took place. That memorable engagement was sprung as a surprise upon the Wampanoags while King Philip was absent, he having an hours’ overtime engagement with his teacher. Up and over the hill poured the Pilgrims loaded with shelly-cocoas and headed by Captain Church, mounted upon his father’s heavy-hoofed and formidable dray horse. Cavalry was a new element in the warfare and the Indians gave way in disorder. The enemy held the hillside and the shelly-cocoa patches. Dark was the outlook, when suddenly their feeble war whoops were reinforced by one which had a “Charge, Chester, Charge,” ring to it, and up came King Philip Ducksy, armed with an eight-foot fence rail which he swung around like the wing of a windmill. Right for the cavalry he charged, and as Captain Church swept down upon him he dodged and then—whack came the formidable wing on the cavalry’s flank. Whack followed whack, and then did the war steed of the doughty Captain place him in the role of John Gilpin as it tore its way toward home. King Philip sounded the advance and the Pilgrims lost no time in following their leader. Oh, the rout was awful! Great was the carnage amid the shrilling of the victors’ war whoops. Napoleon at the bridge of Lodi and Sheridan at Winchester’s fight faded into insignificance as in-the-nick-of-time battle heroes alongside of the resourceful and brave Ducksy.
Shelly-cocoas were not always in partnership with war whoops. Under the guidance of appreciative youth they were connected with other pursuits more or less useful as well as tending to the enhancement of good feeling among all classes and the growth of uplifting influences. For instance, there was the campaign of education to popularize shelly-cocoas with the grown-up folks. Every inducement was held out to make them take notice of the shelly-cocoa and look kindly upon it. Sister’s best young man hastening homeward from the usual Sunday night parlor seance would find his overcoat pockets freighted with juicy shelly-cocoas; Pa, fat and bald headed, would, on leaving after the evening card game, slam his silk hat on hurriedly while a half dozen shelly-cocoas would rattle around inside it like dice in a box; Ma on her busy baking days was reminded of the existence of shelly-cocoas by having one fly through the open window and snuggle down with the fruit in the pie she was building.
But failure croaked like a raven over this field of industry. Strange to say, the older folks could not understand why a shelly-cocoa was born. Such perverseness!
Then there were weird relations between policemen and shelly-cocoas. The spiny bulbs were the abomination of the knights of the star; some of whom even ascribed supernatural qualities to shelly-cocoas; others tried to figure out the tie of affinity between adolescence and the shelly-cocoa. There certainly was some mysterious influence which stirred shelly-cocoas to aggressive action when a policeman approached their haunts. Myriad cases have been reported of shellycocoas deliberately tearing themselves loose from their vines and lurking around corners and savagely assaulting a policeman as he turned it, or of leaping upon roofs just to tumble off again and swat a policeman in the neck. It was no use for a policeman to hold up some happy-hearted youth gayly tripping on his way to school, his face wreathed in smiles at the knowledge of how well he knew his lessons for the day. What did he know of the doing of erratic shelly-cocoas?
Attempts to introduce shelly-cocoas into the schools also failed owing to the narrow-mindedness and obduracy of teachers. There was a peaceful and a sentimental aspect to a shelly-cocoa’s existence, especially out in the districts where the wig-wams were few and far between and the tribes were not menaced by the strenuous struggles of the border. There the shelly-cocoa had other uses than as a weapon of war. Within the heart of the spiny bulb was an oval-shaped kernel which when dried out hard in the sun like a gourd, was susceptible of a high polish from canary yellow to a rich mahogany, and with copper and brass “Chinee” coins with square holes in the center made up the wampum of the tribes. These dried “shellies” could also be cut up into pretty designs such as baskets, rings or linked bracelets, and necklaces fit to adorn a South Sea princess.
Perhaps you knew that pretty square block of birdcage houses, each set in a garden of roses, called Tuckertown, and which nestled on the slope which caught the slanting rays of the westward falling sun, beginning at Octavia and Washington streets. Perhaps you crossed that ridge like a warrior bold and true homeward-bound from school, and gave a whoop as you gazed admiringly upon the lupine and shelly-cocoa covered vista and saw the belle of Tuckertown swinging on the family gate, just as Dove Eye the Lodge Queen might have loitered around the opening of her chieftain daddy’s tepee.
Perhaps you hurled your Davies’ Bourdon and Swinton’s Outlines, bound by a strap, to the ground and kicked them gleefully all the way before you until you landed beside Dove Eye and threw a necklace of shelly-cocoa wampum over her shoulders.
Perhaps, I say.
The shelly-cocoa and the golden and purple lupine blossoms are gone forever from all the old hillsides, having given way to the homes of other dwellers who little reck of the romance of the reincarnated Pilgrim Fathers and the Wampanoags and the dimples of winsome Dove Eye that have long since turned to wrinkles. And I have heard these newcomers in Canaan denounce those slopes of dear old San Francisco as dreary, dismal districts where raw winds and damp fogs held high Walpurgian revels. But—
There once lived in the old town an obscure poet whose thoughts over dwelt in “June’s palace paved with gold,” but whose feet trod the halls of dingy lodging-houses and whose appetite was appeased in “three for a quarter” restaurants. He finally decided to become a prosperous plumber instead of remaining a poor poet. But before bartering his minstrel harp for a plumber’s pipe wrench he twanged off a lay called “Where Purple Lupine Grows,” in which he lauded the sand dunes, expressing his reverence for the blossom-bedecked hills because of the memory of the days when he wandered over them in company with bonny Dove Eye’s sister, who probably later became his bride and the mother of a line of plumbers, and closing:
To some gay gardens are more fair,
But eye cannot impartIdeal of beauty—that is e’er The Standard of the heart.
And the poet-plumber had a lead-pipe cinch on the sentimental situation.
—Article transcription courtesy of Ron Filion [http://www.zpub.com/sf50/sf/sindex.htm]
The north and west sides of the city sported the sandhills while sand blew over the hills and filled the valleys in the southeast. Those valleys soaked up the water from rain runoff and artesian springs to form marshlands, lakes, lagoons, and streams. Just as the Potrero District was ideal for pastureland, the Mission District proved itself ideal for farming. It received more sun than the rest of the city and its softly rolling hills, sandy soil and abundant water made it ideal for row crops, grains, and orchards.
The 1867 San Francisco Municipal Report for Farms cited five thousand acres planted in barley and oats, another eleven hundred acres planted in potatoes, three hundred acres of hay, hundreds of bushels of beans, peas, onions, and beets harvested, as well as ninety tons of turnips and thirty tons of pumpkins and squash produced. Aside from reporting nearly seventy-five hundred horses, the city held within it over four thousand milk cows, more than fifty-six hundred hogs, nearly five thousand chickens, and numerous other farm animals. Orchards and vines accounted for the remainder of the report, with over three thousand fruit trees planted, one hundred raspberry vines, seventy-five grape vines, and thirty thousand strawberry vines producing. San Francisco must have had a hearty appetite for strawberries.
San Francisco’s primary crop remained houses and businesses, and soon the Mission District was apportioned with its own street layout and lots for sale. The lakes and lagoons were filled, the artesian wells were tapped and diverted through the storm drains, and the streams were routed to those storm drains as well, all emptying into the artificial Mission Creek and then directly into the bay. The land was leveled and the Mission became a working-class neighborhood for the city’s German and Irish immigrants. Not one remnant remains of the fertile land other than the occasional backyard garden, and few
