Little Known Tales in San Francisco History

San Francisco grew from a tiny burg of 1,000 persons in 1848 to its present-day population of 825,863. The city was founded in 1776 when Spain built a fort at the site of Golden Gate Park.After World War II, San Francisco became a magnet for America's counter-culture. Hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury in 1960 and peaked out with the Summer of Love in 1967.San Francisco's China Town is the oldest and largest in North America. The city's famous cable cars carry riders up and down the steep inclines and to Fisherman's Wharf below.People watch as the fishermen bring in their daily catches each day at the piers of Fisherman's Wharf.. There's little that can't be found in San Francisco. The city's ethnic makeup is diverse. It's made up of whites, Asians, Afro-Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics. San Francisco has developed an international character that began with its founding and continues today.

Alton Pryor has published fifty-plus books since turning 70 in 1997-many of them about California’s past and the colorful characters who rode our trails to fame or infamy. To date he has sold more than 180,000-plus copies of his first book, ＂Little Known Tales in California History＂, and has done respectably well with most of his other titles. But until fate derailed his 33-year journalism career, he never aspired to write a book, and certainly never anticipated he would come to be regarded as ＂Mr. Self-Publishing＂ by his peers in the Sacramento area. ＂I would have liked living in the Old West,＂ he says. ＂I wanted, at one time, to be a really good cowboy. I had horses as a young man and even took a raw colt and trained it to work cattle.＂ But, by the time Pryor was born on March 19, 1927, the era of gunslingers and gold miners was over, and he started life, instead, on his family’s farm outside of King City in the Salinas Valley. He was terminated after writing for 27 years for a magazine. The magazine was sold to a midwest firm. Pryor turned to writing books and says now, ＂I wish I had been fired 20 years earlier.＂