SAN FRANCISCO GOTERA

city, eastern El Salvador, on the Ro Grande de San Miguel. Formerly called Gotera, its name was modified in 1887 to honour Francisco Morazn, the former Central American president. It is an agricultural and livestock-trading centre. Gold and silver are mined nearby at El Divisadero. Pop. (1985 est.) 15,113. History Exploration and early settlement It is extraordinary that the site of San Francisco should have been explored first by land instead of from the sea, for San Francisco Bay is one of the most splendid natural harbours of the world, and great captains and explorers sailed unheeding past the entranceJuan Rodrguez Cabrillo (154243), Sir Francis Drake (1579), and Sebastin Vizcano (1602). In 1769 a scouting party from an expedition led by the Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portol looked down from a hilltop onto a broad body of water, the first white men known to have seen San Francisco Bay. It was not until August 5, 1775, that the first Spanish ship, the San Carlos, commanded by Lieut. Juan Manuel de Ayala, turned eastward between the headlands, breasted the ebbing tide, and dropped anchor just inside the harbour mouth. (Though it is possible that Drake may have entered the bay, most evidence is against it.) Settlers from Monterey, under Lieut. Jos Joaquin Moraga and the Rev. Francisco Palu, established themselves at the tip of the San Francisco peninsula the next year. The military post (which remained in service as the Presidio of San Francisco until 1994) was founded September 17, 1776, and the Mission San Francisco de Asis (popularly called the Mission Dolores) was opened on October 9. Almost half a century later, a village sprang up on the shore of Yerba Buena Cove, two miles east of the mission. The pioneer settler was an Englishman, Capt. William Anthony Richardson, who in 1835 cleared a plot of land and erected San Francisco's first dwellinga tent made of four pieces of redwood and a ship's foresail. In the same year, the United States tried unsuccessfully to buy San Francisco Bay from the Mexican government, having heard reports from whalers and captains in the hide-and-tallow trade that the great harbour held bright commercial possibilities. Richard Henry Dana, whose ship entered the bay in 1835, wrote in Two Years Before the Mast (1840) that If California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity. The Americans had to wait only another 11 years. After fighting began along the Rio Grande, Capt. John B. Montgomery sailed the sloop of war Portsmouth into the bay on June 3, 1846, anchored in Yerba Buena Cove, and later went ashore with a party of sailors and marines to raise the U.S. flag in the plaza. On January 30, 1847, Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco, which was regarded as a more propitious name. The permanent white population of Yerba Buena in 1844 did not exceed 50 persons. By 1846 the settlement had a white population of 375 in addition to 83 blacks, American Indians, and Sandwich Islanders (Hawaiians). Two years later, just before the discovery of gold on the American River, the town had grown to about 200 shacks and adobes inhabited by about 800 whites. The growth of the metropolis The city of the '49ers With the discovery of gold, San Francisco picked up pace and direction. The modest village was at first almost deserted as its population scrambled inland to the Mother Lode, and then it exploded into one of the most extraordinary cities ever constructed. Some 40,000 gold hunters arrived by sea, another 30,000 plodded across the Great Basin, and still another 9,000 moved north from Mexico. By 1851 more than 800 ships rode at anchor in the cove, deserted by their crews. Everybody except the miners got rich. Eggs sold for $1 apiece, and downtown real estate claimed prices that would almost hold their own against the appreciated values of the late 20th century. Until the bubble burst in the Panic of 1857, 50,000 San Franciscans became rich and went bankrupt, cheated and swindled one another, and took to the pistol and knife all too readily. As The Sacramento Union noted in 1856, there had been some fourteen hundred murders in San Francisco in six years, and only three of the murderers hung, and one of these was a friendless Mexican. Two vigilance committees (1851 and 1856) responded to the challenge with crude and extralegal justice, hanging four men apiece as an example to the others. In 1859 silver was discovered in the Nevada Territory. The exploitation in Nevada of the Comstock Lode, which eventually yielded $300,000,000, turned San Francisco from a frontier boomtown into a metropolis whose leading citizens were bankers, speculators, and lawyers who dressed their ladies in Paris gowns and ate and drank in splendid restaurants and great hotels. San Francisco then was by all accounts an intoxicating city whose many charms moved the historian-moralist B.E. Lloyd to advise parents in 1876 The 1860s and 1870s marked the birth of the modern San Francisco, which has for more than 100 years claimed to be the Athens, Paris, and New York City of the West but which never completely lost the mark of its wild beginning. As Rudyard Kipling was to observe after he visited the city in the 1890s, San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people. . . .