Nordhoff's West Coast California, Oregon and Hawaii

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 London 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 CALIFORNIA, 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 Paris; 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 Mutiny on the Bounty, 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 Californias 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.

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