PACIFIC BASIN BOOKS

Editor: Kaori O'Connor

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES

Louis Becke Pacific Tales James S. de Benneville Tales ofthe Samurai Isabella Bird Korea and her Neighbours Isabella Bird Six Months in Hawaii Katharine Augusta Carl With the Empress Dowager ofChina Miguel Covarrubias Island ofBali Miguel Covarrubias Mexico South Paul Gauguin Intimate Journals Jukichi Inouye Home Life in Tokyo Washington Irving Astoria John La Farge An American Artist in the South Seas Jack Cruise ofthe Snark Pierre Loti Japan: Madame Chrysanthemum Pierre Loti Tahiti: The Marriage ofLoti Herman Melville Omoo Herman Melville Typee Robert Louis Stevenson In the South Seas NORDHOFF'S WEST COAST , OREGON AND HAWAII

BY CHARLES NORDHOFF

Introduction by Kaori O'Connor

I~ ~~o~!~!n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published in 1987 by Kegan Paul International

This edition first published in 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 ThirdAvenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint ifthe Taylor & Francis Group, an if!forma business

© This edition KPI Limited 1987

All rights reserved. No part ifthis book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10: 0-7103-0257-6 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-7103-0257-1 (hbk)

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality ifthis reprint but points out that some impeifections in the original copies may be apparent. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace. INTRODUCTION

Probably twenty Americans go to Europe for one who goes to California; for one who has seen the YoSemite, a hundred will tell you of the Alps, and a thousand about ; yet no American who has not seen the Plains, the Great Salt Lake, the Sierra Nevada and the wonders of California can honestly say that he has seen his own country, or that he even has an intelligent idea of its greatness. So begins California for Health, Pleasure and Residence, the remarkable work that - along with its companion volume Northern California, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands l - is the finest historical account we have today of life on the Pacific coast and in the islands in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Written by Charles Nordhoff, the most respected American journalist, political commentator and descriptive writer of the period and grandfather of the namesake co-author of , it is a panoramic account of life, work and leisure in a golden land ofopportunity that had just been opened for settlement by the construction of the first transcontinental railway in 1869. Few books have had such a dramatic effect on the development of America, for it inspired a generation ofsettlers to head for the coast, and was instrumental in creating what came to be called the New West. Charles Nordhoffwas born in Erwitte, Prussia on August 31, 1830, and was brought to America at the age of 4 when his father was exiled from Germany for his liberal views. America in the early 1830s was a young country on the move west. Following the trend, the family settled in the frontier country near Fort Dearborn, Michigan, where Nordhoff's father became a trapper and dealer in furs. The Nordhoffs had been wealthy in their homeland, and lived in a stylishly anomalous fashion, 'eating from silver plate and drinking imported mineral water in the Western wilderness, '2 but despite these refinements the life proved to be too difficult and Nordhoff's mother and then his father died, leaving him an orphan at the age of9. Young Charles's only inheritance was a chest which contained silver plate and papers believed to have been titles to land where Chicago now stands. The chest 'disappeared at the time of his f::tther's death, and was never found. '3 Charles then became a ward of Bishop Nast ofCincinnati, who gave him the only formal education he ever received, but at age 13 he chose to leave school to 6 INTRODUCTION become a printer's apprentice. By his own account 'weakly and puny,' Charles soon found that the confined conditions of the printing house did not suit his constitution. As he recalled, The perusal ofbooks of travel had always given me great pleasure, and in them I had frequently read glowing accounts of the invigorating and restoring powers of sea air and tropical climes. And so, one day, the idea occurred to me to try the salt water. 4 Running away from home with two clean shirts, a pair of socks and his life savings of $25, Charles made his way to Philadelphia where, after many difficulties, he obtained a berth as a 'first class boy' on the newly• commissioned US naval ship Columbus, setting sail on June 4, 1845, on a voyage that would take him halfway around the world to many of the countries of the Pacific Basin. After calling at Batavia, China and Manila the Columbus proceeded to Japan, which was then closed to foreigners. The crew were not permitted on shore, but parties of prominent Japanese were allowed to visit the ship where young Nordhoff was fascinated by the great curiosity they showed: They walked about drinking in with their eyes greedily all the wonders of our ship, many of them carrying little notebooks in their hands, in which they made memorandums of what struck their attention most forcibly. 5 Nearly two years out from Philadelphia, the Columbus arrived at the Hawaiian islands which had become the prime port of call for the large Pacific whaling fleet as well as the many trading vessels that plied along the coasts of the and the Northwest coast. As Nordhoff remembered: Honolulu at that time Uust before the discovery of gold in California) was a straggling, rather poorly constructed town. It contained a number of respectable-looking houses, but the great body of the town was made up of small huts, and on the outskirts not a few tents were to be seen, reminding me somewhat of a camp-meeting in the Western woods at home. The whole place had a listless, impassive look, as though the inhabitants were only taking a rest, preparatory to starting on ajourney. Except just down by the waterside, where the sailors by their uncouth gambols along the shore gave some life to the scene, a sabbath stillness reigned throughout. 6 After leaving Hawaii the Columbus sailed for Chile and then for California, where American troops had taken possession of the coast following the raising of the American flag over Monterey in 1847. Monterey was then the principal port on the coast, San Francisco being a small village of sixty to seventy INTRODUCTION 7 houses, and the Columbus remained there for nine months. On this visit, California struck Nordhoff as a country of vast but unrealized potential: The California of those days was a most unproductive or rather nothing-producing country - a great fertile waste in which everything would grow but nothing was made to grow except, indeed, beef' ... The hills surrounding San Francisco Bay yet swarmed with cattle ... there was not a vegetable on the whole coast, nothing eatable but beef, beef, beef - a never-ending round of boiled beef, of which we grew so tired that to this day the sight of a soup bone takes away my appetite. 7 Charles Nordhoff remained at sea for a total of nine years, serving in whaling, fishing and merchant ships. He came ashore for good in 1854 with no more savings than an English sixpence, but with a vigorous constitution and boundless energy that never left him. Resuming his printing connections he became a newspaper reporter, finding time to write three books on his nautical adventures before taking up a post as an editor for Harper and Brothers in 1857. The following year he went over to the New York Evening Post where he championed the Union cause during the American Civil War (1861-5), and argued for positive and sweeping measures of reform and reconciliation during the postwar Reconstruction. Now established as one of the nation's leadingjournalists, Nordhoff was in an ideal position to assess the state of the country in the aftermath of the conflict. Conditions in the south were desperate, with transportation destroyed, agricultural lands untended and the economy in ruins. In the north, the heavy industrialization that had taken place during the war meant that many returning soldiers found their old jobs gone, taken over by machines. While many struggled to rebuild their old lives, many more felt the need for a fresh beginning and a new start. In America, the opening up of new territories for settlement had 'long served as a kind of safety-valve whereby men dissatisfied with economic conditions in long-settled districts could escape to a new and freer environment'8 but the opening of new territories had proceeded slowly since Nordhoff's frontier boyhood. At the end of the war, most of the land west of the Mississippi River was still Indian country, inhabited by tribes who harried any settlers who ventured into their ancestral preserves. The central plains could not be developed for agriculture without irrigation on a scale that was not yet possible, and further west lay the arid, sagebrush wastes of the Great American Desert. It was only west of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, on the Pacific coast, that settlement had made any progress, spurred by the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and subsequently sustained by the growing realization that the west coast's fine climate, fertile soil, abundant water and peaceable conditions might well prove to be a bigger bonanza than 8 INTRODUCTION gold. Conditions that made settlement difficult elsewhere did not exist on the west coast - the problem was getting there. The overland route to the coast by wagon train or stagecoach was fraught with danger and often prohibitively expensive, a stagecoach journey from Kansas to California costing as much as $500. The sea route, either through the Straits of Magellan or by way of Panama, was less costly but involved similar degrees of danger and discomfort; in both cases the journey had to be reckoned in weeks at best, but usually in months. Communication of any kind with the coast was difficult; letters had to be carried by sea or rider, and although a telegraph line had been constructed in 1862, service was often interrupted by Indian attacks, buffalo stampedes and storms. The difficulties of access and communication meant that America had developed as two countries - the west coast and the eastern states - separated by a vast wilderness, a situation that ceased on May 10, 1869 when the tracks of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railways were joined at Promontory Point, Utah, creating a transcontinental route. For the first time, the west coast could be visited easily, quickly and safely, and western produce could be shipped east, creating new markets that would in turn create further employment and opportunities in the west. But the railroad could only bridge the physical gulf between the coasts. Because it had been so inaccessible for so long, the far west was a terra incognita whose true nature was hidden behind a veil of hearsay, tall tales and sensational accounts• like the following description of San Francisco in 1860 - that owed more to literary license than accurate observation; Its name had become synonymous for all that was most shameless in profligacy, for all that was basest in depravity, for all that was wanton and brutal in ruffianism. In the open day men were murdered with impunity. At night the property of the citizens was at the mercy of the lawless. The scum of Polynesia, desperadoes from Australia, bullies and blackguards from the wild state of Missouri, Spanish cut-throats from the cities of the Pacific coast, dissolute women and reckless adventurers from the slums congregated in San Francisco, and there plied their several avocations and followed their devious courses in defiance of the prohibitions of a law which had lost its terrors for them, and in disregard of any other check save the revolver and the bowie knife. 9 Not surprisingly, easterners were contemptuous and suspicious of westerners, inclined to think of them as vulgar and commonplace at best, shiftless, malcontent and positively dangerous at worst. Few were keen to hazard a new life in the wild west. The opening of the railway was one of the engineering feats of the century, and writers were quick to describe the journey. Their efforts, which consisted INTRODUCTION 9 for the most part of shallow travelogues and descriptions of colourful characters encountered en route, did little to change the popular image of the westerner or <;:onvey more than a vague notion of the countryside. The true potential of the west coast remained unexplored, unexplained and unexploited - and Nordhoff sensed the story of a lifetime. He had always thought of himself as a 'westerner', and was free of eastern bias. Having known the west coast in pre-gold rush days, he had a yardstick against which to measure the many changes that had since taken place there. A practical man with a passion for detail, he was capable of grasping the essentials of everything from sugar planting to cider making, and of describing them simply and clearly, yet so colorfully that his accounts were as entertaining as they were informative. His immigrant background and his belief in the value of hard work led him to see the opening of the far west for settlement as a tremendous challenge and adventure, and he knew how important the development of the west coast would be in helping the nation to recover from the war. In 1871, at the age of41, Nordhoffleft New York for the west coast, where he was to spend the next two years. The train trip to San Francisco took seven days and cost $118, and Nordhoff's meticulous account of the journey - including such diverse information as the number of table napkins carried on board, the decoration of the Pullman carriages and the sensible advice to 'Eat only two meals on your journey, as you are not exercising nor working' - gives the reader a rare opportunity to savour the delights of travel in the golden age of the railways. On arrival, he began to send articles back east to Harper's Magazine, the Tribune and the Evening Post, in which he made a special point of commenting on what he called the 'admirable quality' of the western population, offering his own Darwinian explanation for it: New York receives a constant supply of the rudest, least civilized European populations ... the neediest, least thrifty and energetic and most vicious remain in New York, while the ablest and most valuable fly rapidly westward. 10 Nordhoff crisscrossed the state of California, gathering information for his panoramic portrait of western life. Through his eyes we see the live oak groves that gave the golden hills the look ofa landscaped park, the sleepy market town of Los Angeles nestled in the deep green of its orange groves, old California ranchos, the almond orchards of the Sacramento Valley and the vineyards of Sonoma where good grape land cost $20-$25 an acre but where, as Nordhoff noted with disapproval, it was still the done thing to put French wines on the table. Sheep farming, cattle ranching, fruit growing, salmon fishing, timber felling, wheat growing and even silk culture are described in such detail and with such enthusiasm that the reader imagines he could easily tum his hand to it, and wants to. Above all, Nordhoff's descriptions convey a picture of a 10 INTRODUCTION completely new lifestyle - one based on outdoor living, healthy pursuits, unrivalled opportunities for self-improvement and advancement, and freedom from many of the constraints and formalities of life on the east coast. Nordhoff's articles captured the public imagination and proved so popular that he used them as the basis for a book, which immediately ran to several editions. No other work had such a profound effect on the development of the west coast, for Nordhoff's account of California - what he saw before him, and his vision of what the future would bring - set offa wave of migration, and signaled the birth of the New West. Following the success of the first book, Nordhoff was persuaded to write a second volume on northern California, Oregon and Hawaii, the Hawaiian section reflecting the facts that the islands had become a favored resort of Americans on the Pacific coast, and there was already much talk of annexing the still-independent kingdom to the United States. On returning to Honolulu, Nordhoff found it agreeably changed from the listless, haphazard port he had visited on the Columbus. 'What the islands are,' he observed, 'they are because of American effort, American enterprise, American capital, ,11 but to Nordhoff this did not mean that the islands should become American: To annex the islands would be to burden ourselves with an outlying territory too distant to be cheaply defended .... Moreover there is no excuse for annexation, in the desire of the people .... The native people are very strongly opposed to annexation; they have a strong feeling of nationality and considerable jealousy offoreign influence. Annexation to our own or any other country would be without their consent. 12 After touring the islands and visiting the leper asylum on Molokai, Nordhoff returned to the west coast and traveled through northern California, a trip which produced a furious attack on the reservation system under which the indians of California were forced to live. Continuing his travels, he found much to admire among the state's Chinese residents and, at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was rife, made a special point of refuting the often-made charges that they underbid white labourers and brought leprosy into the country. Nordhoff then headed north by sea, sailing from San Francisco up the Oregon coast to the mouth of the majestic Columbia River, on to Portland by way of the Willamette, and finally to Victoria, British Columbia by way ofPuget Sound. New settlers were just beginning to push into the remote valleys ofOregon and Washington, but Nordhoffforesaw that the time was not far off when the northwest would be the home of a vast and thriving population. In 1874, Nordhoff went back east to become the Washington correspondent of the New York Herald and, during the sixteen years that he held the post, was held in high esteem as 'not only one of the few political writers in whom public INTRODUCTION 11 men confided, but one of the still fewer whom they consulted. '13 On the west coast, settlement was proceeding apace. The population of California, 560,000 in 1870, had grown to 865,000 by 1880,14 and the railways had met the demand for cheap travel west by laying on, in addition to first and second classes, a special immigrant class that cost $65 for the trip from New York to San Francisco, lower rates being available for large groups. With an eye to the future, Nordhoff in 1887 acquired the entire Todos Santos tract in Baja California, consisting of 50,000 acres of coastal land, the Punta Banda Cape and a ranch near Ensenada. 15 By 1890 the population ofCalifornia had reached 1,213,000; a year later Nordhoff retired and returned to the west coast where he continued to write newspaper features and books, and kept up his interest in political developments in the Pacific. In January, 1893 the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown by a small group of foreign residents who favored annexation to the United States, a movement that would not have succeeded without the intervention of the American Minister to Hawaii and the support of American troops, in violation of existing treaties. Before a formal bill annexing the islands could pass through Congress a change of administration in Washington saw the Presidency pass from Benjamin Harrison, who favored annexation, to Grover Cleveland. Cleveland refused to let the annexation bill proceed before the circumstances surrounding the revolution could be investigated and appointed a special commissioner, James Blount, to undertake the inquiry. Blount arrived in Honolulu on March 29, 1893 and Nordhoff - then 63 - arrived a week later, determined to do all he could to restore the deposed Queen, Liliuokalani, to the throne. Nordhofflobbied his friends in Washington, canvassed support for the Queen among leading citizens on the west coast, and wrote fiery articles for the New York Herald that were so detrimental to the cause oflocal annexationists that they threatened him with libel suits, tar-and-feathering, and dragged him before a kangeroo court where he was roughly treated. Nordhoffhad become friendly with Commissioner Blount, and the two spent so much time together that Nordhoff's enemies accused him of writing the reports that Blount sent back to Washington. Whatever the truth of the matter, Blount's final summation substantially agreed with Nordhoff's view that American intervention in the revolution constituted a miscarriage ofjustice, and that the Queen and the monarchy should be restored. Nordhoff spent three months in the islands, and when he left the ladies of the royalist Hawaiian Patriotic League presented him with a gold-headed cane and a memorial of thanks that was so 'prettily worded that tears filled his eyes. '16 Nordhoff continued his efforts on behalf of the royalist cause but various factors ultimately prevented the restoration, and Hawaii was annexed to the United States in 1898. Charles Nordhoff died onJuly 14, 1901 in San Francisco, at the heart of the New West he had done so much to bring about. The northwest states were 12 INTRODUCTION

well-settled and prosperous, San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound were among the busiest shipping waters in the world, and the population of California, 1,485,000 the year before his death, would swell to 2,378,000 by 1910. Years later, when the younger Charles Nordhoff would complain to his co-author about the people who were moving to the west coast in ever-increasing numbers, Hall would tease him by replying that 'Nordy' had no right to grumble as it was his grandfather who was largely to blame.

Kaori O'Connor

NOTES

1 Presented complete in this edition for the first time. 2 Briand, Paul L. Jr, In Search of Paradise: the Nordhoff-Hall Story, Duell Sloane & Pierce, New York, 1966, pp.129-30. 3 Nordhoff, Charles (the younger), 'Preface'; in Nordhoff, Charles, In Yankee Windjammers, Dodd Mead & Co., New York, 1943, p.vi. 4 Nordhoff, Charles, ibid., p.3. 5 Ibid., p.123. 6 Ibid., pp.136-7. 7 Idbid., p.149. 8 Haworth, Paul L., The United States in Our Own Times 1865-1920, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1920, p.118. 9 Rae, W.F., Westward By Rail, Longmans Green & Co., London, 1870, pp.264-S. 10 Nordhoff, Charles, California for Health, Pleasure and Residence, KPI, London, 1987, p.18. 11 Nordhoff, Charles, Northern California, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands KPI, London, 1987, p.90. 12 Ibid., p.96. 13 Kunitz, Stanley J. and Haycroft, Howard, American Authors 1600-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature, The H.V. Wilson Company, New York, 1977, p.S69. 14 Historical Statistics of the United States, Bureau of the Census Publications, Washington D. C. IS Briand, op.cit., p.130. 16 Kuykendall, Ralph S., The Hawaiian Kingdom 1874-1893, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1967, p.627.