Bryant was a strong advocate for an eight-hour work day as well as legislation to halt the immigration of Chinese laborers into the state.

As a young man, he sailed around the tip of South America to San Francisco, where he arrived in 1850 and went directly to the Gold Country of California.

After a "year's hard work," however, he returned to San Francisco "for medical treatment," and then went to Benicia, California, where in 1854–55 was the city marshal and in 1856 he was a deputy sheriff.

[4] In San Francisco he became active in the Democratic Party, and in 1866 President Andrew Johnson commissioned him a naval officer "with all the honors and benefits to be derived therefrom."

The founding resolution noted that Broderick had sought to form an organization "whose main principle was opposition to the extension of slavery.

Subsequent developments only helped strengthen the opinion and remove all doubt that the untimely termination of the ex-Mayor's career was the act of a desperate man, goaded by financial and physical troubles.

Bryant, ex-Mayor of San Francisco, committed suicide this morning by jumping from the ferry steamer Encinal just after the boat had started on the 9:15 trip to Oakland.

[16]A coroner's jury, however, ruled on May 15, 1888, that the death was accidental, a decision based primarily on the testimony of "the boy Joseph Leikena," who said: When the boat was three or four blocks out from the wharf, I saw a man walking up and down on the upper deck.

[17]Bryant's support for an eight-hour working day and his calling for legislation to halt the "influx" of Chinese laborers to California attracted the attention of Democratic leaders, and he secured the nomination for San Francisco mayor in 1875.

The votes were 9,792 for Bryant; 9,486 for Charles Clayton, former county supervisor; and 4,106 for Andrew Hallidie, the builder of San Francisco's first cable car.

I recommend that one of our vacant squares or lots in the outskirts of the city be appropriated, and that a cheap, rough building be erected of two wards, one for women and the other for men, designed expressly for this class.

In one year the dens of gambling and lewdness that now offend decency on our public streets will be driven out of sight, [and] our jails will be relieved of these pests.

"[20] He called it a "gross injustice to send children of tender years" to the city's Industrial School "who, guiltless of crime, but for the misfortune of being orphans or having worthless parents.

[20] In running for mayor, Bryant "emphatically condemned the purchase of the Spring Valley Water Company by the city, declaring it not worth half the price being asked."

[2]: 96 In the depths of the Long Depression of 1873–79, by June 1877 an estimated thirty thousand San Franciscans were unemployed, and workers' camps sprang up on the sandlots south of the new City Hall at Macallister and Larkin streets.

Mobs threatened the peace of the city, and on July 26, Bryant was compelled to call upon the Army and upon organized gangs of vigilantes to help restore order.

[23] In 1878, Bryant called together and was elected chairman of a relief committee designed to accept and forward donations to Southern United States communities that were then in the grip of a yellow fever epidemic.

The mayor hosted former President Ulysses S. Grant when the general made a lengthy visit to California after his around-the world trip in 1879.

[31] He was also chairman of an 1887 committee "to make preparations for an extensive and proper exhibit of interior products at the fair to be given this fall by the Mechanics' Institute."