Next time you are standing on San Francisco’s streets east of Sansome, picture this: below your feet, beneath the pavement lies the ash and timbers of many other incarnations of this city, including remnants of “many a gallant craft that once proudly plowed the bounding billows of the open sea, and which formed one of the great fleet of vessels that brought the fortune-hunters to the Golden Gate—that made up the Argonauts’ Armada of golden dreams.”

Liza Ketchum’s lively eyes light up as she asks, “Did you know that San Francisco burned to the ground many times before the 1906 earthquake? Ketchum, author of Newsgirl, set in gold-rush San Francisco, explains how the town earned its early nickname, Phoenix City for its stubborn ability to spring forth again and again from its own ashes. “It was a city made of wood, tar-paper and canvas, and the fire companies were all horse-drawn. There wasn’t even a real water system.” In fact, the city suffered what were referred to as seven great conflagrations: among the most severe were in December 1849, May, June and September 1850, May and June 1851, and November 1852. In 1853, editor of the San Francisco Directory Charles P. Kimball wrote, “After every extensive fire the walls of (the sturdier) buildings were to be seen, standing in melancholy loneliness in the midst of the desolation.”

That phoenix-like resilience is embodied by Newsgirl and its adventurous heroine, Amelia Forrester, who arrives at the wharves of 1851 San Francisco as a 12-year-old girl accompanied only by her mother and her mother’s female friend in a city (then covering territory to San Mateo) whose population boasted about 28,000 people, only 600 of whom (roughly 2%) were women. A resourceful Amelia, observing how boys as young as seven made good money selling month-old eastern newspapers for many times their original value, cuts off her hair and dresses as a boy in order to be accepted in a newspaper gang. Amelia’s bravery, compassion, and passion for exploration is clearly echoed by Ketchum herself in her attitude toward exploring history, not as a sepia-toned, two-dimensional pedagogical exercise, but with full-color, knockdown intensity.

“I didn’t intend to be a children’s author, I just sort of fell into it, but I have always been interested in and inspired by the stories my father and grandfather, who wrote swashbuckling cliffhanger serials for newspapers, also collected and loved.” For Ketchum, who remembers certain of her own childhood periods vividly, the stories that are particularly compelling are about children: the children of the gold rush, and of the western migration. One true account led to a newspaper serial she wrote several years ago called Orphan Journey Home, about a family of six children living in Southern Illinois whose parents died within a week of each other in 1828—a time when orphaned children could be seized and sold as indentured servants. The children made it back to Eastern Kentucky on wilderness roads, camping in the woods with almost no adult help—the oldest was 12 and the youngest was an infant. Asked what children will take away from her books, besides the joy of an adventure story in which a girl can be a strong character, Ketchum hopes “that children will understand that they have inner resources.”

Ketchum’s next book, a historical novel set in 1913 about the children of vaudeville, has just been submitted to her agent. “The protagonist is 14: she runs away from home to become a vaudeville singer.” Its inspiration? Ketchum's own great-grandparents eloped and ran away to join a vaudeville troupe.

Ketchum is a teacher of Writing for Children and Young Adults at Hamline University, and says she targeted Newsgirl toward a middle-school audience, ten and older, but the writing is sophisticated enough for adults, and packed with historical treasure that brings a San Francisco few of us would recognize into sharp focus. “I don’t like to talk down to kids,” Ketchum says. “And as this book illustrates, children of the gold rush era were bread-winners for their families. They often made more money selling eastern newspapers than their parents did running shops.” Not only is the heroine of Newsgirl a compelling character, but the city itself appears in an incarnation no living person remembers first-hand, “with its homely shacks straggling along the bayshore at the base of chaparral-covered slopes and with the bay waters resembling the floor of a convention of toothpicks stood on end, so dotted is it with the stick of a myriad, masted fleet craft of all sizes, styles and nationalities.” The inhabitants of 1851 San Francisco live in a scattered collection of shacks, shanties, tents, a few sturdier brick or iron buildings (which cooked their inhabitants alive during fires), and ships abandoned when their crew and captains caught gold fever and left for the panning fields. Amelia’s Goat Hill, the pre-telegraph Telegraph Hill, sports a semaphore for signaling to the city about the nature of incoming ships. The city has one post office, and a population so desperate for news they rise at 3am when a mail ship arrives to stand in line for letters from home.

Newsgirl is a book children will love because it is an adventure that acknowledges their bravery and intelligence. The world of 1851 San Francisco, with its hardscrabble existence, fires, and street violence is really not so different from the world of 2010 with its earthquakes, tsunamis, poverty and climate change. Adult readers will enjoy Newsgirl because it is spun out of the same rich history of San Francisco’s rough and ready cast of characters. Maybe you have already heard of Mizzentop Joe, a fiddle-playing ghost buried with the Bethel, which now lies under Drumm street, close to Jackson, and Black Bart, the gentleman highwayman, caught because he dropped his handkerchief at a train robbery, or Shadowless Sam, brought as a carnival exhibition and billed as so thin he didn’t cast a shadow—until he snuck into the hold of the Alida and ate his way to 250 pounds. Now you can add another character to San Francisco's ranks of vital characters: Ketchum’s Amelia Forrester, or Emile as she names her newsboy alter-ego, who rescues the beloved horse, Dos Reales, from the fire of May 1851, learns to pan for gold, survives an accidental balloon trip that crashes her in Sonora (based on actual historical accounts), and eventually becomes not just a newsgirl, but a full-fledged news-writer.

Newsgirl
by Liza Ketchum (327 pages/Viking, 2009)

reviewed by LJ Moore editor.moore(at)gmail(dot)com

Related Links:
Other books by Liza Ketchum
San Francisco Buried Ships
The Armada of Golden Dreams, by Walter J. Thompson, 1916
San Francisco History