a setting for adventure even Tom Sawyer would envy.
"The Old Flume at Black Point, 1856," photograph for In the Footsteps of the Padres, 1911 . Larger.
As for Black Point, it was a wilderness of beauty in our eyes; a very paradise of live-oak and scrub-oak, and of oak that had gone mad in the whirlwinds and sandstorms that reveled there. Beyond Black Point we climbed a trestle and mounted a flume that was our highway to the sea. Through this flume the city was supplied with water. The flume was a square trough, open at the top and several miles in length. It was cased in a heavy frame; and along the timbers that crossed over it lay planks, one after another, wherever the flume was uncovered. This narrow path, intended for the convenience of the workmen who kept the flume in repair, was our delight. We followed it in the full assurance that we were running a great risk. Beneath us was the open trough, where the water, two or three feet in depth, was rushing as in a mill-race. Had we fallen, we must have been swept along with it, and perhaps to our doom. Sometimes we were many feet in the air, crossing a cove where the sea broke at high tide; sometimes we were in a cut among the rocks on a jutting point; and sometimes the sand from the desert above us drifted down and buried the flume, now roofed over, quite out of sight.
Among Stoddard's works are South-Sea Idyls and The Lepers of Molokai. He taught English at Notre Dame and at the Catholic University of America before he returned to California to retire.
"View of Montgomery, Post and Market Streets, San Francisco, 1858," illustration for In the Footprints of the Padres, 1912. Larger.
Forget the past and ignore the present. In California, everybody embraces the future, no matter who they are.
Travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard spent the latter part of his boyhood growing up in San Francisco, which even in the 1850s he learned was a remarkably forward looking place.
Social San Francisco during the early Fifties seems to have been a conglomeration of unexpected externals and surprising interiors. It was heterogeneous to the last degree. It was hail-fellow-well-met, with a reservation; it asked no questions for conscience's sake; it would not have been safe to do so. There were too many pasts in the first families and too many possible futures to permit one to cast a shadow upon the other. And after all is said, if sins may be forgiven and atoned for, why should the memory of a shady past imperil the happiness and prosperity of the future? All futures should be hopeful; they were "promise-crammed" in that healthy and hearty city by the sea.
In the Footprints of the Padres was Charles Warren Stoddard's 1902 tribute to early California. An expanded edition appeared in 1912, three years after his death.
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