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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. It remains the greatest global coming together known and as our birth legacy it should be familiar to all who call Northern California home.
Everybody was going to be rich and like the local high-tech dot.com bust of 2000 many were made rich by the rush. Eggs sold for one dollar apiece, and downtown real estate went sky high. 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 violence 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 in the 1850s responded to the challenge with crude and extralegal justice, hanging eight men 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 some $300 million, turned San Francisco from a frontier boomtown into a metropolis whose leading citizens were bankers, speculators, and lawyers, all of whom ate and drank in splendid restaurants and great hotels. By 1870 San Francisco boasted a population of nearly 150,000.
The 1860s and '70s marked the birth of the modern San Francisco, which has since then claimed to be the Athens, Paris, and New York City of the West but has never completely lost its mark of a 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.”
"In this old Presidio she was born. In the old Mission Dolores she was christened. Here, it is told, that in the merry exuberance of her innocent babyhood, she danced instead of prayed before the shrine.
In the glory of these sunrises and day-vistas and sunsets, she passed her girlhood and bloomed into womanhood. In this old adobe building she queened it supremely. Here she presided at every hospitality; here she was the leader of every fiesta." The Love-Story of Concha Argüello.
Nicola Petrovich Reznov, Chamberlain to the Czar and Concepcion (Concha) Arguello, daughter of the commandant of the Presidio.
The world premiere of the musical Viva Concha! Rose of the Presidio occurred on Cinco de Mayo weekend, May 5, 6 & 7, 2006 at the historic Victoria Theatre just a few blocks from Mission Dolores was baptized and prominent members of her family are memorialized in the graveyard. [vivacocha.com]
"There have been many small and large miracles associated with this project, none the Vatican would recognize but enough for me to understand why the Ohlone Indians called Concha "La Beata," the Blessed One."
---Candace Forest -producer composer
Historian Eve Iversen took a DVD of Viva Concha! to Krasnoyarsk, Russia, in 2007 along with a rose and soil from the Sister's grave, to be placed upon the grave of Rezanov.
There is a popular rock-opera version of the story in Russia called The Juno and the Avos
In 1806 a Russian diplomat, secretly seeking supplies for starving Russian trappers in Alaska, proposed marriage to the 15-year old Rose of the Presidio, Concha Arguello.
My proposal shocked her parents, raised in fanatiscism," wrote Rezanov in his journal. "The difference in religion and the future separation from their daughter were like a thumderclap to them."
The parents hope of making the stubborn girl obedient, appealing to her sense of devotion and fidelity to the Catholic religion was hopeless. Conchita, selflessly defending her love to Rezanov, had no intention to “betray” the faith as she sincerely believed that God would understand their feelings. In the end it was decided to “solicit the permission of holy Roman Catholic Church” for such a “mixed” marriage. between a catholic and an orthodox. Still Rezanov insisted on the immediate engagement, which unlike betrothal did not require a church ceremony.
On May 21, 1806, the Juno departed San Francisco for Sitka. Rosanov soon attempted to ride across Siberia to reach St. Petersburg. On the way he caught pneumonia three times; each time he failed to heal completely before beginning his journey again. During his third relapse on March 1, 1807, Rezanov fell from his horse and died near Krasnoyarsk. Concepcion, however, waited patiently for her true love to return. She struggled with thoughts of tragedy or disloyalty for five years before learning from an officer of Rezanov's, "He is dead…His last words were of you." The young officer then returned the locket Concepcion had given to Rezanov prior to his journey.
Concho became a Dominican nun. Sister Maria Domenica is buried in Benicia. Her brother, a governor of California has the tallest gravestone in Mission Dolores.
Miss Lotta
More Favorite Divas of the SF Bay Area
Luisa Tetrazzini
, (June 29, 1871 - April 28, 1940) thought to be the subject of the saying, "It's not over until the fat lady sings," was a gifted and internationally popular opera star who performed in San Francisco. Her most famous performance here was a free concert at Lotta's Fountain.
When the New York Metropolitan Opera bought out Oscar Hammerstein, a dispute arose over who owned Tetrazzini's contract. Attempts were made to secure an injunction to prevent her from singing in any theater until the dispute was resolved. After these legal difficulties in New York, she held a press conference and declared, "I will sing in San Francisco if I have to sing there in the streets, for I know the streets of San Francisco are free." This line became famous. She won her legal case, and her agent announced she would sing in the streets of San Francisco. On a crystal clear Christmas Eve in 1910, at the corner of Market and Kearney near Lotta's Fountain, Tetrazzini climbed a stage platform in a sparkling white gown, surrounded by a throng of an estimated two to three-hundred thousand San Franciscans, and serenaded the city she loved.
A San Franciscol chef named a dish (turkey, chicken, or seafood Tetrazzini) after her.
Her 3rd husband left her in reduced circumstances and she is remembered for her line her reduced circumstances. She would often say, "I am old, I am fat, but I am still Tetrazzini."
Charlotte (Lotta) Mignon Crabtree ((November 7, 1847, – September 25, 1924) was known as “Miss Lotta, the San Francisco Favorite" and “The Nation’s Darling.” By the age of 27, she was one of the most highly paid actresses in America. Today she is known primarily as the donor of Lotta’s Fountain where the San Francisco 1906 Earthquake commemoration takes place at Market and Kearny on April 18th at 5:12 am. The fountain was donated in 1875, at which time Lotta was touring the nation with her own theatrical company.
Lotta Crabtree had become one of the wealthiest and most beloved American entertainers of the late 19th century. From her beginnings as a 6-year-old red-haired ball of energy becoming enamored by her neighbor in Grass Valley the world famous, Lola Montez, until her retirement at the age of 45, she danced and jigged and sang her way into becoming "The Nation's Darling". Lotta was noted for her Irish dancing, at least some of which she seems to have learned from Lola. She also claimed to have picked up the cigar habit from Lola. Lotta also sang Irish songs and played the banjo which was a popular instrument among minstrels.
Lotta began her career by traveling to all of the mining camps performing ballads and dancing for the miners. Jigs, flings, wild polkas, breakdowns, the whole range of soft-shoe dancing: in her five or six years of traveling in the mines or playing to small audiences in San Francisco she had picked up every bold and lively changing step which could provoke a sudden cheer, and danced them with a delicate sprightliness or a rough and romping humor.
In 1856, the family moved back to San Francisco where Lotta toured the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys as well as the city's variety halls and amusement parks. She liked wearing male clothes and smoked cigars, on stage and off. She stood 5'2" and had light red hair, which she sprinkled sparingly with cayenne pepper for her performances. She always wore her skirts shorter than was the style, simply because she wanted to.
With Lotta and her mother exploiting the newly available publicity machine of mass market newspapers, her career took off. On the east coast she launched her stage career with melodramas which offered lots of opportunity for singing and dancing. Lotta's performances were generally played for laughs with unbelievable plots creating frameworks for amusing scenes or a song and dance number.
After retiring in 1902 at age 45, she made one final appearance in 1915 for "Lotta Crabtree Day" in San Francisco at the Panama-Pacific Exposition.
Lotta's mother Mary Ann had a legendary steamer trunk filled with proceeds from the tours, when it became too heavy, she would shrewdly invest Lotta's earnings in real estate, bonds and other endeavors. Lotta was worth more then $4,000,000 when she retired.
Early Superstar based in London - San Francisco - Monaco -Jersy maintained a wine-growing estate in SF Bay Area during the peak years of her career.
(13 October 1853 – 12 February 1929) was born the only girl and 6th of 7 children to to minister of a church on the English Channel island of Jersy. She inherited her mother's beauty and beautiful pale skin which led family members to call her 'Lillie'.
In 1772 Emilie Charlotte Le Breton was the 19 year old daughter of the Dean of the Jersey Isle, when she married the wealthy, handsome Edward Langtry, who had impressed by sailing in on his own yacht to her brother's wedding 6 weeks earlier. She was ambitious and they eventually settled in London after tiring of the small town social life on Jersy, although she would forever be known as the "Jersy Lilly."
She was discovered, wearing a simple black dress but it was her beauty and charm that had the men falling over themselves for her. Still she used the black dress for some time early in her career as a people's Queen of the Victorian era. Painters clamored to capture her likeness on canvas, people bought her photographs to display,
The married Prince of Wales, a well known serial philanderer, would never be able to end his infatuation with her and they would later share laughs at horse races many decades later with him as king Edward VII formerly Queen Victoria’s son Albert Edward ("Bertie"). He once complained to her, "I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship," whereupon she tartly replied, "And you’ve spent enough in me to float one."
In 1880 Lillie met Prince Louis of Battenberg and fell in love with him. Mr. Langtry—broke, dependent upon his wife, sinking into alcoholism—refuses to give his wife a divorce, claiming that he never will. Unknown to him, Lillie is pregnant with Louis' child. Helped financially by the Prince, Lillie goes to Paris to have her child, daughter Jeanne Marie. While there, Lillie meets legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Lillie set new trends in fashion, society emulating her style and the hairdressers and dressmakers of the day following suit, advertising themselves 'By Appointment to Lillie Langtry'.
In December 1881,Lillie embarked upon a stage career. she made her debut before the London public in She Stoops to Conquer. The following autumn, she made her first tour of America, an enormous success in New York she was welcomed with open arms. Wall Street closed during her visit and 'The Jersey Lily Waltz' became a huge hit.
"The greatest Claret in the country."
Lille was among the first to put Northern California wine country on the international map
Langtree, with the help of her winemaker Henri Descelles, crushed 51 tons of grapes for her first vintage and bottled the wine with her likeness on the label, Langtry proclaimed her wine "the greatest claret in the country."
1887—Transcontinental tour of major American cities, her most ambitious tour ever. For it, Lillie had a luxurious private railroad car built—paid for by Fred Gebhard.
When she reaches San Francisco in July, she bought a ranch on which she planned to breed race horses and make wine located at the northern part of the Napa Valley stretching into Lake County. She also bought a home in the City of San Francisco's Mission District. Her plan was to get an American divorce and live on the ranch and in the City for 6 months per year. On her portion of the ranch she establishes a winery and vineyard which are still in operation today. She was proud of her wine which featured her likeness on the bottle from the 4200 acres in the Guenoc Valley of California, 90 miles north of San Francisco. She sold it in 1906. You can still visit her restored home on special occasions and the winery celebrates its past owner in many ways including its name --- Langtry Farms
1888—Lillie's father dies; her mother and daughter, who believes Lillie to be her aunt, move in with Lillie at 2 Cadogan Place, London—the house bought for Lillie by the Prince of Wales.
1895—Oscar Wilde's reputation as a great playwright is established when The Importance of Being Earnest opens on St. Valentine's Day; and his catastrophic decline begins that same night when Lord Douglas publicly accuses him of maintaining an unnatural relationship with his son. Lillie attends the premiere performance.
Scenes from "Lillie" (1978) Francesca Annis as Lillie Langtry Peter Egan as Oscar Wilde
In 1897, Langtry became an American citizen. Her estranged husband, whom she supported with an annual allowance on condition he stay away from her, died of alcoholism. A letter of condolence written by her to a widow reads in part, "I too have lost a husband, but alas! it was no great loss."In 1899 Lillie's was at last free to remarry but her romance with her San Francisco ranch partner, American Freddie Gebhard, had ended. She married Sir Hugo de Bathe, a bon vivant nineteen years her junior with little wit, but great physical appeal. Moreover he stood in line for a title of Baronet allowing that Lillie could, at last, become a lady.
She became involved in the horse-racing world that she loved, although as a woman she was not allowed to join the Jockey Club (she registered herself as Mr. Jersey!) before retiring from the stage. One of her horses, Merman, won the prestigious Goodwood Cup, among other prizes.
1903—Judge Roy Bean, the Texas lawman who named his town Langtry in Lillie's honor, dies three months before Lillie travels to her namesake town hoping to meet him. The new mayor presents Bean's gun to her. The occasion was depicted in the 1940 film, The Westerner in which she was portrayed by Lillian Bond
Monaco
with her husband living a short distance away. The two saw one another only when she called on him for social gatherings or in brief private encounters. Her constant companion during this time was her close friend, Mathilda Peat, the widow of her butler. She may have also been seeing Arthur Jones who she'd met as a girl in Jersy.
Langtry died in Monaco in 1929, and was buried in the graveyard of St. Saviour's Church in Jersey – the church of which her father had been rector.
Lillie Langtree''s name should be added to these pioneering names of our wine industry:
"Many of the pioneering names of the 1850s continued to flourish: Jacob Gundlach in Sonoma, Charles Krug in Napa, and Charles Lefranc and Pierre Pellier in Santa Clara County, to name some of those whose wineries continue in operation to this day. To these pioneers, many new names were now added. Some of those still operating in California go back to this time, but very few indeed: Inglenook and Beringer in Napa County and Simi in Sonoma are notable; Cresta Blanca, Wente, and Concannon, all (originally) in the Livermore Valley, belong to the early 1880s, as do Geyser Peak and Italian Swiss Colony in Sonoma County and Chateau Montelena in Napa."
One of the most famous paintings done was by Millais, in which she wore her simple black dress, an amaryllis in her hand. The flower was mistakenly thought of as a Lily giving rise to her new nickname 'The Jersey Lily.' The portrait was hung at the Royal Academy, soon nominated Portrait of the Year and had to be roped off because of the crowds eager to see whom Milliais called “the most beautiful woman on earth.” Photography was just coming into its own, and her portrait became one of the most collected.
Where ever Lillie went, she was now mobbed. She became a fashion icon, women imitated the way that she wore her hair, her hats, even her dress sense.
"There shines in Lillie Langtry a purity of spirit. Therein lies the essence of human poetry."
---Walt Whitman
"I resent Mrs. Langtry. She has no right to be intelligent, daring and independent as well as lovely. It is a frightening combination of attributes."
-George Bernard Shaw:
Oscar Wilde
Among her coterie of new admirers was also the young Oscar Wilde, who wrote a poem about her called The New Helen. They became great friends, Oscar would teach her Latin and Greek, taking her to the British Museum to look at the antiquities. Laura Beattie, in her excellent biography of Lillie, writes that the two mutually used each other, as they continued their assault on the world. At the time of their meeting, Oscar Wilde was only a few years out of Oxford, and just beginning to make a name for himself in London as a dandy and aesthete. He would later become famous for wearing velvet suits and walking through the streets of London carrying a large lily. Lillie admired his charismatic stage presence.
Langtry made her American debut in 1882 as Hester Grazebrook in An Unequal Match. Her most famous theatrical roles: Rosalind in As You Like It and Kate in She Stoops to Conquer. Although she attempted such classic roles as Cleopatra [shown above] Rosalind and Lady Macbeth, she was at her best in contemporary pieces. American critics liked her Gossip (1895) and the controversial The Degenerates (1900). She refused to play Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere's Fan, a role her friend Oscar Wilde had written for and about her, which strained their friendship.
depicted with a Jersey lily in her hair by Frank Miles
The first European Diva to pause in San Francisco
She is fatal to any man who dares to love her,' Alexandre Dumas,
Lola Montez
, (February 17, 1821 – January 17, 1861) who could have served as the inspiration for the song from Damn Yankees, "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets," was famous for performing her Spider Dance, a provocative performance based on the notion that spiders were crawling on her body under her clothing. As she twirled and writhed around the stage, rubber spiders came flying out.
She arrived in New York in 1852, dressed like a man, with spurred boots and a riding whip, which she used immediately on an admirer who dared to grab onto her coat tails. She toured the country for three years, purchasing a house in Grass Valley, Nevada where she lived in between tours. While in San Francisco, she married her third husband (again bigamous), a newspaper man by the name of Patrick Hull in 1853.
They set off on a tour of the Gold Rush towns, Lola not one to travel lightly, brought along 50 trunks that contained silk drapery, gilt mirrors, as well as a stupendous wardrobe of clothes. The marriage didn't last, with Hull leaving Lola after only two months of marriage. Unlucky in love, she is said to have written, "Love is a pipe we fill at eighteen and smoke until forty. Then we rake the ashes till our exit."
During her 3 years in Grass Valley, she inspired a young pupil, Lotta Crabtree to go to become the most successful actress in America's 19th century.. She also kept a menagerie of pets including a tamed grizzly bear which she took for walks.
Recovered enough from a stroke to hobble outside for a breath of fresh air on Christmas Day, Lola developed pneumonia and, on January 17, 1861 – she died. Her life quickly passed into legend.
"I have known all the world has to give -- ALL!" Lola Montez shortly before her death in 1861.
