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, he little thought that in after years there would spring up, as if by magic, under the skillful hands of the Lelands, famous in San Francisco as in Saratoga in the olden days, the magnificent Palace Hotel, with its royal court, its great dining halls, and its seven hundred and fifty-five rooms for guests, rivalling in its grandeur and its luxurious appointments the palaces of kings.

The growth of San Francisco was very rapid after the discovery of gold.  The population immediately leaped into the thousands.  California was the goal of the gold-seeker, the El Dorado of his quest.  Men in search of fortune came from all parts of the world to the Golden West.  It was on the 19th of January, 1848, that gold was discovered.  The story reads like a romance.  Captain John Augustus Sutter, who was born in Baden, Germany, February 15th, 1803, after many adventures in New York, Missouri, New Mexico, the Sandwich Islands, and Sitka, at last