The paddle-steamer California passed through the Golden Gate on the morning of 21 September 1857, a month and a week after Collis had sailed out of New York harbour. The fog made the bay seem silvery and haunted, like the lake which dying Norse heroes had to pass across to reach Valhalla; and when the California started to protest mournfully with her foghorn, and when dozens of rotting and abandoned ships came mysteriously into view, still riding at anchor where their owners had left them years and years ago, rising and falling with ocean swell, Collis was almost convinced that they had reached the end of the world, the final graveyard of dreams and ambitions. For the first time since he had bought his ticket from the steamship office in New York, he felt a twinge of real apprehension. He knew from Andrew Hunt that San Francisco was less than comfortable; that it was populated by thieves, opportunists, and speculators; but at the very least he had expected to see a sunny, welcoming bay, with people waving and shouting. At the very least, he had expected some kind of rough-cut jollity. Instead, under this pall of pearly grey, ghostly and muffled, the California paddled her way past makeshift warehouses, tumbledown shacks, and half-collapsed jetties; and although the wharves and the landing stages were bustling with longshoremen and expressmen and men banging at crates with hammers and mallets, they seemed to be going about their daily business with a preoccupied grimness that was unmoved by the arrival of another steamship.

Eventually, with a last honk, the California slowed, and turned, and nudged her way into Broadway Wharf, the landing stage at the foot of Telegraph Hill. The engines were stilled and the steamer drifted gradually inshore, until her hull bumped against the wharf’s wooden supports.

Collis stood straight and looked through the fog at the dim hills of San Francisco. They were patchworked with shanties, sheds, and tents, and the fog was made thicker still by the haze from hundreds of cooking fires. In what looked like the downtown district, he could make out a cluster of more respectable-looking frame buildings and adobes, and brick-built banks and hotels. But to a man from New York, who was accustomed to the sophisticated jostling of omnibuses and private carriages between tree-lined avenues and shady parks and rows of solid brownstones, San Francisco looked like a decorative rubbish dump, a higgledy-piggledy collection of iron, secondhand timber, and ship’s canvas, in and out of which a population of extraordinary fierceness rushed and rampaged in oxcarts and on horses and on foot, shouting at the tops of their voices and wearing the sorriest display of hats that Collis had ever seen in his life.

To the West, towards the Presidio, the hills appeared to be more pleasantly wooded, but beyond the smoke and the fog and the shanties Collis could make out nothing more than bald sandy peaks and scrubby trees.