To be successful and popular among
the Pioneers was something really to a man’s
credit. Men were thrown upon their own resources,
and, as in Mediaeval times, were their own police
and watchmen, their own firemen, and in most cases
their own judge and jury. There was no distribution
of the inhabitants into separate classes: they
constituted a single class, the only distinction being
that between individuals. There was not even the
broad distinction between those who worked with their
heads and those who worked with their hands.
Everybody, except the gamblers, performed manual labor;
and although this condition could not long prevail
in San Francisco or Sacramento, it continued in the
mines for many months. In fact, any one who did
not live by actual physical toil was regarded by the
miners as a social excrescence, a parasite.
An old miner, after spending a night
in a San Francisco lodging house, paid the proprietor
with gold dust. While waiting for his change he
seemed to be studying the keeper of the house as a
novel and not over-admirable specimen of humanity.
Finally he inquired of him as follows: “Say,
now, stranger, do you do nothing else but just sit
there and take a dollar from every man that sleeps
in these beds?” “Yes,” was the reply,
“that is my business.” “Well,
then,” said the miner after a little further
reflection, “it’s a damned mean way of
making your living; that’s all I can say.”
Even those who were not democratic
by nature became so in California. All men felt
that they were, at last, free and equal. Social
distinctions were rubbed out. A man was judged
by his conduct, not by his bank account, nor by the
set, the family, the club, or the church to which he
belonged. All former records were wiped from the
slate; and nobody inquired whether, in order to reach
California, a man had resigned public office or position,
or had escaped from a jail.
“Some of the best men,”
says Bret Harte, “had the worst antecedents,
some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless, Puritan
pedigree. ’The boys seem to have taken
a fresh deal all round,’ said Mr. John Oakhurst
one day to me, with the easy confidence of a man who
was conscious of his ability to win my money, ’and
there is no knowing whether a man will turn out knave
or king.’”
This, perhaps, sounds a little improbable,
and yet here, as always, Bret Harte has merely stated
the fact as it was. One of the most accurate
contemporary historians says: “The man esteemed
virtuous at home becomes profligate here, the honest
man dishonest, and the clergyman sometimes a profane
gambler; while, on the contrary, the cases are not
few of those who were idle or profligate at home,
who came here to be reformed."
“It was a republic of incognitos.
No one knew who any one else was, and only the more
ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know.
Gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility
than thieves living in South Kensington would take
to conceal their blackguardism."
“Have you a letter of introduction?”
wrote a Pioneer to a friend in the East about to sail
for California. “If you have, never present
it. No one here has time to read such things.
No one cares even to know your name. If you are
the right sort of a man, everything goes smoothly here.”
“What is your partner’s last name?”
asked one San Francisco merchant of another in 1850.
“Really, I don’t know,” was the reply;
“we have only been acquainted three or four
weeks.” A miner at Maryville once offered
to wager his old blind mule against a plug of tobacco
that the company, although they had been acquainted
for some years, could not tell one another’s
names; and this was found upon trial to be the case.
Men were usually known, as Bret Harte
relates, by the State or other place from which they
came, with some prefix or affix to denote
a salient characteristic. Thus one miner, in
a home letter, speaks of his friends, “Big Pike,
Little Pike, Old Kentuck, Little York, Big York, Sandy,
and Scotty.” Men originally from the East,
and long supposed to be dead, turned up in California,
seeking a new career. In fact, there seems to
have been a general inclination among the Pioneers
to strike out in new directions. “To find
a man here engaged in his own trade or profession,”
wrote a Forty-Niner, “is a rare thing. The
merchant of to-day is to-morrow a doctor; lawyers
turn bankers, and bankers lawyers. The miners
are almost continually on the move, passing from one
claim to another, and from the Southern to the Northern
mines, or vice versa.”
Bret Harte was startled by meeting
an old acquaintance in a strange situation. “At
my first breakfast in a restaurant on Long Wharf I
was haunted during the meal by a shadowy resemblance
which the waiter who took my order bore to a gentleman
to whom in my boyhood I had looked up as to a mirror
of elegance, urbanity, and social accomplishment.
Fearful lest I should insult the waiter who
carried a revolver by this reminiscence,
I said nothing to him; but a later inquiry of the
proprietor proved that my suspicions were correct.
‘He’s mighty handy,’ said this man,
’and can talk elegant to a customer as is waiting
for his cakes, and make him kinder forget he ain’t
sarved.’”
Bret Harte relates another case.
“An Argonaut just arriving was amazed at recognizing
in the boatman who pulled him ashore, and who charged
him the modest sum of fifty dollars for the performance,
a classmate at Oxford. ‘Were you not,’
he asked eagerly, ’Senior Wrangler in ‘43?’
‘Yes,’ said the other significantly, ‘but
I also pulled stroke against Cambridge.’”
A Yale College professor was hauling
freight with a yoke of oxen; a Yale graduate was selling
peanuts on the Plaza at San Francisco; an ex-governor
was playing the fiddle in a bar-room; a physician was
washing dishes in a hotel; a minister was acting as
waiter in a restaurant; a lawyer was paring potatoes
in the same place. Lawyers, indeed, were doing
a great deal of useful work in California. One
kept a mush and milk stand; another sold pies at a
crossing of the American River; a third drove a team
of mules.
John A. McGlynn, one of the best known
and most successful Forty-Niners, began by hitching
two half-broken mustangs to an express wagon, and acting
as teamster. He was soon chosen to enforce the
rules regulating the unloading of vessels and the
cartage of goods. All the drivers obeyed him,
except one, a native of Chili, a big, powerful man,
with a team of six American mules. McGlynn ordered
him into line; he refused; and McGlynn struck him
with his whip. In an instant both men had leaped
from their wagon-seats to the ground. The Chileno
rushed at McGlynn, with his bowie-knife in his hand;
but the American was left-handed, for which the Chileno
was not prepared; and with his first blow McGlynn stretched
his antagonist on the ground. There he held him
until the fellow promised good behavior. On regaining
his feet the defeated man invited all hands to drink,
and became thenceforth a warm friend of the victor.
The judge of the Court for Santa Cruz
County kept a hotel, and after court adjourned, he
would take off his coat and wait on the table, serving
jurors, attorneys, criminals and sheriffs with the
same impartiality which he exhibited on the bench.
A brief term of service as waiter in a San Francisco
restaurant laid the foundation of the highly successful
career of another lawyer, a very young man. One
day a merchant upon whom he was waiting remarked to
a companion: “If I only had a lawyer who
was worth a damn, I could win that suit.”
“I am a lawyer,” interposed the waiter,
“and I am looking for a chance to get into business.
Try me.” The merchant did so; the suit
was won; and the former waiter was soon in full legal
practice.
Acquaintances were formed, and the
beginning of a fortune was often made, by chance meetings
and incidents. Men got at one another more quickly
than is possible in an old and conservative society.
One who became a distinguished citizen of California
began his career by accepting an offer of humble employment
when he stepped into the street on his first morning
in San Francisco. “Look here, my friend,”
said a merchant to him, “if you won’t
get mad about it, I’ll offer you a dollar to
fill this box with sand.” “Thank
you,” said the young fellow, “I’ll
fill it all day long on those terms, and never become
angry in the least.” He filled the box,
and received payment. “Now,” he said,
“we’ll go and take a drink with this dollar.”
The merchant acquiesced with a laugh, and thus began
a life-long connection between the two men.
There were some recognitions of old
acquaintances as remarkable as the making of new friends.
Two brothers, Englishmen from the Society Islands,
met in a mining town, and were not aware of their relationship
until a chance conversation between them disclosed
it. A merchant from Cincinnati arrived in San
Francisco with the intention of settling there.
One of the first persons whom he met was a prosperous
business man who had absconded some years before with
ten thousand dollars of his money. He recovered
the ten thousand dollars and interest, without making
the matter public, and went back to Ohio well satisfied.
A lawyer of note in San Francisco remarked, in 1850, that the last time he
saw Ned McGowan, previous to his arrival in California, McGowan stood in the
criminal dock of a Philadelphia court where he was receiving a sentence to the
State prison for robbery. Subsequently he was pardoned by the Governor of
Pennsylvania, on condition that he should leave the State. When this
lawyer settled in San Francisco, he was employed to defend some persons who had
been arrested for drunkenness; and upon entering the court room he was
thunderstruck by the appearance of the magistrate upon the bench. After a
careful survey of the magistrate and a pinch of the flesh to make sure that he
was not dreaming, he exclaimed:
“Ned McGowan, is that you?”
“It is,” was the cool reply.
“Well, gentlemen,” said
the lawyer, turning to his clients, “you had
better toll down heavy, for I can do you no good with
such a judge.” Tolling down heavy was probably
a practice which the judge encouraged, for, a year
later, upon the organization of the Vigilance Committee,
Ned McGowan fled from San Francisco, if not from California.
California, from 1849 to 1858, was
a meeting ground for all the nations of the earth.
One of the first acts of the Legislature was to appoint
an official translator. The confusion of languages
resulted in many misunderstandings and some murders.
A Frenchman and a German at Moquelumne Hill had a
controversy about a water-privilege, and being unable
to understand each other, they resorted first to pantomime,
and then to firearms, with the unfortunate result
that the German was killed.
A trial which occurred at San Jose
illustrates the multiplicity of tongues in California.
A Spaniard accused a Tartar of assaulting him, but
as the Tartar and his witnesses could not speak English
the proceedings were delayed. At last another
Tartar, called Arghat, was found who could speak Chinese,
and then a Chinaman, called Alab, who could speak Spanish;
and with these as interpreters the trial began.
Another difficulty then arose, namely, the swearing
of the witnesses. The court, having ascertained
that the Tartar mode of swearing is by lifting a lighted
candle toward the sun, adopted that form. The
judge administered the ordinary oath to the English
and Spanish interpreters; the latter then swore Arghat
as Tartar and Chinese interpreter, and he, in turn,
swore Alab, by the burning candle and the sun, as
Chinese and Spanish interpreter; and the trial then
proceeded in four languages.
The first newspaper was printed half
in English, half in Spanish. Sermons were preached
by Catholic priests both in English and in Spanish.
The Fourth of July was celebrated at San Jose in 1850
by one oration in English and another in Spanish.
German and Italian weekly papers were published in
San Francisco. The French population of the city
was especially large. They made rouge-et-noir
the fashion. “Where there are Frenchmen,”
remarks a Pioneer, “you will find music, singing
and gayety.” A French benevolent society
was established at San Francisco in 1851.
Many of the best citizens of California
were Englishmen. There was a famous ale-house
in San Francisco, called the Boomerang, where sirloins
of beef could be washed down with English ale, and
followed by Stilton cheese; where the London “Times,”
“Punch” and “Bell’s Life”
were taken in.
Australia and New South Wales contributed
a considerable and by no means the best part of the
population. The “Sydney Ducks” who
infested the dark lanes and alleys of San Francisco,
and lurked about the wharves at night, lived mainly
by robbery; and they often murdered in order to rob.
An English traveller said of them: “I have
seen vice in almost every form, and under almost every
condition in the Old World, but never did it appear
to me in so repulsive and disgusting a shape as it
exists among the lower orders of Sydney, and generally
in New South Wales."
But not all of the immigrants from
English colonies were of this character. Many
were respectable men, and succeeded well in California.
An Australian cabman, for example, brought a barouche,
a fine pair of horses, a tall hat and a livery coat
all the way across the Pacific, and made a fortune
by hiring out at the rate of twenty dollars an hour.
There were many Jews in San Francisco,
but none in the mines; they alone of all
the nations gathered in California kept to their ordinary
occupations, chiefly the selling of clothes, and never
looked for gold. Even their dress did not change.
“They are,” writes a Pioneer, “exactly
the same unwashed-looking, slobbery, slipshod individuals
that one sees in every seaport town.” But
the Jew prospered, and was a good citizen. Another
Pioneer, who could look beneath the surface, said,
“The Jew does honor to his name here. The
pressure which elsewhere bows him to the earth is
removed."
The variety and mixture of races in
California were without precedent, and San Francisco
especially prided itself upon the barbaric aspect of
its streets. Perhaps the Chinese were the most
striking figures. The low-caste Chinamen wore
full jackets and breeches of blue calico, and on their
heads a huge wicker-work hat that would have made
a good family clothes-basket. The aristocratic
Chinaman displayed a jacket of gay-colored silk, yellow
satin breeches, a scarlet skull-cap with a gold knob
on top, and, in cold weather, a short coat of Astrakhan
fur.
There was, of course, a Chinese quarter,
and a district known as little Chili, where South
Americans of every country could be found, with a
mixture of Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands, and negroes
from the South Seas. In July, 1850, there arrived
a ship-load of Hungarian exiles, and somewhat later
a company of Bayonnais from the south of France, the
men wild and excitable in appearance, the women dark-skinned,
large-eyed, and graceful in their movements.
There was a Spanish quarter where,
as Bret Harte said, “three centuries of quaint
customs, speech and dress were still preserved; where
the proverbs of Sancho Panza were still spoken in
the language of Cervantes, and the high-flown allusions
of the La Manchian knight still a part of the Spanish
Californian hidalgo’s dream.”
The Spanish women were usually attended
by Indian girls, and their dress was coquettish and
becoming. Their petticoats, short enough to display
a well-turned ankle, were richly laced and embroidered,
and striped and flounced with gaudy colors, of which
scarlet was the most common. Their tresses fell
in luxuriant plaits down their backs; and, in all the
little accessories of dress, such as earrings, and
necklaces, their costume was very rich. Its chief
feature, the reboso, was a sort of scarf, like
the mantilla of old Spain. This was sometimes
twined around the waist and shoulders, and at other
times hung in pretty festoons about the figure.
It was only in respect to their diversions
that the Spanish had any influence upon the Americans.
The gambling houses and theatres were largely in Spanish
hands at first, and the fandango was the national
amusement in which the American miners soon learned
to join.
And yet the fundamental gravity of
the Spanish nature, a gravity which is epitomized
and immortally fixed in the famous portrait of Admiral
Pareja by Velasquez, was as marked in California as
at home. It is thus that Bret Harte describes
Don Jose Sepulvida, the Knight Errant of the Foot-Hills:
“The fading glow of the western sky through the
deep, embrasured windows lit up his rapt and meditative
face. He was a young man of apparently twenty-five,
with a colorless, satin complexion, dark eyes, alternating
between melancholy and restless energy, a narrow, high
forehead, long straight hair, and a lightly pencilled
mustache.”
One is struck by the resemblance between
Don Jose Sepulvida, and Culpeper Starbottle, the Colonel’s
nephew, whose tragic death the Reader will remember.
Bret Harte thus depicts him: “The face was
not an unprepossessing one, albeit a trifle too thin
and lank and bilious to be altogether pleasant.
The cheek-bones were prominent, and the black eyes
sunken in their orbits. Straight black hair fell
slantwise off a high but narrow forehead, and swept
part of a hollow cheek. A long, black mustache
followed the perpendicular curves of his mouth.
It was on the whole a serious, even quixotic face,
but at times it was relieved by a rare smile of such
tender and even pathetic sweetness, that Miss Jo is
reported to have said that, if it would only last
through the ceremony, she would have married the possessor
on the spot. ‘I once told him so,’
added that shameless young woman; ’but the man
instantly fell into a settled melancholy, and has
not laughed since.’"
There were, in fact, many things in
common between the Southerner and the Spaniard.
They lived in similar climates, and the fundamental
ideas of their respective communities were very much
the same. The Southerner was almost as deeply
imbued as the Spaniard with extreme, aristocratic notions
of government and society; and he, like the Spaniard,
was conservative, religious, dignified, courteous,
chivalrous to women, brave, narrow-minded and indolent.
In The Secret of Sobriente’s
Well, this resemblance suddenly occurs to Larry
Hawkins, who, in describing to Colonel Wilson, from
Virginia, the character of his Spanish predecessor,
the former owner of the posada in which the
Colonel lived, said: “He was that kind o’
fool that he took no stock in mining. When the
boys were whoopin’ up the place and finding the
color everywhere, he was either ridin’ round
lookin’ up the wild horses he owned, or sittin’
with two or three lazy péons and Injuns that was
fed and looked after by the priests. Gosh!
Now I think of it, it was mighty like you when you
first kem here with your niggers. That’s
curous, too, ain’t it?”
The hospitality of the Spanish Californian
was boundless. “There is no need of an
orphan asylum in California,” wrote the American
Alcalde at Monterey. “The question is not
who shall be burdened with the care of an orphan,
but who shall have the privilege of rearing it.
An industrious man of rather limited means applied
to me to-day for the care of six orphan children.
He had fifteen of his own;” and when the Alcalde
questioned the prudence of his offer, the Spaniard
replied, “The hen that has twenty chickens scratches
no harder than the hen that has one.”
A Pioneer, speaking from his own experience,
said: “If you are sick there is nothing
which sympathy can divine which is not done for you.
This is as true of the lady whose hand has only figured
her embroidery or swept her guitar, as of the cottage-girl
wringing from her laundry the foam of the mountain
stream; and all this from the heart!"
Generosity and pride are Spanish traits.
“The worst and weakest of them,” remarks
an English Pioneer, “has that indefinable something
about him that lifts so immeasurably the beggar of
Murillo above the beggar of Hogarth." The Reader
will remember how cheerfully and punctiliously Don
Jose Sepulvida paid the wagers of his friend and servant,
Bucking Bob. A gambling debt was regarded by
the Spaniards in so sacred a light that if he who
incurred it was unable to pay, then, for the honor
of the family, any relative, a godfather, or even
one who had the misfortune to be connected by marriage
with the debtor, was bound to discharge the obligation.
Some Americans basely took advantage of this sentiment;
and, in one case, an old Spanish lady was deprived
of a vineyard, her only means of support, in order
to preserve the reputation of a scapegrace nephew
who had lost to an American at faro a greater sum than
he possessed.
Some convenient and becoming articles
of Spanish dress were adopted by the Americans, notably
the sombrero and the serape, or horseman’s cloak.
Jack Hamlin, as the Reader will remember, sometimes
went a little further. Thus, when he started
on his search for the Sappho of Green Springs, he
“modified his usual correct conventional attire
by a tasteful combination of a roquero’s costume,
and in loose white bullion-fringed trousers, red sash,
jacket and sombrero, looked infinitely more dashing
and picturesque than his original.”
The profuse wearing of jewelry, even
by men, was another foreign fashion which Americans
adopted in the early years; so much so, in fact, that
to appear in a plain and unadorned state was to be
conspicuous. The jewelry thus worn was not of
the conventional kind, but a sort of miner’s
jewelry, significant of the place and time. Ornaments
were made from the gold in its native state by soldering
into one mass many small nuggets, without any polish
or other embellishment. Everybody carried a gold
watch, and watch-chains were constructed upon a massive
plan, the links sometimes representing dogs in pursuit
of deer, horses at full speed, birds in the act of
flight, or serpents coiled and hissing. Scarf-pins
were made from lumps of gold retaining their natural
form and mixed with quartz, rose-colored, blue-gray,
or white, according to the rock from which they were
taken. The big “specimen ring” worn
by the hero of A Night on the Divide was an
example.
Some Americans adhered to their usual
dress which, in the Eastern States, was a sober suit
of black; but usually the Pioneers discarded all conventional
clothes, and appeared in a rough and picturesque costume
much like that of a stage pirate. Indeed, it
was impossible for any man in ’49 to make his
dress sufficiently bizarre to attract attention.
The prevailing fashion included a red or blue flannel
shirt, a “wide-awake” hat of every conceivable
shape and color, trousers stuffed into a huge pair
of boots coming up above the knee, and a belt decorated
with pistols and knives. More than one Pioneer
landed in San Francisco with a rifle slung on his
back, a sword-cane in his hand, two six-shooters and
a bowie-knife in his belt, and a couple of small pistols
protruding from his waistcoat pockets.
In the rainy season of ’49,
long boots were so scarce, and so desirable on account
of the mud, that they sold for forty dollars a pair
in San Francisco, and higher yet in Stockton.
Learning of this, Eastern merchants flooded the market
with top-boots a year later; but by that time the
streets had been planked, the miner’s costume
was passing out of fashion, and long boots were no
longer in demand. These changes were greatly
regretted by unconventional Pioneers, and even so early
as 1850 they were lamenting “the good old times,” just
one year back, before the tailor and the
barber were abroad in the land.
Local celebrations were marked by
more color and display than are usually indulged in
by Americans. In 1851, on Washington’s Birthday,
there was a procession in San Francisco headed by
the Mayor in a barouche drawn by four white horses.
Next came the fire engines of the city, each with a
team of eight gray horses, and followed by a long train
of firemen in white shirts and black trousers.
Then came a company of teamsters mounted on their
draught horses, and carrying gay banners; and finally
a delegation of Chinamen, preceded by a Chinese band
and bearing aloft a huge flag of yellow silk.
Horsemen, more or less intoxicated,
and shouting like wild Indians, charged up and down
the streets at all hours of the day and night, to the
great discomfort of many and the fatal injury of some
pedestrians. “On Sundays especially, one
would imagine,” a local newspaper remarks, “that
a horde of Cossacks or Tartars had taken possession
of the city.”
“The Spaniard,” Bret Harte
says, “taught the Americans horsemanship, and
they rode off with his cattle.” The Americans
usually adopted the Spanish equipment, consisting
of a huge saddle, with cumbrous leather saddle-flaps,
stirrups carved from solid oak, heavy metal spurs,
a bridle jingling with ornaments, and a cruel curb
bit, the whole paraphernalia being designed
to serve the convenience and vanity of the rider without
the least regard to the comfort of his beast.
The Spanish manner of abrupt stopping, made possible
by the severe bit, was also taken up by young Americans
who loved to charge down upon a friend, halting at
the last possible moment, in a cloud of dust, with
the horse almost upon his haunches. This was
Jack Hamlin’s habit.
A popular figure in the streets of
San Francisco was a black pony, the property of a
constable, that stood most of the day, saddled and
bridled, in front of his master’s office.
The pony’s favorite diversion was to have his
hoofs blacked and polished, and whenever a coin was
placed between his lips, he would carry it to a neighboring
boot-black, put, first, one fore-foot, and then the
other, on the foot-rest, and, after receiving a satisfactory
“shine,” would walk gravely back to his
usual station. Even the dumb animals felt that
something unusual was expected of them in California.
There were no harness horses or carriages
in San Francisco in the early part of ’49; and
when they were introduced toward the end of that year,
a touch of barbaric splendor marked the fashionable
equipage of the hour. A pair of white horses
with gilt trappings, drawing a light, yellow-wheeled
buggy, was once a familiar sight in the streets of
the city. The demi-monde rode on horseback,
in parties of two or three, and even of six or more,
and the pace which they set corresponded with that
of California life in general. The appearance
of one of the most noted of these women is thus described
by a Pioneer, the wife of a sea-captain: “I
have seen her mounted on a glossy, lithe-limbed race-horse,
one that had won for her many thousands on the race-course,
habited in a close-fitting riding-dress of black velvet,
ornamented with one hundred and fifty gold buttons,
a hat from which depended magnificent sable plumes,
and over her face a short, white lace veil of the
richest texture, so gossamer-like one could almost
see the fire of passion flashing from the depths of
her dark, lustrous eyes."
Even the climate, the dry, bracing
air, the cool nights, the aromatic fragrance of the
woods, tended to quicken the pulse of the Argonauts,
and to heighten the general exuberance of feeling.
Central California, the scene of Bret
Harte’s stories, is a great valley bounded on
the west by the Coast Range of hills or mountains,
which rise from two thousand to four thousand, and
in a few places to five thousand feet, and on the
east by the Foot-Hills. After the immigration,
this valley furnished immense crops of wheat, vegetables
and fruit; but in ’49 it was a vast, uncultivated
plain, free from underbrush or other small growth,
and studded by massive, spreading oaks, by tall plane
trees, and occasionally by a gigantic redwood, sending
its topmost branches two and even three hundred feet
into the air. In the dry season, the surface was
brown and parched, but as soon as the rains began,
the wild grasses and wild oats gave it a rich carpet
of green, sparkling with countless field flowers.
The resemblance of the valley, in the rainy season
at least, to an English park, was often spoken of
by Pioneers who found in it a reminder of home.
On the eastern side this great central
valley gradually merges into the Foot-Hills, the vanguards
of the lofty mountain range which separates central
California from Nevada. The Foot-Hills form what
is perhaps the most picturesque part of the State,
watered in the rainy season by numerous rocky, swift-flowing
streams, the tributaries of the Sacramento and the
San Joaquin, and broken into those deep, narrow glens
so often described in Bret Harte’s poetry and
prose. This was the principal gold-bearing region.
The Foot-Hills extend over a space about five hundred
miles long and fifty wide, and from them arise, sometimes
abruptly, and sometimes gradually, the snow-crowned
Sierras.
Such is central California. A
region extending from latitude 32 deg. 30’
in the South to 42 deg. in the North, and rising
from the level of the Pacific Ocean to mountain peaks
fifteen thousand feet high, must needs present many
varieties of weather; but on the whole the State may
be said to have a mild, dry, breezy, healthy climate.
Except in the mountains and in the extreme northeast,
snow never lies long, the earth does not freeze, and
Winter is like a wet Spring during which the cattle
fare much better than they do in Summer. The
passing of one season into the other was thus described
by Bret Harte: “The eternal smile of the
California Summer had begun to waver and grow fixed;
dust lay thick on leaf and blade; the dry hills were
clothed in russet leather; the trade winds were shifting
to the south with an ominous warm humidity; a few
days longer, and the rains would be here.”
San Francisco has a climate of its
own. Ice never forms there, and geraniums bloom
throughout the Winter; but during the dry season, which
lasts from May or June until September or October,
a strong, cold wind blows in every afternoon from
the ocean, dying down at sunset. The mercury
falls with the coming of the wind, the rays of the
sun seem to have no more warmth than moonbeams, the
sand blows up in clouds, doors and windows rattle,
and the city is swept and scourged. But fifty
miles inland the air is still and balmy, and residents
of San Francisco leave the city in Summer not to escape
unpleasant heat, but to enjoy the relaxation of a
milder and less stimulating climate. “In
the interior one bright, still day follows another,
as calm, as dreamy, as disconnected from time and
space as was the air which lulled the lotus-eaters
to rest." This evenness of temperature was amazing
and delightful to the weather-beaten Pioneers from
New England.
The Midsummer days are often intensely
hot in the interior, but the nights are cool, and
the atmosphere is so dry that the heat is not enervating.
Men have been seen hard at work digging a cellar with
the thermometer at 125 deg. F. in the shade;
and sunstrokes, though not unknown, are extremely
rare. Nothing decays or becomes offensive.
Fresh meat hung in the shade does not spoil.
Dead animal or vegetable matter simply dries up and
wastes away.
In 1849 the rains were uncommonly severe, to the great discomfort of the
Pioneers; and Alvarado, the former Spanish governor, explained the fact in all
sincerity by saying that the Yankees had been accompanied to California by the
devil himself. This explanation was accepted by the natives generally,
without doubt or qualification. The streets of San Francisco, in that
year, were like the beds of rivers. It was no uncommon thing to see, at
the same time, a mule stalled in the middle of the highway, with only his head
showing above the road, and an unfortunate pedestrian, who had slipped off the
plank sidewalk, in process of being fished out by a companion. At the
corner of Clay and Kearney Streets there once stood a sign, erected by some
joker, inscribed as follows,
This street is impassable,
Not even jackassable!
But the rainy season is usually neither
long nor constant. The fall of rain on the Pacific
Slope is only about one third of the rainfall in the
Atlantic States; and, before water was supplied artificially,
the miner was often obliged to suspend operations
for want of it. Frequently a day’s rain
would have been cheaply bought at the price of a million
dollars; and even a good shower gave an impetus to
business which was felt by the merchants and gamblers
of San Francisco and Sacramento. It was observed
that after a long drought dimes took the place of gold
slugs upon the roulette and faro tables. Thus,
even the weather was a speculation in Pioneer times.
And yet, notwithstanding the general
mildness of the climate, extremes of cold, at high
levels, are close at hand. Snow often falls to
a depth of one or two feet within fifty miles of San
Francisco. Near the head-waters of the Feather
River the snow is sometimes twelve and even fifteen
feet deep; and in December, 1850, eighteen men out
of a party of nineteen, and sixty-eight of their seventy
mules froze to death in one night. A snow-storm
came up so suddenly, and fell with such fury, that
their firewood became inaccessible, and they were
obliged to burn their cabin; but even that did not
save them.
Bret Harte has described a California
snow-storm not only in The Outcasts of Poker Flat,
but in several other stories, notably in Gabriel
Conroy, Snow-Bound at Eagle’s, and
A Night on the Divide. It is interesting
to know, as Mr. Pemberton tells us, that the description
of the snow-storm in Gabriel Conroy was written
on a hot day in August.
Poker Flat was in Sierra County, and
in March, 1860, the snow was so deep in that county
that tunnels were dug through it as a picturesque and
convenient means of access to local saloons. The
storm which overwhelmed the Outcasts was no uncommon
event. But when these storms clear off, the cold,
though often intense, is not disagreeable, owing to
the dryness of the air. “We are now working
every fair day,” wrote a miner in January, 1860,
“and have been all the Winter without inconvenience.
The long, sled-runner Norwegian snow-shoes are used
here by nearly everybody. I have seen the ladies
floating about, wheeling and soaring, with as much
grace and ease of motion as swans on the bosom of
a placid lake or eagles in the sun-lit air.”
On the summit of the mountains the
snow is perpetual, and on the easterly slopes it often
attains the almost incredible depth, or height, of
fifty feet. In A Tale of Three Truants,
Bret Harte has described an avalanche of snow, carrying
the Three Truants along with it, in the course of which
they “seemed to be going through a thicket of
underbrush, but Provy Smith knew that they were the
tops of pine trees.”
On the whole, the climate of California
justified the enthusiasm which it aroused in the Pioneers,
and which sometimes found an amusing expression.
The birth of twins to an immigrant and his wife, who
had been childless for fifteen years, was triumphantly
recorded by a San Jose paper as the natural result
of even a short residence on the Pacific Slope.
Large families and long life marked not only the Spaniards,
but also the Mexicans and Indians. Families of
fifteen, twenty, and even twenty-five children excited
no surprise and procured no rewards of merit for the
parents. In 1849 there was a woman living at Monterey
whose children, all alive and in good health, numbered
twenty-eight.
We read of an Indian, blind but still
active at the age of one hundred and forty; and of
a squaw “very active” at one hundred and
twenty-six. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner a speaks
of “Don Antonio Serrano, a tall, spare man,
who rides with grace and vigor at ninety-three,”
and of an Indian servant “who was a grown man,
breaking horses, when Don Antonio was an infant.
This man is still strong enough to mount his horse
and canter about the country. He is supposed
to be about one hundred and eighteen.”
This wonderful longevity was ascribed by Mr. Warner
to the equable climate and a simple diet.
Ancient Mexicans and Indians figure
occasionally in Bret Harte’s stories. There
is, for example, Concepcion, “a wrinkled Indian
woman, brown and veined like a tobacco leaf,”
who acts as servant to the Convert of the Mission;
and, at the Mission of San Carmel, Sanchicha, in the
form of a bundle, is brought in and deposited in a
corner of the room. “Father Pedro bent
over the heap, and distinguished in its midst the glowing
black eyes of Sanchicha, the Indian centenarian of
the Mission. Only her eyes lived. Helpless,
boneless, and jelly-like, old age had overtaken her
with a mild form of deliquescence.”
But it was not length of days, it
was feverish energy that the climate produced in the
new race which had come under its influence. The
amount of labor performed by the Pioneers was prodigious.
“There is as much difference,” wrote the
Methodist preacher, Father Taylor, “between the
muscular action of the California miner and a man hired
to work on a farm, as between the aimless movements
of a sloth and the pounce of the panther.”
“We have,” declared a
San Francisco paper, “the most exhilarating
atmosphere in the world. In it a man can do more
work than anywhere else, and he feels under a constant
pressure of excitement. With a sun like that
of Italy, a coast wind as cool as an Atlantic breeze
in Spring, an air as crisp and dry as that of the
high Alps, people work on without let or relaxation,
until the vital cord suddenly snaps. Few Americans
die gradually here or of old age; they fall off without
warning.”
So late as 1860 it was often said
that there were busy men in San Francisco who had
never taken a day’s vacation, or even left the
city to cross the Bay, from the hour of their arrival
in 1849 until that moment. Even this record has
been eclipsed. A Pioneer of German birth, named
Henry Miller, who accumulated a fortune of six million
dollars, is said to have lived, or at least to have
existed, in San Francisco for thirty-five years without
taking a single day’s vacation.
It was even asserted at first that
the climate neutralized the effect of intoxicating
liquor, and that it was difficult, if not impossible,
to get really drunk in California. Possibly a
somewhat lax definition of drunkenness accounted in
part for this theory. A witness once testified
in a San Francisco court that he did not consider
a man to be drunk so long as he could move. But
the crowning excellence of the California climate
remains to be stated. It was observed by the Pioneers, and
they had ample opportunity to make observations upon
the subject, that in that benign atmosphere
gunshot wounds healed rapidly.
With a climate exhilarating and curative;
with youth, health, courage, and the prospect of almost
immediate wealth; with new and exciting surroundings,
it is no wonder that the Pioneers enjoyed their hour.
In San Francisco, especially, a kind of pleasant madness
seized upon every newcomer. “As each man
steps his foot on shore,” writes one adventurer,
“he seems to have entered a magic circle in which
he is under the influence of new impulses.”
And another, in a letter to a friend says, “As
soon as you reach California you will think every one
is crazy; and without great caution, you will be crazy
yourself.”
Still another Pioneer wrote home even
more emphatically on this point: “You can
form no conception of the state of affairs here.
I do believe, in my soul, everybody has gone mad, stark,
staring mad."
To the same effect is the narrative of Stephen J. Field, afterward, and for
many years, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr.
Field, who arrived in San Francisco as a very young man, thus describes his
first experience:
“As I walked along the streets,
I met a great many persons whom I had known in New
York, and they all seemed to be in the highest spirits.
Every one in greeting me said, ‘It is a glorious
country!’ or ’Isn’t it a glorious
country?’ or ‘Did you ever see a more glorious
country?’ In every case the word ‘glorious’
was sure to come out.... I caught the infection,
and though I had but a single dollar in my pocket,
no business whatever, and did not know where I was
to get my next meal, I found myself saying to everybody
I met, ‘It is a glorious country!’"
“The exuberance of my spirits,”
Judge Field continues, “was marvellous”;
and the readers of his interesting reminiscences will
not be inclined to dispute the fact when they learn
that four days after his arrival, having made the
sum of twenty dollars by selling a few New York newspapers,
he forthwith put down his name for sixty-five thousand
dollars’ worth of town lots, and received the
consideration due to a capitalist bent upon developing
the resources of a new country.
The most extravagant acts appeared
reasonable under the new dispensation. Nobody
was surprised when an enthusiastic miner offered to
bet a friend that the latter could not hit him with
a shotgun at the distance of seventy-eight yards.
As a result the miner received five shots, causing
severe wounds, beside losing the bet, which amounted
to four drinks. After the first State election,
a magistrate holding an important office fulfilled
a wager by carrying the winner a distance of three
miles in a wheelbarrow.
A characteristic scene in a Chinese restaurant is described as follows in the
Sacramento Transcript of October 8, 1850:
“One young man called for a
plate of mutton chops, and the waiter, not understanding,
asked for a repetition of the order.
“‘Mutton chops, you chuckle
head,’ said the young gentleman.
“‘Mutton chops, you chuckle
head,’ shouted the Chinaman to the kitchen.
“The joke took among the customers,
and presently one of them called out, ‘A glass
of pigeon milk, you long-tailed Asiatic.’
“‘A glass of pigeon milk,
you long-tailed satic,’ echoed the waiter.
“‘A barrel of homoeopathic
soup, old smooth head,’ shouted another.
“‘Arrel homepatty soup,
you old smooth head,’ echoed the waiter.
“‘A hatful of bricks,’ shouted a
fourth.
“‘Hatter bricks,’ repeated the waiter.
“By this time the kitchen was
in a perfect state of confusion, and the proprietor
in a stew of perplexity rushed into the dining-room.
’What you mean by pigeon milk, homepatty soup,
and de brick? How you cooking, gentlemen?’
“A roar burst from the tables,
and the shrewd Asiatic saw in a moment that they were
hoaxing his subordinates. ’The gentlemen
make you all dam fools,’ said he, rushing again
into the smoky recess of the kitchen.”
At a dinner given in San Francisco a local orator thus discoursed upon the
glories of California: Look at its forest trees, varying from three
hundred to one thousand feet in height, with their trunks so close together
[drawing his knife and pantomiming] that you cant stick this bowie-knife
between them; and the lordly elk, with antlers from seventeen to twenty feet
spread, with their heads and tails up, ambling through these grand forests.
Its a sight, gentlemen
“Stop,” cried a newcomer
who had not yet been inoculated with the atmosphere.
“My friend, if the trees are so close together,
how does the elk get through the woods with his wide-branching
horns?”
The Californian turned on the stranger
with a look of thorough contempt and replied, “That’s
the elk’s business”; and continued his
unvarnished tale, no more embarrassed than the sun
at noonday.
“There was a spirit of off-hand,
jolly fun in those days, a sort of universal free
and easy cheerfulness.... The California Pioneer
that could not give and take a joke was just no Californian
at all. It was this spirit that gives the memory
of those days an indescribable fascination and charm."
The very names first given to places
and situations show the same exuberant spirit; such,
for example, as Murderer’s Alley, Dead Man’s
Bar, Mad Mule Canon, Skunk Flat, Whiskey Gulch, Port
Wine Diggins, Shirt-Tail Hollow, Bloody Bend, Death
Pass, Jackass Flat, and Hell’s Half Acre.
Even crime took on a bold and original
form. A scapegrace in Sacramento stole a horse
while the owner still held the bridle. The owner
had stepped into a shop to ask a question, but kept
the end of the reins in his hand, when the thief gently
slipped the bridle from the horse’s head, hung
it on a post, and rode off with steed and saddle.
Bizarre characters from all parts
of the world, drawn as by a magnet, took ship for
California in ’49 and ’50 and became wealthy,
or landed in the Police Court, as fate would have
it. The latter was the destination of one Murphy,
an Irishman presumably, and certainly a man of imagination,
who described himself as a teacher of mathematics,
and acknowledged that he had been drunk for the preceding
six years. He added, for the benefit of the Court,
that he had been at the breaking of every pane of glass
from Vera Cruz to San Francisco, that he had smoked
a dozen cigars in the halls of the Montezumas, and
that there were as many persons contending for his
name as there were cities for the birth of Homer.
The Court gave him six months.
Two residents of San Francisco, one
a Frenchman, the other a Dutchman, were so enthusiastic
over their new and republican surroundings that they
slept every night under the Liberty Pole on the Plaza;
and seldom did they fail to turn in patriotically
drunk, shouting for freedom and equality. Prize-fighters,
as a matter of course, were attracted to a place where
sporting blood ran so high. In June, 1850, news
came that Tom Hyer (of whose celebrity the Reader
is doubtless aware) was shortly expected with “his
lady” at Panama; and he must have arrived in
due course, for in August, Tom Hyer was tried in the
Police Court of San Francisco for entering several
saloons on horseback, in one case performing the classic
feat of riding up a flight of steps. The defence
set up that this was not an uncommon method of entering
saloons in San Francisco, and the Court took “judicial
notice” of the fact, his honor having witnessed
the same thing himself on more than one occasion.
However, as Mr. Hyer was somewhat intoxicated, and
as the alleged offence was committed on a Sunday, the
Judge imposed a small fine.
In the same year, Mr. T. Belcher Kay,
another famous prize-fighter from the East, narrowly
escaped being murdered while returning from a ball
before daylight one Sunday morning; and subsequently
Mr. Kay was tried, but acquitted, on a charge of burglary.
In that strange collection of human
beings drawn from all parts of the earth, for the
most part unknown to one another, but almost all having
this fundamental trait in common, namely, that they
were close to nature, it was inevitable that incidents
of pathos and tragedy, deeds of rascality and cruelty,
and still more deeds of unselfishness and heroism,
should continually occur.
Some Pioneers met good fortune or
disaster at the very threshold. One young man,
upon landing in San Francisco, borrowed ten dollars,
went immediately to a gambling saloon, won seven thousand
dollars, and with rare good sense took the next steamer
for home. Another newcomer, who brought a few
hundred dollars with him, wandered into the gambling
rooms of the Parker House soon after his arrival,
won twenty thousand dollars there, and went home two
days later.
A Pioneer who had just crossed the
Plains fell into a strange experience upon his arrival
at Placerville. He was a poor man, his only property
being a yoke of oxen which he sold almost immediately
for one hundred dollars in gold dust. Shortly
before that a purse containing the same quantity of
gold had been stolen; and when, a few hours later,
the newly-arrived teamster took out his pocket-book
to pay for a small purchase, a man immediately stepped
forward and accused him of the robbery. He was,
of course, arrested, and a jury to try him was impanelled
on the spot. The quality of the gold in his purse
corresponded exactly with the quality of the stolen
gold. It was known that he had only just arrived
from the Plains and could not have obtained the gold
dust by mining. The man to whom he sold his cattle
had gone, and he was unable to prove how he had come
by the treasure. Under these circumstances, the
jury found him guilty, and sentenced him to receive
thirty lashes on the bare back, which were thereupon
administered, the unfortunate man all the time protesting
his innocence.
After he was whipped, he procured
a pistol, walked deliberately up to the person who
first accused him, placed the pistol at his head, and
declared that he believed him to be the guilty man,
and that if he did not then and there confess that
he had stolen the money he would blow his brains out.
The fellow could not stand the power of injured innocence.
He became frightened, acknowledged that he was the
thief, and drew the identical stolen money out of
his pocket. The enraged crowd instantly set upon
him, bore him to the nearest tree, and hung him.
A subscription was then started, and about eighteen
hundred dollars were raised in a few minutes for the
sagacious teamster, who departed forthwith for his
home in the East.
Of the many thousand Pioneers at work
in the mines very few reaped a reward at all commensurate
with their toils, privations and sufferings, much
less with their expectations. The wild ideas which
prevailed in some quarters as to the abundance of the
gold may be gathered from the advice given to one
young Argonaut by his father, on the eve of his departure
from Illinois. The venerable man urged his son
not to work too hard, but to buy a low chair and a
small iron rake, and, taking his seat comfortably,
to rake over the sand, pick up the nuggets as they
came to view, and place them in a convenient box.
In reality, the miners’ earnings,
after deducting necessary living expenses, are computed
to have averaged only about three times the wages
of an unskilled day-laborer in the East. Few of
them saved anything, for there was every temptation
to squander their gains in dissipation; and men whose
income is subject to wide fluctuations are notoriously
unthrifty. The following is a typical experience:
“Our diet consists of hard bread, flour which
we eat half-cooked, and salt pork, with occasionally
a salmon which we purchase of the Indians. Vegetables
are not to be procured. Our feet are wet all
day, while a hot sun shines down upon our heads, and
the very air parches the skin like the hot air
of an oven. Our drinking water comes down to
us thoroughly impregnated with the mineral substances
washed through the thousand cradles above us.
The hands and feet of the novice become painfully
blistered and the limbs are stiff. Besides all
these causes of sickness, many men who have left their
wives and children in far-distant States are homesick,
anxious and despondent."
Many a family in the East was desolated
and reduced to poverty by the untimely death of a
husband and father; and in other cases long absence
was as effectual in this respect as death itself.
The once-common expression “California widow”
is significant. Some Eastern men took informal
wives on the Pacific Slope; others, who had succeeded,
put off their home-coming from month to month, and
even from year to year, hoping for still greater success;
others yet, who had failed, were ashamed to go home
in poverty, and lingered in California until death
overtook them. This phase of Pioneer life is
treated by Bret Harte in the stories How Old Man
Plunkett went Home, and Jimmy’s Big Brother
from California. Of those who were lucky
enough to find gold in large quantities, many were
robbed, and some of these unfortunates went home, or
died, broken-hearted.
But as a rule, the Pioneers rose superior
to every blow that fate could deal them. Men
met misfortune, danger, even death with composure,
and yet without bravado. A traveller being told
that a man was about to be lynched, proceeded to the
spot and found a large gathering of miners standing
around in groups under the trees, and quietly talking.
Seeing no apparent criminal there, he stepped up to
one person who stood a little apart from the others,
and asked him which was the man about to be hung.
The person addressed replied, without the slightest
change of countenance, “I believe, Sir, it’s
me.” Half an hour later he was dead.
There was a battle at Sacramento in
1850 between a party of “Squatters” on
one side, and city officials and citizens on the other.
Among the latter was one J. F. Hooper from Independence
in Missouri. Hooper, armed only with a pistol,
discharged all his cartridges, then threw the weapon
at his advancing opponents, and calmly faced them,
crossing his hands over his breast as a protection.
They fired at him, notwithstanding his defenceless
situation, and one ball piercing his right hand inflicted
a wound, but not a mortal one, in his side. Four
men were killed and several others badly wounded in
this fight.
When a father and son were arrested
by a vigilance committee at Santa Clara for horse-stealing,
and were sentenced to receive thirty-six lashes apiece,
the son begged that he might take his father’s
share as well as his own.
Men died well in California.
In November, 1851, two horse-thieves were hung by
a vigilance committee at Stockton. One of them,
who was very young, smoked a cigar up to the last
moment, and made a little speech in which he explained
that the act was not dictated by irreverence, but that
he desired to die like a man. When Stuart, a noted
robber and horse-thief was being tried for his life
by the Vigilance Committee in San Francisco, he complained
that the proceedings were “tiresome,” and
asked for a chew of tobacco.
The death of this man was one of the
most impressive scenes ever witnessed upon this blood-stained
earth. Sentence having been passed upon the prisoner
the Committee, numbering one thousand men, came down
from the hall where they met and formed in the street,
three abreast. They comprised, with some exceptions,
the best, the most substantial, the most public-spirited
citizens of San Francisco. In the centre was Stuart,
handcuffed and pinioned, but perfectly self-possessed
and cool. A gallows had been erected some distance
off, and the procession moved up Battery Street, followed
by a great throng of men. There was no confusion,
no outcry, no apparent excitement, not
a sound, indeed, except the tread of many feet upon
the planked streets, every footfall sounding the prisoner’s
knell.
It was of this event that Bret Harte
wrote in his Bohemian Days in San Francisco:
“Under the reign of the Committee the lawless
and vicious class were more appalled by the moral
spectacle of several thousand black-coated, serious-minded
business men in embattled procession than by mere
force of arms.”
When they reached the gallows, a rope
was placed around the prisoner’s neck, and even
then, except for a slight paleness, there was no change
in his appearance. Amid the breathless silence
of the whole assemblage Stuart, standing under the
gallows, said, “I die reconciled. My sentence
is just.” His crimes had been many, and
he seemed to accept his death as the proper and almost
welcome result of his deeds. He was a man of
intellect, and, hardened criminal though he was, the
instinct of expiation asserted itself in his breast.
In July, 1851, a Spanish woman was
tried and condemned by an impromptu vigilance committee
for killing an American who, she declared, had insulted
her. Being sentenced to be hanged forthwith, she
carefully arranged her dress, neatly coiled her hair,
and walked quietly and firmly to the gallows.
There she made a short speech, saying that she would
do the same thing again if she were permitted to live,
and were insulted in the same way. Then she bade
the crowd farewell, adjusted the noose with her own
hands, and so passed bravely away.
A few years later at Moquelumne Hill,
a young Welshman, scarcely more than a boy, met death
in a very similar manner, and for a similar offence.
On the scaffold he turned to one of the by-standers,
and said, “Did you ever know anything bad of
me before this affair occurred?” The answer was,
“No, Jack.” “Well,” said
the youth, “tell those Camp Saco fellows that
I would do the same thing again and be hung rather
than put up with an insult.” Men like these
died for a point of honor, as much as did Alexander
Hamilton.
But far higher was the heroism of
those who suffered or died for others, and not for
themselves. No event, not even the discovery of
gold, stirred California more profoundly than did
the death of James King. In 1856, King, the editor
of the “Bulletin,” was waging single-handed
a vigorous warfare against the political corruption
then rife in California, and especially against the
supineness of the city officials in respect to gambling
and prostitution. He had given out that he would
not accept a challenge to a duel, but he was well
aware of the risk that he ran. San Francisco,
even at that time, indulged in an easy toleration of
vice, and only some striking, some terrible event
could have aroused the conscience of the public.
Among the city officials whose hatred
Mr. King had incurred was James Casey, a typical New
York politician, and a former convict, yet not wholly
a bad man. The two men, King and Casey, really
represented two stages of morality, two kinds of government.
Their personal conflict was in a condensed form the
clashing of the higher and the lower ideals. Casey,
meeting King on the street, called upon him to “draw
and defend himself”; but King, being without
a weapon, calmly folded his arms and faced his enemy.
Casey fired, and King fell to the ground, mortally
wounded.
“It was expedient that one man
should die for the people”; and the death of
King did far more than his life could have done to
purify the political and social atmosphere of California.
On the day following the murder, a Vigilance Committee
was organized, and an Executive Committee, consisting
chiefly of those who had managed the first Vigilance
Committee in 1851, was chosen as the practical ruler
of the city. It was supported by a band of three
thousand men, distributed in companies, armed, officered
and well drilled. For two months and a half the
Executive Committee remained in office, exercising
its power with marked judgment and moderation.
Four men were hung, many more were banished, and the
city was purged. Having accomplished its work
the Committee disbanded, but its members and sympathizers
secured control of the municipal government through
the ordinary legal channels, and for twenty years
administered the affairs of the city with honesty
and economy.
The task in 1851 had been mainly to
rid the city of Australian convicts; in 1856 it was
to correct the political abuses introduced by professional
politicians from the East, especially from New York;
and in each case the task was successfully accomplished,
without unnecessary bloodshed, and even with mercy.
Nor was Casey’s end without
pathos, and even dignity. On the scaffold he
was thinking not of himself, but of the old mother
whom he had left in New York. “Gentlemen,”
he said, “I stand before you as a man about to
come into the presence of God, and I declare before
Him that I am no murderer! I have an aged mother
whom I wish not to hear that I am guilty of murder.
I am not. My early education taught me to repay
an injury, and I have done nothing more. The
‘Alta California,’ ‘Chronicle,’
‘Globe,’ and other papers in the city
connect my name with murder and assassination.
I am no murderer. Let no newspaper in its weekly
or monthly editions dare publish to the world that
I am one. Let it not get to the ears of my mother
that I am. O God, I appeal for mercy for my past
sins, which are many. O Lord Jesus, unto thee
I resign my spirit. O mother, mother, mother!”
The sinking of the steamer, “Central
America,” off the coast of Georgia, in 1857,
is an event now almost forgotten, and yet it deserves
to be remembered forever. The steamer was on
her way from Aspinwall to New York, with passengers
and gold from San Francisco, when she sprang a leak
and began to sink. The women and children, fifty-three
in all, were taken off to a small brig which happened
to come in sight, leaving on board, without boats
or rafts, five hundred men, all of whom went down,
and of whom all but eighty were drowned. Though
many were armed, and nearly all were rough in appearance,
they were content that the women and children should
be saved first; and if here and there a grumble was
heard, it received little encouragement. Never
did so many men face death near at hand more quietly
or decorously.
And yet the critic tells us about
the “perverse romanticism” of Mr. Bret
Harte’s California tales!
One incident more, and this brief
record of California heroism, which might be extended
indefinitely, shall close. Charles Fairfax, the
tenth Baron of that name, whose family have lived
for many years in Virginia, was attacked without warning
by a cowardly assassin, named Lee. This man stabbed
Fairfax twice, and he was raising his arm for a third
thrust when his victim covered him with a pistol.
Lee, seeing the pistol, dropped his knife, stepped
back, and threw up his hands, exclaiming, “I
am unarmed!”
“Shoot the damned scoundrel!”
cried a friend of Fairfax who stood by.
Fairfax, holding the pistol, with
the blood streaming from his wounds, said: “You
are an assassin! You have murdered me! Your
life is in my hands!” And then, after a moment,
gazing on him, he added, “But for the sake of
your poor sick wife and of your children, I will spare
you.” He then uncocked the pistol, and
fell fainting in the arms of his friend.
All California rang with the nobility of the deed.