Harry Meiggs was one of those perceptive entrepreneurs in the Gold Rush who realized that the main chance for making a fortune lay not in mining gold, but in mining the miners. In 1848 he left his lumberyard in upstate New York with a shipload of lumber. When he arrived in San Francisco he began selling his lumber to the eager miners who desperately needed wood to build flumes and sluices, and to timber shafts and tunnels. Meiggs soon made a small fortune and built a sawmill near the intersection of Francisco and Mason.

Meiggs was also a key player in the development of the lumber industry along the north coast. He founded the port of Meiggsville in Mendocino County, and operated a fleet of schooners that brought thousands of board feet of redwood to San Francisco. The city was booming in the 1850s, and its appetite for lumber was insatiable.

To accommodate all the incoming cargoes of lumber, Meiggs built a two-thousand-foot wharf in San Francisco. Known as Meiggs Wharf, it projected out from the Embarcadero near what is today Fisherman's Wharf. At the end of the wharf was a surreal little dive called the Cobweb Palace, a place where sailors and other patrons could share their drinks--should they so choose--with a half-tame monkey. Meiggs was quite a pet fancier himself; he kept a small menagerie of canaries in his mansion on Telegraph Hill.

Always bubbling over with charisma and self-confidence, Harry Meiggs was a man with an exuberant personality. He was on a back-slapping, first-name basis with half the city. And he was a super salesman, too. "You can always trust Honest Harry" was his motto. In 1852 Meiggs was elected city alderman and put a lot of energy into directing the city's growth toward North Beach, where he just happened to own some real estate. When he became a bit over-extended, Meiggs made a big mistake by trying to cover his debts with stolen city warrants. Apparently Honest Harry wasn't so honest after all.