Larry Clinton/Sausalito Historical Society
During the seven years that he lived at the San Francisco presidio, William Richardson became well-informed about the facilities and role of Mexico’s northernmost military post, according to biographer Robert Ryal Miller. Miller donated an autographed copy of his book on Richardson to the Historical Society in 1995. Here are some edited excerpts showing Richardson’s early influence on life in the Bay Area:
Richardson married Maria Antonia Martinez, the daughter of Presidio Comandante Ignacio Martinez, on May 15, 1825, at Mission Dolores. The couple spent their honeymoon in Sausalito, which Richardson had discovered while reconnoitering the Bay in his fifteen-ton sloop, Rey del Mar. He had become “especially charmed with the glens, dells and fresh water springs at Sausalito. Here the young couple camped out for a few days after their wedding, little realizing that one day the property would belong to them.”
He began to sound and chart the waters of the bay and its adjacent sloughs and creeks … “Because of his seafaring talents he came to be called Captain Richardson, and his services became indispensable as a pilot for foreign ships entering the bay.”
During the 1820s a number of foreign trading ships, whalers and warships anchored in San Francisco Bay. Whenever Captain Richardson was in residence, he piloted them through the sometimes fog-bound straits to a safe anchorage.
With a growing family to feed, Richardson wanted some property of his own where he could raise livestock and vegetables. Mexican regulations authorized and encouraged governors of territories to grant vacant land to applicants who wished to inhabit and utilize the land.
Beginning in 1827, Richardson petitioned a succession of Mexican governors for a grant of the tract known as Sausalito. Some time before he gained clear title to the land, Richardson put livestock there, constructed a rude shelter near Whaler’s Cove, and sold wood, water and meat from the ranch to visiting ship captains.
Besides a rancho, Richardson desired a small residential lot at Yerba Buena Cove on San Francisco Bay. Reacting favorably to both of these suggestions, Governor José Figueroa asked Richardson to make a sketch of the proposed pueblo of Yerba Buena, indicating the plot he wanted. Richardson later testified that the governor “requested me to come to Yerba Buena to establish me as Captain of the Port of San Francisco, as he had seen a communication, written by me in 1828, respecting the anchorage at Yerba Buena, and he wished to lay off a small settlement for the convenience of Public offices at the anchorage.” Richardson loaded his possessions on pack animals and helped his wife and three children mount horses for the three-week journey from San Gabriel. He and his family camped near Yerba Buena Cove while waiting for official confirmation of his office. On June 25, 1835, he chose a residential site on a chaparral-covered rise above the beach. Most of the shallow harbor was later filled in and covered with buildings and streets, but in 1835 the waterfront ran along the present Montgomery Street, and the main landing was at Clark’s Point (the corner of the Montgomery and Sacramento streets today). Near what was to soon become the financial center of the city of San Francisco, Richardson set up a temporary dwelling made from a ship’s foresail stretched over four redwood posts. At that time no one else lived near there. A little over three miles to the west was the presidio, then commanded by Lieutenant Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Richardson’s closest neighbors to the south were three miles away at Mission Dolores.
Richardson’s daughter Mariana, who was nine years old when her family moved to Yerba Buena, later recalled:
“Father, immediately upon arriving at Yerba Buena, pitched his tent and made us as comfortable as possible. Yerba Buena at that time was nothing but sand dunes, covered with shrubbery and trees. Most of the trees were what we call the Christmas berry [Toyon]. Wild animals were very numerous, such as bears, wolves, coyotes. I remember before my father constructed his adobe house, while we were still occupying the tent, one night a bear put in his paw under the tent and carried off a screeching rooster. My father killed the bear a few days later.”
Captain Richardson reactivated two waterlogged thirty-ton schooners, the San Francisco and Guadalupe. With these vessels, manned by Indians, he again transported goods and people around San Francisco Bay.
During this period, Richardson met Richard Henry Dana, a Harvard College student working on a hide-ship called the Alert. In his 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast, Dana referred to Richardson and his dwelling in the shadow of Loma Alta (Telegraph Hill):
“Behind the point is a little harbor or bight, called Yerba Buena, in which trading vessels anchor, and near it, the mission of Dolores. There was no other habitation on this side of the Bay, except a shanty of rough boards put up by a man named Richardson who was doing a little trading between the vessels and the Indians.” In a footnote of a later edition, Dana added: “The next year Richardson built a one-story adobe house on the same spot, which was long afterwards known as the oldest house in the great city of San Francisco.” Yerba Buena’s name was changed to San Francisco in 1847, after the U.S. claimed Alta California for the United States during the Mexican American War.
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