Bonanza Inn : America's First Luxury Hotel

Bonanza Inn is the story of the world-famous Palace Hotel in San Francisco, built in 1875 and destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906.

It is, however, much more than the biography of a hotel. For the Palace was the perfect symbol of one of the most remarkable eras in American history. Built at the time when Nevada's fabulously rich silver mines were pouring millions of dollars each month into San Francisco, it typified the color and grandiose extravagances of the whole bonanza period.

Through its marble-paved public rooms and its immense grand court passed all the great, the near-great, and merely flamboyant of a colorful era—bonanza kings and royalty alike, statesmen, soldiers, singers, and sinners of every hue. Here dallied Senator Sharon and Sarah Althea Hill; Lillie Hitchcock Coit romped through the corridors as she romped through life; Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman were feasted in the banquet halls; and the members of the Friday Night Cotillion Club danced their sedate dances in the ballroom. Here women preened and paraded; here men drank and diced and died.

The story of the three decades of its life, and of the people who thronged it during those glamorous years, has been told in Bonanza Inn. Nothing is missed of the color and throbbing life of the place and time.