Most of the newspaper men in the early days of California were Southerners or under Southern influence, as is plain from many indications. For example, duelling and shooting at sight were common editorial functions.

Bret Harte, in An Episode of Fiddletown, gives an instance: “An unfortunate rencontre took place on Monday last between the Honorable Jackson Flash, of the ‘Dutch Flat Intelligencer,’ and the well-known Colonel Starbottle of this place, in front of the Eureka Saloon. Two shots were fired by the parties without injury to either, although it is said that a passing Chinaman received fifteen buckshot in the calves of his legs from the Colonel’s double-barrelled shotgun which were not intended for him. John will learn to keep out of the way of Melican man’s firearms hereafter.”

This fictitious incident can be paralleled almost exactly from the California papers of the day. In July, 1851, a certain Colonel Johnston pulled the nose of the Editor of the “Marysville Times,” whereupon the Editor drew a pistol, and the Colonel ran away. In September of the same year the “Alta California” announced that a duel between one of the proprietors of that paper and a brother to the Governor of the State had been prevented by the police. In March, 1851, two Sacramento Editors had a dispute in the course of which one endeavored to shoot the other. In May of the same year, the Editor of the “Calaveras Chronicle” fought a duel with another citizen of that town, and was dangerously wounded. In November, 1860, the Editor of the “Visalia Delta” was killed in a street affray. In San Francisco a duel took place between ex-Governor McDougall and the Editor of “The Picayune,” “A. C. Russell, Esq.”

This use of “Esquire,” by the way, was an English custom imported to California by way of the South, and many humorous examples of it may be found in Bret Harte. Thus, in the “Star’s” account of “Uncle Ben” Dabney’s sudden elevation to wealth and to a more aristocratic name, we read: “Benjamin Daubigny, Esq., who left town for Sacramento on important business, not entirely unconnected with his new interests in Indian Springs, will, it is rumored, be shortly joined by his wife, who has been enabled by his recent good fortune to leave her old home in the States, and take her proper proud position by his side.... Mr. Daubigny was accompanied by his private secretary, Rupert, the eldest son of H. G. Filgee, Esq.,” “H. G. Filgee, Esq.” being a species of bar-room loafer.

Another indication of the Southern origin of Californian Editors is the Starbottlian lack of humor which they often display. In August, 1850, the junior Editor of the “Alta California” published an extremely long letter in that paper describing his personal difficulties with two acquaintances, and concluding as follows: “I had simply intended in our interview to pronounce Messrs. Crane and Rice poltroons and cowards, and spit in their faces; and had they seen fit to resent it on the spot, I was prepared for them.” Nothing more. The “Sacramento Transcript” concluded the account of a funeral as follows: “She was buried in a neat mahogany coffin, furnished by Mr. Earle Youmans at one half the established price.” The “San Francisco Daily Herald” of June 21, 1852, contains a very long, minute, and extremely technical account of a prize-fight, written with evident relish, but concluding with a wholly unexpected comment as follows: “Thus ended this brutal exhibition!”

The editorial tone, especially in San Francisco, was distinguished by great solemnity, but it was the assumed solemnity of youth, for the Editors, like everybody else in California, were young. None but a youthful journalist could have written a leading article, published one Monday in a San Francisco paper, describing a sermon which the writer had heard on the preceding Sunday, giving the name of the preacher, and complaining bitterly, not that he was heterodox or bigoted, but that he was stupid and uninteresting!

In fact, the California Editors, despite the solemnity of their tone, showed a decided inclination to deal with the amusing, rather than with the serious, aspects of life. The “Sacramento Transcript” in August, 1850, contained a column letter, in large type, minutely describing “an alleged difficulty” which occurred at the American Fork House, between Mr. Gelston of Sacramento, and Mr. Drake, “who has been stopping at this place for his health,” with poor results, it is to be feared. In another issue of the same paper two columns are devoted to an account of a practical joke played upon a French barber in San Francisco.

Most of all, however, did the California journalists betray their youth, and their Southern origin as well, by the ornate style and the hyperbole in which the early papers indulged, and which are often satirized by Bret Harte. An editorial article dealing with the prospects of California began as follows: “When the eagle, emblem of model Republican liberty, winged its final flight westward from its home where Atlantic surges chafe our shores, and sought the sunny clime of the mild Pacific Strand, it bore in its strong talons,” and so forth for a sentence of one hundred and twenty words.

But the California newspapers, though often crude and provincial, were almost wholly free from vulgarity. In this respect they far excelled the average newspaper of to-day. There was nothing of the Philistine about them. They give the impression of having been written “by gentlemen and for gentlemen.” These California writers were, indeed, very young gentlemen, as we have seen, and they often lacked breadth of view, self-restraint, and knowledge of the world, but they were essentially men of honor, and in public matters they took high ground. The important part played by the “Bulletin” and its Editor, James King, has already been described. Nor did they lack literary skill, as is sufficiently shown by some of the passages from San Francisco papers already quoted. A correspondent of the “Sacramento Transcript,” writing in July, 1850, from the northern mines, gives an account of the destruction by fire of a store and restaurant owned by a Mr. Cook, concluding as follows: “With the recuperative energy so peculiar to American character, Mr. Cook has already gone down to your city to purchase a new stock, having reestablished his boarding-house before leaving. The son of Ethiopia who conducts the culinary department is not the darker for ’the cloud which has lowered o’er our house,’ and deprived him of many of the instruments of his office.”

The delicate humor of the last sentence does not seem out of place in the “Sacramento Transcript” of that date. The same paper published on the fourth of July, 1850, a patriotic leader which closed with these words, they appear far from extravagant now, but at that time they must have sounded like a rash and audacious prophecy: “‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ will blend in unison around the world.”

The first newspaper published in California was a small sheet called “The Californian,” started at Monterey in the Fall of 1846, and printed half in English, half in Spanish. Needless to say, its conductors were Americans. They had discovered in the ruins of the Mission, and used for this purpose, an old press which the Spaniards had imported in the day of their rule for printing the edicts of the Governor. In the following year “The Californian” was removed to San Francisco. Many other newspapers sprang into existence after the discovery of gold, especially the “Alta California,” which became the leading journal on the Pacific Slope. By the end of 1850 there were fifteen newspapers in the State, including six daily papers in San Francisco, and that excellent home and farm weekly, the “California Farmer.”

As for the buoyant, confident tone of these Pioneer papers, exaggerated though it was, it only reflected the general feeling. So early as November, 1851, a meeting was held in San Francisco to advocate the building of a railroad which should connect the Atlantic with the Pacific. In June, 1850, the “Sacramento Transcript” warned Europe as follows: “The present is the most remarkable period the world has ever been called upon to pass through.... The nations are centering hitherward. Europe is poor, California is rich, and equilibrium is inevitable. Four years will pass, and ours will be the most popular State in the Union. She is putting in the Keystone of Commerce, and concentrating the trade of the world.”

Moreover, busy as the Pioneers were, their reading was not confined to newspapers. Bret Harte said of them: “Eastern magazines and current Eastern literature formed their literary recreation, and the sale of the better class of periodicals was singularly great. Nor was their taste confined to American literature. The illustrated and satirical English journals were as frequently seen in California as in Massachusetts; and the author records that he has experienced more difficulty in procuring a copy of ‘Punch’ in an English provincial town than was his fortune at ’Red Dog’ or ‘One-Horse Gulch.’”

This statement has been questioned, but it is borne out by the contemporary records and publications. The “Atlantic Monthly,” for example, was regularly advertised in the California papers, and the “Atlantic” at that time was essentially a literary magazine. In the list of its contributors published in the “California Farmer” are the names of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Parsons, Whittier, Prescott, Mrs. Stowe, Motley, Herman Melville, C. C. Felton, F. J. Child, Edmund Quincy, J. T. Trowbridge, and G. W. Curtis. The London “Illustrated News” had a particularly large sale among the Pioneers, although the California price was a dollar a copy.

The shifting character of the population, and the fact, already mentioned, that, almost to a man, the Pioneers expected to return to the East within a few months, or, at the latest, within a year or two, these reasons discouraged the founding of permanent institutions such as libraries and colleges; but even in this direction something was done at an early date. The rush of immigration began in the Spring of 1849, and within less than a year a meeting had been held at San Francisco to establish a State college; a State library had been founded at San Jose; mercantile library associations had been started both in San Francisco and Sacramento, and an auction sale of books had been held in the latter city.

In September, 1850, an audience gathered at Stockton to hear a lecture upon so recondite a subject as the “State of Learning from the Fall of Rome to the Fall of Constantinople.” In June, 1851, a San Francisco firm advertised the receipt by the latest steamer of ten thousand new books, including the complete works of Dickens and Washington Irving. In November, 1851, a literary society called The California Institute was organized in San Francisco, and in April, 1856, some one entertained a hall full of people by giving an account of a lecture which Cardinal Wiseman had delivered in London upon the Perception of Natural Beauty by the Ancients and Moderns.

Before the close of 1856 numerous boarding-schools had been established, such as the Alameda Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies and Gentlemen, the Stockton Female Seminary, the Female Institute at Santa Clara, the Collegiate Institute at Benicia, the Academy of Notre Dame at San Jose.

The “legitimate drama,” and even Shakspere, flourished in California. In the Summer of 1850 Charles R. Thorne was playing at Sacramento, and in the Autumn “Richard III” and “Macbeth” were on the boards there. In the Fall of 1851 two theatres were open in San Francisco, “Othello” being the play at one, “Ernest Maltravers” at the other. In 1852 “The Hunchback” was performed in the same city with Miss Baker, the once-famous Philadelphia actress, in the leading part. There was no exaggeration in the remark made by the “Sacramento Transcript” in May, 1850: “Nowhere have we seen more critical theatrical audiences than those which meet nightly in Sacramento.... Every mind is wide awake, and the discriminating eye of an impartial public easily selects pure worth from its counterfeit.”

An amusing incident, which would have delighted Charles Lamb, and which shows the youthfulness, the humor, and, equally, the decorum of the California audience, is thus related by an eye-witness: “One night at the theatre a countryman from Pike, sitting in the ‘orchestra’ near the stage, and becoming uncomfortably warm, took off his coat. Thereupon the gallery-gods roared and hissed, stopping the play until the garment should be resumed. Some one touched the man on the shoulder and explained the situation. The hydra watched and waited. Shirt-sleeves appeared to be refractory, and a terrific roar came from the hydra. Shirt-sleeves, quailing at the sound, and at the angry looks and gestures of those who sat near him, started up with an air of coerced innocence, and resumed his toga virilis. The yell of triumph that arose from the ‘gods’ in their joyful sense of victory was beyond the description of tongue or pen."

It was remarked at an early date that nothing really satisfied the Pioneers unless it was the best of its kind that could be obtained, whether that kind were good or bad. Thus San Francisco, as many travellers observed, had the prettiest courtesans, the truest guns and pistols, the purest cigars and the finest wines and brandies to be found in the United States. The neatness and good style which marked the best hotels and restaurants prove the natural refinement of the people. Bret Harte has spoken of the old family silver which figured at a certain coffeehouse in San Francisco; and the Rev. Dr. Bushnell, who, being a minister, may perhaps be cited as an expert on this subject, was impressed by the good food and the excellent service which the traveller in California enjoyed:

“Passing hither and thither on the little steamers to Marysville, to Stockton, to the towns north of the Bay, where often the number of passengers did not exceed thirty, we have seen again and again a table most neatly set, the silver bright and clean, the meals well prepared and good, without any nonsense of show dishes, the servants tidy, quiet and respectful, the whole entertainment more rational and better than we have ever seen on Mississippi steamboats, or on those of the Atlantic Coast."

The steamers that plied up and down the Sacramento were “fast, elegant, commodious.” In July, 1851, some one gave an aristocratic evening party in the heart of the mountains, fifty miles from Marysville. A long artificial bower had been constructed under which were spread tables ornamented with flowers, and loaded with delicious viands, turkeys at twenty dollars apiece, pigs as costly, jellies, East India preserves, and ice cream. Some of the guests came from a great distance, ten, twenty, and even thirty miles. “No gamblers were present,” said the local paper which gave an account of the affair, thus showing how quickly the social line was drawn.

But even if we regard the beginnings of education and literature in California as somewhat meagre, it is otherwise with religion. Those who have looked upon the early California society as essentially lawless and immoral will be surprised to find how large and how potent was the religious element. Churches sprang up almost as quickly as gambling houses. The Baptists have the credit of erecting, in the Summer of ’49, the first church building; but Father William Taylor, the Methodist, was a close second. Father Taylor set out to build a church with his own hands. Every morning he crossed the Bay from San Francisco to San Antonio Creek and toiled with his axe in a grove of redwoods until he had cut down and hewn into shape the needed timber. This he transported in a sloop to the city, and then, with the aid of his congregation, constructed the church which was finished in October, ’49. By September, 1850, the following congregations had been formed in San Francisco: one Catholic, four Methodist (one being for negroes), one Presbyterian, one Congregational, one Baptist, one Episcopal, one Union Church. Three separate services were held at the Catholic Church, which was the largest, one in English, one in Spanish, one in French. Two years later a Jewish synagogue was established.

In July, 1850, five Episcopal clergymen met at San Francisco to create the diocese of California, and in the following month Dr. Horatio Southgate was elected Bishop. In the same year the San Francisco Bible Society was formed, and the next year, the “California Christian Advocate,” a Methodist paper, began publication.

At Sacramento, in the Spring of 1850, the Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians were holding regular services, and church building had begun. In July, 1851, a Methodist College at San Jose was incorporated; and in the same month the San Francisco papers have a long and enthusiastic account of a concert given by the children of the Baptist church there. “It was like an oasis in the desert for weary travellers,” remarked one of them. A Sacramento paper speaking of a school festival in that city said: “No bull-fight, horse-race or card-table ever gave so much pleasure to the spectators.”

A miner, writing from Stockton on a Sunday morning in October, 1851, says, “The church bell is tolling, and gayly-dressed ladies are passing by the window.”

The congregations at the early religious meetings were extremely impressive, being composed almost wholly of men, and of men young, vigorous and sincere. As Professor Royce remarks: “Nobody gained anything by hypocrisy in California, and consequently there were few hypocrites. The religious coldness of a larger number who at home would have seemed to be devout did not make the progress of the churches in California less sure.” And he speaks of the impression which these early congregations of men made upon his mother. “She saw in their countenances an intensity of earnestness that made her involuntarily thank God for making so grand a being as man.”

It has often been remarked that in times of unbelief and lax morality there is always found a small element in the community which maintains the standard of faith and conduct with a strictness wholly alien to the period. Such was the case in the Roman Empire just before and just after the advent of the Christian religion. So, in the English Church, in its most idle, most worldly, most unspiritual days, as before the Evangelical movement, and again before the Tractarian movement, there was a small body of priests and laymen, chiefly, as in the Roman Empire, isolated persons living in the country, who preserved the torch of faith, humility and self-denial, and served as a nucleus for the new party which was to revive and reform the Church. Extremes can be met only by extremes. Intense worldliness can be vanquished only by intense unworldliness; unbelief fosters faith among a few; and the more loose the habits of the majority, the more severe will be the practice of the minority.

This was abundantly seen in California. As Bret Harte himself said: “Strangely enough, this grave materialism flourished side by side with and was even sustained by a narrow religious strictness more characteristic of the Pilgrim Fathers of a past century than the Western Pioneers of the present. San Francisco was early a city of churches and church organizations to which the leading men and merchants belonged. The lax Sundays of the dying Spanish race seemed only to provoke a revival of the rigors of the Puritan Sabbath. With the Spaniard and his Sunday afternoon bull-fight scarcely an hour distant, the San Francisco pulpit thundered against Sunday picnics. One of the popular preachers, declaiming upon the practice of Sunday dinner-giving, averred that when he saw a guest in his best Sunday clothes standing shamelessly upon the doorstep of his host, he felt like seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him from that threshold of perdition.”

An example of this narrow, not to say Pharisaic point of view was commented upon as follows by the “San Francisco Daily Herald” of February 3, 1852: “Of all countries in the world California is the least favorable to cant and bigotry.... It is not surprising that a general feeling of loathing should have been created by an article which recently appeared in a so-called religious newspaper having the title of the ’Christian Advocate,’ commenting in terms of invidious and slanderous malignity on the fact of Miss Coad, recently attached to the American Theatre, being engaged to sing in the choir of the Pacific Church.”

This is well enough, though put in an extravagant and rather boyish way; but the writer then goes on in the true Colonel Starbottle manner as follows: “With the conductors of a clerical press it is difficult to deal. Under the cloak of piety they do not hesitate to libel and malign, and at the same time not recognizing the responsibility of gentlemen [Colonel Starbottle’s phrase], and being therefore not fit subjects of attack in retort, one feels almost ashamed in checking their stupidity or reproving their falsehood.” And so on at great length.

Nevertheless, the Puritan minority, reinforced by the good sense of a majority of the Pioneers, very quickly succeeded in modifying the free and easy life of San Francisco, and later of the mining regions. Gamblers of the better sort, and business men in general, welcomed and supported the churches as tending to the peace and prosperity even of the Pacific Slope. “I have known five men,” wrote the Reverend Mr. Colton, “who never contributed a dollar in the States for the support of a clergyman, subscribe here five hundred dollars each per annum, merely to encourage, as they termed it, ‘a good sort of a thing in a community.’"

The steps taken in 1850 and 1851 to prohibit or restrain gambling have already been noticed. In August, 1850, the Grand Jury condemned bull-baiting and prize-fighting at any time, and theatrical and like exhibitions on Sunday. In September of the same year, the “Sacramento Transcript” said, “The bull-fights we have had in this city have been barbarous and disgusting in the extreme, and their toleration on any occasion is disgraceful.”

This sentiment prevailed, and shortly afterward bull-fights in Sacramento were forbidden by city ordinance. A year later gambling houses and theatres, both in San Francisco and Sacramento, were closed on Sunday, and we find the “Alta California” remarking on a Monday morning in May, “Yesterday all was like Sunday in the East, as quiet as the fury of the winds would allow. Two years ago under similar circumstances many hundreds of men would have forgotten the day, and the busy hum of business would have rung throughout the land.”

In the mines Sunday, at first, was almost wholly disregarded; but abstention from work on that day was soon found to be a physical necessity. Thus an English miner wrote home, “We have all of us given over working on Sundays, as we found the toil on six successive days quite hard enough.”

Men who stood by their principles in California never lost anything by that course. A merchant from Salem, Massachusetts, came up the Sacramento River with a cargo of goods in December, 1848. Early on the morning after his arrival three men with three mules appeared on the bank of the river to purchase supplies for the mines. It being Sunday, however, the man from Salem refused to do business on that day, but, after the New England fashion, accommodated his intending customers with a little good advice. This they resented in a really violent manner, and went off in a rage, swearing that they would never trade with such a Puritanical hypocrite. Yet they came back the next morning, purchased goods then, and on various later occasions, and finally made the Sabbath-keeper their banker, depositing in his safe many thousands of dollars.

Even a matter so unpopular as that of temperance reform was not neglected by the religious people. A temperance society was organized at Sacramento in June, 1850, addresses were made in the Methodist chapel, and numerous persons, including some city officials, signed a total abstinence pledge. “The subject is an old one,” the “Sacramento Transcript” naively remarked; “but this is a new country. Temperance is rather a new idea here, and its introduction among us seems almost like a novel movement.” In the same month and year a similar society was formed in San Francisco, and arrangements were made to celebrate the Fourth of July “on temperance principles.”

The most genuine, the most thorough-going kind of religion found in California was that of the Western Pioneers, who were mainly Methodists and Baptists of a rude, primitive sort. Nothing could be further from Bret Harte’s manner of thinking, and yet he has depicted the type with his usual insight, though perhaps not quite with his usual sympathy. Joshua Rylands, in Mr. Jack Hamlin’s Mediation (a story already mentioned), is one example of it, and Madison Wayne, in The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, is another. Of all Bret Harte’s stories this is the most tragic, a terrible fate overtaking every one of the four characters who figure in it. Madison Wayne is a Calvinistic Puritan, a New Englander such as has not been seen in New England for a hundred years, but only in that Far West to which New England men penetrated, and in which New England ideas and beliefs, protected by the isolation of prairie and forest, survived the scientific and religious changes of two centuries.

In A Night at Hays’ we have the same character under a more morose aspect. “Always a severe Presbyterian and an uncompromising deacon, he grew more rigid, sectarian, and narrow day by day.... A grim landlord, hard creditor, close-fisted patron, and a smileless neighbor who neither gambled nor drank, old Hays, as he was called, while yet scarce fifty, had few acquaintances and fewer friends.”

In An Apostle of the Tules Bret Harte has described a camp-meeting of Calvinistic families whose gloom was heightened by malaria contracted from the Stockton marshes. “One might have smiled at the idea of the vendetta-following Ferguses praying for ‘justification by faith’; but the actual spectacle of old Simon Fergus, whose shotgun was still in his wagon, offering up that appeal with streaming eyes and agonized features, was painful beyond a doubt.”

As for Bret Harte’s own religious views, it can scarcely be said that he had any. He was indeed brought up with some strictness as an Episcopalian, his mother being of that faith; and when he returned from her funeral with his sisters, he seemed deeply moved by the beauty of the Episcopal burial service, and expressed the hope that it would be read at his own grave. His friends in this country remember that he declined to take part in certain amusements on Sunday, remarking that, though he saw no harm in them, he could not shake off the more strict notions of Sunday observance in which he had been trained as a child. Through life he had a horror of gambling, and always refused even to play cards for money. In San Francisco he used to attend the church where his friend Starr King preached, and in New York he was often present at another Unitarian church, that of the Reverend O. B. Frothingham; but this seems to have been the extent of his church-going, and of his connection, external or internal, with any form of Christianity.

Nor, so far as one can judge from his writings, and from such of his letters as have been published, was he one who thought much or cared much about those mysteries of human existence with which religion is supposed to deal. Even as a child, Bret Harte had no sense of sin, no sense of that hideous discrepancy between character and ideals, between conduct and duty, which ought to oppress all men, and which, at some period of their lives, does oppress most men. Everybody, from the Digger Indian up, has a standard of right and wrong; everybody is aware that he continually falls below that standard; and from these two facts of consciousness arise the sense of sin, remorse, repentance, and the instinct of expiation. Perhaps this is religion, or the fundamental feeling upon which religion is based.

To be deficient in this feeling is a great defect in any man, most of all in a man of powerful intellect. In a letter, Bret Harte, speaking of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” says that he read it as a boy, but that the book made no impression upon him, except that the characters seemed so ridiculous that he could not help laughing at them. This statement gives a rather painful shock even to the irreligious reader. The truth is, Bret Harte had the moral indifference, the spiritual serenity of a Pagan, and, as a necessary concomitant, that superficial conception of human life and destiny which belongs to Paganism.

Benjamin Jowett, speaking of the Mediaeval hymns, said, “We seem to catch from them echoes of deeper feelings than we are capable of.” That Mediaeval, Gothic depth of feeling, that consciousness of sin and mystery hanging over and enveloping man’s career on earth, survives even in some modern writers, as in Hawthorne, George Eliot, Tolstoi, and, by a kind of negation, in Thomas Hardy; and it gives to their stories a sombre and imposing background which is lacking in the tales of Bret Harte and of Kipling.

It is owing partly to this defect, and partly to the unfortunate character of most of the ministers who reached California before 1860, that the clerical element fares but ill in Bret Harte’s stories. His most frequent type is the smooth, oily, self-seeking hypocrite. Such is the Reverend Joshua McSnagley whose little affair with Deacon Parnell’s “darter” is sarcastically mentioned in Roger Catron’s Friend, and who comes to a violent end in M’liss. The Reverend Mr. Staples who meanly persecutes the Youngest Prospector in Calaveras, is McSnagley under another name; and the same type briefly appears again in the Reverend Mr. Peasley, who greets the New Assistant at Pine Clearing School “with a chilling Christian smile”; in the Reverend Mr. Belcher, who attempts the reform of Johnnyboy; and still again in Parson Greenwood, who profits by the Convalescence of Jack Hamlin to learn the mysteries of poker, and of whom the gambler said that, when he had successfully “bluffed” his fellow-players, “there was a smile of humble self-righteousness on his face that was worth double the money.”

A much less conventional and more interesting type is that of the jovial, loud-voiced hypocrite who conceals a cold heart and a selfish nature with an affectation of frankness and geniality. Such are the Reverend Mr. Windibrook in A Belle of Canada City, and Father Wynn, described in The Carquinez Woods. It was Father Wynn who thus addressed the newly-converted expressman, to the great disgust and embarrassment of that youth: “’Good-by, good-by, Charley, my boy, and keep in the right path; not up or down, or round the gulch, you know, ha, ha! but straight across lots to the shining gate.’

“He had raised his voice under the stimulus of a few admiring spectators, and backed his convert playfully against the wall. ‘You see! We’re goin’ in to win, you bet. Good-by! I’d ask you to step in and have a chat, but I’ve got my work to do, and so have you. The gospel mustn’t keep us from that, must it, Charley? Ha, ha!’”

James Seabright, the amphibious minister who is responsible for the Episode of West Woodlands, is rather good than bad, and so is Stephen Masterton, the ignorant, fanatical, but conscientious Pike County revivalist who, yielding to the combined charms of a pretty Spanish girl and the Catholic Church, becomes a Convert of the Mission.

Of another Protestant minister, the Reverend Mr. Daws, it is briefly mentioned in The Iliad of Sandy Bar that “with quiet fearlessness” he endeavored to reconcile those bitter enemies, York and Scott. “When he had concluded, Scott looked at him, not unkindly, over the glasses of his bar, and said, less irreverently than the words might convey, ’Young man, I rather like your style; but when you know York and me as well as you do God Almighty, it’ll be time enough to talk.’”

But of all Bret Harte’s Protestant ministers the only one who figures in the least as a hero is Gideon Deane, the Apostle of the Tules. Gideon Deane, it will be remembered, first ventures his own life in an effort to save that of a gambler about to be lynched, and then, making perhaps a still greater sacrifice, declines the church and the parsonage and the fifteen hundred dollars a year offered to him by Jack Hamlin and his friends, and returning to the lonely farmhouse and the poverty-stricken, unattractive widow Hiler, becomes her husband, and a father to her children.

The story is not altogether satisfactory, for Gideon Deane is in love with a young girl who loves him, and it is not perfectly clear why her happiness, as well as that of the preacher himself, should be sacrificed to the domestic necessities of the widow and her children. Nor is the hero himself made quite so real as are Bret Harte’s characters in general. We admire and respect him, but he does not excite our enthusiasm, and this is probably because the author failed to get that imaginative, sympathetic grasp of his nature which, as a rule, makes Bret Harte’s personages seem like living men and women.

There is a rather striking resemblance in the matter of ministers between Bret Harte and Rhoda Broughton. Both have the same instinctive antipathy to a parson that boys have to a policeman; both have the same general notion that ministers are mainly canting hypocrites; both, being struck apparently by the idea of doing full justice to the cloth, have set themselves to describe one really good and even heroic minister, and in each case the type evolved is the same, and not convincing. Gideon Deane has the slender physique, the humility, the courage, the self-sacrificing spirit, the melancholy temperament of the Reverend James Stanley, and, it may be added, the same unreality, the same inability to stamp his image upon the mind of the reader.

Bret Harte’s treatment of the Spanish priest in California is very different. He pokes a little fun at his Reverence, now and then. He shows us Father Felipe entering the estudio of Don Jose Sepulvida “with that air of furtive and minute inspection common to his order”; and in the interview with Colonel Parker, Don Jose’s lawyer, there is a beautiful description of what might be called an ecclesiastical wink. “The Padre and Colonel Parker gazed long and gravely into each other’s eyes. It may have been an innocent touch of the sunlight through the window, but a faint gleam seemed to steal into the pupil of the affable lawyer at the same moment that, probably from the like cause, there was a slight nervous contraction of the left eyelid of the pious father.”

Father Sobriente, again, “was a polished, cultivated man; yet in the characteristic, material criticism of youth, I am afraid that Clarence chiefly identified him as a priest with large hands whose soft palms seemed to be cushioned with kindness, and whose equally large feet, encased in extraordinary shapeless shoes of undyed leather, seemed to tread down noiselessly rather than to ostentatiously crush the obstacles that beset the path of the young student.... In the midnight silence of the dormitory, he was often conscious of the soft, browsing tread and snuffy, muffled breathing of his elephantine-footed mentor.”

But the simplicity, the unaffected piety, and the sweet disposition of the Spanish priest are clearly shown in Bret Harte’s stories. The ecclesiastic with whom he has made us best acquainted is Padre Esteban of the Mission of Todos Santos, that remote and dreamy port in which the Crusade of the Excelsior ended. And yet even there the good priest had learned how to deal with the human heart, as appeared when he became the confidant of the unfortunate Hurlstone.

“‘A woman,’ said the priest softly. ‘So! We will sit down, my son.’ He lifted his hand with a soothing gesture the movement of a physician who has just arrived at an easy diagnosis of certain uneasy symptoms. There was also a slight suggestion of an habitual toleration, as if even the seclusion of Todos Santos had not been entirely free from the invasion of the primal passion.”

The Reader need not be reminded how often Bret Harte speaks of Junípero Serra, the Franciscan Friar who founded the Spanish Missions in California. Father Junípero was a typical Spaniard of the religious sort, austere, ascetic, a Commissioner of the Inquisition. He ate little, avoiding all meat and wine. He scourged himself in the pulpit with a chain, after the manner of St. Francis, and he was accustomed, while reciting the confession, to hold aloft the Crucifix in his left hand, and to strike his naked breast with a heavy stone held in his right hand. To this self-punishment, indeed, was attributed the disease of the lungs which ultimately caused his death.

Each Mission had its garrison, for the intention was to overcome the natives by arms, if they should offer resistance to Holy Church. But the California Indians were a mild, inoffensive people, lacking the character and courage of the Indians who inhabited the Plains, and they quickly succumbed to that combination of spiritual authority and military force which the Padres wielded. At the end of the eighteenth century there were eighteen Missions in California, with forty Padres, and a neophyte Indian population of about thirteen thousand. But all this melted away when the Missions were secularized. In 1822 Mexico became independent of Spain, and thenceforth California was an outlying, neglected Mexican province. From that time the office-holding class of Mexicans were intriguing to get possession of the Mission lands, flocks and herds; and in 1833 they succeeded. The Missions were broken up, the Friars were deprived of all support; and many of the Christian Indians were reduced to a cruel slavery in which their labor was recompensed chiefly by intoxicating liquors. Little better was the fate of the others. Released from the strict discipline in which they had been held by the priests, they scattered in all directions, and quickly sank into a state of barbarism worse than their original state.

But the Missions were not absolutely deserted. In some cases a small monastic brotherhood still inhabited the buildings once thronged by soldiers and neophytes; and these men were of great service. They ministered to the spiritual needs of Spanish and Mexicans; they instructed the sons and daughters of the ranch-owners; they kept alive religion, and to some extent learning in the community; and, finally, if one may say so without irreverence, they contributed that Mediaeval element which, otherwise, would have been the one thing lacking to complete the picturesque contrasts of Pioneer life. The Missions had been the last expression of the instinct of conquest upon the part of a decaying nation; and the Angelus that nightly rang from some fast-crumbling tower sounded the knell of Spanish rule in America.