- ' Real estate had dropped one half or more, and all
merchandise not used in the mines declined, while labor rose tenfold in price. ^^ . Spreading their valedictions on fly-sheets, the only
^ two journals now faint dead away, the Californian on the 29th of May, and the Star on the 14th of June. " The whole country from San Francisco to Los An- geles," exclaimed the former, " and from the seashore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds to the sor- did cry of gold! gold I ! GOLDl ! ! while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pick- axes, and the means of transportation to the spot where one man obtained $128 worth of the real stuff in one day's washing, and the average for all concerned is $20 per diem." Sadly spoke Kemble, he who vis- ited the gold mines and saw nothing, he to whom within four weeks the whole thing was a sham, a superlatively silly sham, groaning within and without, but always in very bad English, informing the world that his paper '* could not be made by magic, and the labor of mechanism was as essential to its existence as to all other arts;" and as neither men nor devils
please, all you in arrears.' See also Findld's StcU.f MS., 4-6. After quite a busy life, duriu^ which he gained some prominence as editor of the Star and Californian and the Altn Cal\fomia, and later as government official and newspaper correspondent, Kemble died at the east the 10th of Feb. 188(5. He was a man highly esteemed in certain circles.
^^ Pay the cost oi the house, and the lot would be thrown in. On tlie fifty-yara corner Pine and Kearny streets was a house which had cost $400 to build; both house and lot were offered for $3o0. Boss* Ex.y MS., 12; Larkin'a Doc.t MS., vi., 144. On the door of a score of houses was posted the notice,
- Gone to the Diggings!' From San Jos^ Larkin writes to the governor,
- The improvement of x erba Buena for the present is done.* Letter, May 26th,
in Larkin^a Doe, Hint. Cal.^ MS., vi. 74. Even yet the name San Francisco has not become familiar to those accustomed to that of Yerba Buena. See also Brooks' Four Months^ in which is written, under date of May 17th: * Work- people have struck. Walking through the town to-day 1 observed that laborers were employed only upon half a dozen of the fifty new buildings which were in the course of being run up.' May 20th: 'Sweating tells me that his negro waiter has demanded and receives ten dollars a day.' Larkin, writing from S. F. to Secretary Buchanan, June Ist, remarks that *8ome par- ties of from five to fifteen men have sent to this town and offered cooks $10 to %\6 a day for a few weeks. Mechanics and teamsters, caming the year past $5 to $8 per day, have struck and gone. . .A merchant lately from C&ina has even lost his Chinese servant. '
