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- 18 REMINISCENCES OF OLD VICTORIA
down in my haste I got my shins bruised and bleeding, and my trousers, of course, torn. I was showing my children these scars only lately, they being still much in evidence after fifty-four years.
As I have before stated, the stores were built of red-wood, and with cellars. The floors of many had trap-doors, and when the fire got near them the storekeeper opened the trapdoor, and all the goods were swept off the shelves into the cellar, and covered up. After this the owner of the building took a bee-line for the lumber yard to get in his order for lumber for a new building ahead of his neighbor. They were the exciting days and no mistake ! A week after one of these devastating fires all was built up and looked the same as usual. I might state that the firebells rang on all occasions to bring the citizens together in those times of tumult, and all prominent men were firemen.
I can well remember the election of President Buchanan, and if I remember right, the voting was in the open air in each ward of the city, the ballots being placed in large glass globes. At one of these polling-places I saw a fight, the result of a dispute between a Democrat and a Republican over an accusation by one that the other had put in a double ticket (I think this was the cause).
To close this history, I might say that my father and his partner put all they had, some ten thousand dollars, into a venture which eventually brought us to Vancouver Island to live. They bought a vessel, and sent her in ballast to Alberni or Sooke for a load of lumber, and it was arranged that on her return to San Francisco she was to take the lumber to England, and we all were to go home again in her. But " L'homme propose et Dieu dispose " was here exemplified, for the
SAN FRANCISCO IN THE FIFTIES. 19
ship never came back. After weeks of anxiety when the ship was overdue, one day either the captain or the mate came to my father with the news that the ship was wrecked in Barclay Sound, and as there was not a dollar of insurance we were ruined, and had to commence all over again.
The result of all this was that later we embarked with about six hundred others on the steamer Northerner for Victoria, to try and retrieve something of what we lost. I will not vouch for the accuracy of the dates or the rotation in which the incidents are related, but I have clone my best after cudgeling my brain for weeks for the general result as here presented.
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