Browsing named entities in Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. You can also browse the collection for San Francisco Bay (California, United States) or search for San Francisco Bay (California, United States) in all documents.

Your search returned 1 result in 1 document section:

Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, San Francisco-Early California experiences-life on the Pacific coast-promoted Captain-Flush times in California (search)
lking the streets, the eye was regaled, on every block near the water front, by the sight of players at faro. Often broken places were found in the street, large enough to let a man down into the water below. I have but little doubt that many of the people who went to the Pacific coast in the early days of the gold excitement, and have never been heard from since, or who were heard from for a time and then ceased to write, found watery graves beneath the houses or streets built over San Francisco Bay. Besides the gambling in cards there was gambling on a larger scale in city lots. These were sold On change, much as stocks are now sold on Wall Street. Cash, at time of purchase, was always paid by the broker; but the purchaser had only to put up his margin. He was charged at the rate of two or three per cent a month on the difference, besides commissions. The sand hills, some of them almost inaccessible to foot-passengers, were surveyed off and mapped into fifty vara lots --a