December 29 Friday – Sam’s San Francisco Letter given this date was published in the Enterprise sometime in Jan. 1866. Sections: “Busted,” “Inspiration of Louderback,” “A Pleasant Farce,” “Personal,” (no text available for the last two items) and:

THE BLACK HOLE OF SAN FRANCISCO

If I were Police Judge here, I would hold my court in the city prison and sentence my convicts to imprisonment in the present Police Court room. … You cannot imagine what a horrible hole that Police Court is. The cholera itself couldn’t stand it there. The room is about 24 x 40 feet in size, I suppose, and is blocked in on all sides by massive brick walls; it has three or four doors, but they are never opened—and if they were they only open into airless courts and closets any how; it has but one window, and now that is blocked up, as I was telling you; there is not a solitary air-hole as big as your nostril about the whole place. Very well; down two sides of the room, drunken filthy loafers, thieves, prostitutes, China chicken-stealers, witnesses, and slimy guttersnipes who come to see, and belch and issue deadly smells, are banked and packed, four ranks deep—a solid mass of rotting, steaming corruption. In the centre of the room are Dan Murphy, Zabriskie, the Citizen Sam Platt, Prosecuting Attorney Louderback, and other lawyers, either of whom would do for a censer to swing before the high altar of hell. Then, near the Judge are a crowd of reporters—a kind of cattle that did never smell good in any land. The house is full—so full that you have to actually squirm and shoulder your way from one part of it to another—and not a single crack or crevice in the walls to let in one poor breath of God’s pure air! The dead, exhausted, poisoned atmosphere looks absolutely blue and filmy, sometimes—did when they had a little daylight. Now they have only gas-light and the added heat it brings. Another Judge will die shortly if this thing goes on [Taper171-3].