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THE MAN WHO BUILT SAN FRANCISCO --Julian Dana--Macmillan ($3.50).

According to Julian Dana, the man who built San Francisco was a cheerful, magnetic, goodhearted, almost-forgotten banker and promoter named William Ralston. He was born in Plymouth, Ohio in 1826, became a steamboat clerk in the great days of Mississippi steamboating, a banker in Panama during the Gold Rush.

He arrived in San Francisco at the age of 25 as captain of the vessel that carried him. Conceived in the newer fashion of romantic biography, which decrees that the life discussed shall conform as closely as possible to a good cinema scenario, The Man Who Built San Francisco does not establish Ralston's claims to greatness, but it does paint a suggestive picture of the career of a Western capitalist, includes a good deal of picturesque material on San Francisco's highly-colored early days and tells of at least two of Ralston's exploits that were of more than local importance.

Associated with three partners in one of Vanderbilt's companies, Ralston was engaged in an amazing conspiracy against the old Commodore, broke with his partners when they were defeated, founded the Bank of California, built a great estate, the famed Palace Hotel, spent fortunes trying to establish industries in California, backed mines, railroads, woolen mills, water companies, insurance companies, diamond mines in Arizona. He lost his fortune with the collapse of the Bank of California in 1875 and died mysteriously the following day while swimming off North Beach at the foot of Larkin Street.

His greatest achievement was probably that of keeping California on gold during the Civil War. But his most mysterious was the part he played in the war of the filibuster, William Walker, President of Nicaragua.

In Julian Dana's account, Walker's invasion of Central America was only an incident in the battle between Commodore Vanderbilt and Ralston and his partners.

On Jan. 3, 1856, Vanderbilt, having rewon control of the company that Ralston and his associates had seized, was in a position to throw them out and intended to do so. But in the previous summer the Westerners had subsidized William Walker's invasion of Nicaragua. Walker, who had already tried to extend slavery by leading an invasion of Mexico, promised Ralston's associates a monopoly on transportation across Nicaragua, where Vanderbilt's lines crossed. They supplied Walker with money ($20,000 in gold belonging to the company Vanderbilt nominally owned), transported his recruits free on Vanderbilt ships. After they had thus blocked Vanderbilt's way across Central America, the Commodore frustrated them by tying up the West Coast ships of the line, sending his soldiers of fortune to Costa Rica, which promptly declared war on Walker and defeated him.

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