This is the first in a multi-part series describing San Francisco in 1880. For those of you who have read either Maids of Misfortune or Uneasy Spirits, or my short stories, this will provide you with some deeper understanding of the city where my main characters, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, lived as children in the 1860s and returned to as adults in the 1870s. If you are not familiar with my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, I hope these historical pieces will pique your interest––although I promise my fiction is much livelier reading. All the material quoted below is from my thesis, “Like a Machine or an Animal: Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century,” University of California: San Diego dissertation, 1982 pp. 60-69.”  I must say, it is much more entertaining to convey historical information through Read more…