The Californians, by Walter M. Fisher
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The Californians, by Walter M. Fisher THE CALIFORNIANS BY WALTER M. FISHER Milagros ó no milagros, dijo Sancho, cada uno mire cómo habla ó como escribe de las personas, y no ponga á trochemoche lo primero que le viene al magin. CERVANTES, Don Quixote. Un historien a bien des devoirs. Permettez-moi de vous en rappeler ici deux qui sont de quelque considération; celui de ne point calomnier, et celui de ne point ennuyer. VOLTAIRE, Letter to M. Norberg. Et sermone opus est, modo tristi, sæpe jocoso; Defendente vicem modo rhetoris, atque poetæ, Interdum urbani, parcentis viribus, atque Extenuantis eas consulto. Ridiculum acri Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res. HORACE, Lib. I., Sat. 10. London MACMILLAN AND CO. 1876 [ All rights reserved.] The Californians, by Walter M. Fisher http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.094 CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. To MR. HUBERT H. BANCROFT, OF SAN FRANCISCO. MY DEAR BANCROFT, Your literary genius, clear head, and warm heart, are among my pleasantest memories of California. It is fitting that to you specially, greatest of The Californians, this book should be presented by its author, and your friend, WALTER M. FISHER. LONDON, August, 1876. PREFACE. THIS book has evolved itself, it is hoped by selection of the fittest, from the note-books of a worker in literature, engaged during the past four years in California. The pages of “The Californians” will show that it has been its author's main business during his absence from England to observe and study, both directly and through the medium of what others have written, the people and the things he here discusses. Though never profaning the sacredness of the bread and salt, he attempts to treat men and their ways much as if he determined the angles and the composition of a crystal, or studied in a test-tube the phenomena of certain combinations of nitrogen and carbon. It is proverbial of travellers of a certain very old and sometime literary guild, that they should viii not be choosers. But, at least in this point, the modern portfolio differs from the gaberlunzie bag; it not only can be, but should be a chooser. The present writer has exercised this right of choice as carefully as his judgment and experience enabled him. All he found in California interesting for The Californians, by Walter M. Fisher http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.094 praise or reproof, for instruction or amusement, he has brought home to his fellow countrymen; everything simply dull and tiresome he has tried to leave behind. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE THEIR COUNTRY 1 CHAPTER II. THEIR PIONEERS 28 CHAPTER III. THEIR SPANISH CALIFORNIANS 42 CHAPTER IV. THEIR CHINESE 50 CHAPTER V. THEIR REPROBATES 69 CHAPTER VI. THEIR WOMEN 84 x CHAPTER VII. THEIR MEN 106 CHAPTER VIII. THEIR POLITICIANS 132 CHAPTER IX. THEIR WRITERS 157 CHAPTER X. PRO ARIS ET FOCIS 205 CHAPTER I. THEIR COUNTRY. Then I said, “Now assuredly I see My lady is perfect, and transfigureth All sin, and sorrow, and death, Making them fair as her own eyelids be.” A Ballad of Life, SWINBURNE. SUPPOSE a country on the western coast of the North American continent, roughly comparable to Italy in climate, area, shape, and position, relative to the parallels and meridians; suppose it—this relative position being still maintained—to be the length of itself nearer the equator than Italy is; suppose it to have its central ridge of mountains not called the Apennines, but the Coast Range, and to have behind it for a western boundary, instead of the Adriatic 2 Sea, another range of mountains called the Sierra Nevada, and there will be called up a clear enough idea of Alta California, as its old Spanish owners used to call it, or, as it is now known to the people of the United States—its present masters—the State of California. The most trustworthy estimates give it an area of 155,000 square miles, and a present population of three-quarters of a million people, of whom a quarter of a million inhabit its principal city, San Francisco. The whole State may be described as a diagonal band, 800 miles long and 190 miles broad, lying across an oriented parallelogram on the map, with The Californians, by Walter M. Fisher http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.094 ten degrees of longitude for a base, and ten degrees of latitude for a perpendicular. The climate is, on the whole, Italian; varying from extreme winter cold in the mountainous districts to a wonderful mildness at all seasons on the coast and in the more favoured valleys. It has its “rainy seasons;” the man who leaves his house then without an umbrella is likely to fare rather worse than if he did so in London. During the other six months of the year, the summer and autumn months, rain is phenomenal; when not irrigated the soil hardens like iron, the grass becomes like a threadbare faded carpet. The dust on every road gathers 3 and drifts into banks as if it were snow; the earth becomes, in fact, a dust-bin, and the air in stormy weather a dust-bin in transitu. It might be supposed that all this made the dry season very unpleasant. The opposite is, however, true, at least for those who are not forced to travel much. The dust is usually quiet enough when not violently stirred up by wheels or by horses' hoofs. In the cities, such as San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, watering-carts and scavengers keep the unpleasant element in practical subjection. The wind, except on the immediate coast, is not generally able, either in its mid-day form of the sea breeze or its night form of the land breeze, to do more than ripple the great lakes and rivers of dust, while it prevents the heat, even in mid-summer, from being oppressive. Taken all in all, from January till December, the climate of California seems bright, mild, equable, and invigorating, above most climates with which we are acquainted by experience or description. Nice has a mistral as keen and dangerous as the stiletto; Naples becomes a kind of Niflheimer in winter; the bright Seven Hills can be dank enough with malaria at times; and even the City of the Violet Crown has its own troubles with fever. 4 Perhaps the climate of the valley of the Nile and that of the valley of the Sacramento are as pleasantly alike in winter as is possible, but in summer California has the advantage. Mr. Hubert Bancroft, the historian, has expressed the ruling sentiment on this subject with his usual happiness: “That there is something indescribably fascinating about California, a peculiar play of light and shadow on the hills and in the heart, an atmosphere aerially alcoholic, we, who have felt its subtle influence, well know. Said one of the expatriated by the Vigilance Committee to the captain of the steamer on reaching Panama: “‘Captain, this is no place for me; you must take me back to San Francisco.’ The Californians, by Walter M. Fisher http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.094 “‘But they will hang you higher than Haman if I do.’” “‘Captain,’ whined the evildoer, ‘I would rather hang in Californian air than be lord of the soil of another country.’” So again, “the judge,” in Mr. Joaquin Miller's “First Fam'lies of the Sierra,” is perpetually finding in “this glorious climate of Californy” the promise and potency of as many forms of virtue as Professor Tyndall, or even Dr. Bastian, can in 5 matter. Less biassed critics of the Golden State, or critics biassed possibly in an opposite direction, have still, like Mr. Hepworth Dixon, at least a good word to say for her climate: “From month to month the seasons come and go in one soft round of spring. In winter it is May, in summer it is only June.” The prevailing sunlight of California is indeed a pleasant thing. It fills every nerve and sense with the heat and the strength, the glory and the excellency of life. With us, in northern Europe, one is obliged most part of the year “to buy one's sun,” as M. Souvestre's delightful philosophe puts it. With the Californians there are few hours of the day and few days of the year when the light of the sun is absent. That “life in the sunshine,” so dear to the poet's heart, may there be always the lot of the humblest—except in the worst days of the rainy season. These long periods of perfectly dry weather, separated by sharply-defined seasons of heavy rain, this régime of sunshine, tempered by the deluge, is not quite so attractive to farmers as to poets. Mr. John Hittell, a Californian, who has written, as far as plain facts and figures are 6 concerned, a most complete and trustworthy book about his adopted State, says: “Every other year, on an average, brings either a drought or a flood.” Between 1872 and 1875, inclusive, there were we believe two droughts and one flood. In the flood, Sacramento, Marysville, and other towns suffered to the extent of the ruin of hundreds of families. In the droughts the main crops of the State were in many places shrivelled to shadowy proportions, and great herds of cattle perished of hunger and thirst. Apart from all this, in the excessively dry seasons, one's own blood begins to remind one of that of St. Januarius in its bottle, and the first little cloud rising “out of the sea like a man's hand” is as joyfully and earnestly watched as the priestly hand that liquefies the sacred fluid of Naples.