Great Republic sailing card, courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

The California Gold Rush gave birth to America's greatest and fastest clipper ships. By the late 1850s, clipper ship owners and merchants—in an atmosphere of financial panic, declining freight rates, growing competition, and the coming of civil war—had begun augmenting their advertising with small sailing cards touting the fleetness with which clippers such as the Great Republic could still make the voyage around the Horn to San Francisco.

"At length we are able to chronicle the arrival of that far-famed specimen of naval architecture, the Great Republic. We do not remember, even with all the celebrated clippers that have run between the Eastern ports and San Francisco, an advent that has been looked forward to with as much interest as the present. The lengthy accounts received from time to time, when she was built—the great expectations entertained with respect to her run suddenly put to flight by the news of the conflagration which caused her scuttling—her subsequent adventures, having been raised, placed on the dock, and employed in the transport service in the Crimea—all of these details have been familiar to all those interested in our mercantile marine, and what Californian is not?—consequently it is not strange that for a week or two past it was expected the famed clipper would make her appearance. Quite a buzz was noticeable on Front street, this afternoon [March 9, 1857], when it became known that she was telegraphed, and the report went from one to another, and for a time the words 'the Great Republic has arrived' were heard at every crossing and corner. The noble ship has done her part deftly—91 days, the shortest passage yet made since the arrival of the Flying Cloud [built by Donald McKay in 1851], in 1854, in 89 days. In fact, next to the two celebrated passages by that vessel, the first in 1851 and the last in 1854, the present time by the Great Republic is the best on record." –Daily Alta California, San Francisco, March 10, 1857

The Great Republic began her first New York–San Francisco run on December 7, 1856. Early accounts in the San Francisco and New York newspapers gave the near-record time of her voyage as 91 days. They were probably based on the Great Republic's reported arrival 91 days later—on March 8—off the Farallones. The celebrated clipper did not actually anchor in San Francisco Bay until March 9.

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