Full text of "California, its characteristics and prospects"

See other formats

THE ROBERT E. COWRN COLLECTION

I'RKSKNTEI) TO THK

UNIVERSITY OF CHLIFORNIA

CALIFORNIA,

ITS

CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS.

[From the New Eng lander for February, 1858.]

* •• ' } ..

CALIFORNIA,

ITS

CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS.

[From the New Englander for February, 185fe.]

7****

California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

CALIFORNIA, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS.

WHOEVER wishes, for health's sake or for any other reason, to
change the sceneries or the objects and associations of his life,
should set off, not for Europe, but for California. And this
the more certainly, if he is a loving and sharp observer of
nature ; for nature meets us here in moods entirely new ; so
that we have even to make her acquaintance over again ;
going back, as it were, to be started in a fresh childhood.
All our common, or previously formed impressions, calcula
tions and weather-wisdoms are at fault. We find that we
really understand nothing and have everything to learn. We
begin to imagine, for example, that her way is to be thus, or
thus ; or that her operations are to be solved in this, or that
manner, but we very soon discover that it will not hold. Our
guess must be given up and we must try again. A person
who is at all curious, in the study of natural phenomena, will
be held in a puzzle thus for whole months, and will nearly com
plete the cycle of the year, before he seems to himself to have
come into any real understanding with the new world he is in ;
just as if he were on a visit to Jupiter and wanted to sail
round the sun with him, for at least once, and feel out his year,
before he can be sure that he understands a single day.

California being to this extent a new world, having its own
combinations, characters, and colors, it is not to be supposed
that we can make any reader acquainted with it by words of
description. The most we can hope to accomplish is, that by
giving some notes on its physical and social characteristics, we
may excite a more curious and possibly a more intelligent
interest in California life, and the certainly great scenes pre
paring to be revealed in that far off, outside, isolated state of
the Republic. It is not to be supposed that every particular
representation or suggestion we may offer will be verified by
the experiments and exact .observations of science, or by the
tests of moral and economical statistics ; we only look on with

fort Library

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 3

our mere eyes, giving our impressions, and venturing what
guesses and possible explications may occur to us.

The first and most difficult thing to apprehend respecting
California is the climate, upon which, of course, depend the
advantages of health and physical development, the growths
and their conditions and kinds, and the modus operandi, or
general cast, of the seasons. But this, again, is scarcely possi
ble, without dismissing, first of all, the word climate, and sub
stituting the plural, climates. For it cannot be said of Cali
fornia, as of New England, or the Middle States, that it has a
climate. On the contrary, it has a great multitude, curiously
pitched together, at short distances, one from another, defying
too, not seldom, our most accepted notions of the effects of
latitude and altitude and the defenses of mountain ranges.
The only way, therefore, is to dismiss generalities, cease 'to
look for a climate, and find, if we can, by what process the
combinations and varieties are made ; for when we get hold of
the manner and going on of causes, all the varieties are easily
reducible.

To make this matter intelligible, conceive that middle Cali
fornia, the region of which we now speak, lying between the
head waters of the two great rivers, and about four hundred
and fifty or five hundred miles long from north to south, is
divided lengthwise, parallel to the coast, into three strips, or
ribands of about equal width. First, the coast-wise region,
comprising two, three, and sometimes four parallel tiers of
mountains from five hundred to four thousand, five thousand,
or even ten thousand feet high. Next, advancing inward, we
have a middle strip, from fifty to seventy miles wide, of almost
dead plain, which is called the great valley ; down the
scarcely perceptible slopes of which, from north to south, and
south to north, run the two great rivers, the Sacramento and
the San Joaquim, to join their waters at the middle of the
basin and pass off to the sea. The third long strip, or riband,
is the slope of the Sierra Nevada chain, which bounds the
great valley on the east, and contains in its foot-hills, or rather
in its lower half, all the gold mines. The upper half is, to a

4 California^ its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

great extent, bare granite rock, and is crowned, at the summit,
with snow, about eight months of the year.

Now the climate of these parallel strips will be different
almost of course, and subordinate, local differences, quite as
remarkable, will result from subordinate features in the local
configurations, particularly of the seaward strip or portion.
For all the varieties of climate, distinct as they become, are
made by variations wrought in the rates of motion, the
courses, the temperature, and the dryness of a single wind ;
viz, the trade wind of the summer months, which blows
directly inward all the time, only with much greater power
during that part of the day when the rarefaction of the great
central valley comes to its aid ; that is from about ten o'clock
in the morning, to the setting of the sun. Conceive such a
wind, chilled by the cold waters that have come down from
ffie Northern Pacific, perhaps from Behring Straits, combing
the tops and wheeling round through the valleys of the coast
wise mountains, crossing the great valley at a mucli retarded
rate, and growing hot and dry, fanning gently the foot-hills
and sides of the Sierra, still more retarded by the piling neces
sary to break over into Utah, and the conditions of the Califor
nia climate, or climates, will be understood with general
accuracy. Greater simplicity in the matter of climate is im
possible, and greater variety is hardly to be imagined.

For the whole dry season, viz, from May to November, this
wind is in regular blast, day by day, only sometimes approach
ing a little more nearly to a tempest than at others. It
never brings a drop of rain, however thick and rain-like the
clouds it sometimes drives before it. The cloud element,
indeed, is always in it. Sometimes it is floated above, in the
manner commonly designated by the term cloud. Sometimes,
as in the early morning, when the wind is most quiet, it may
be seen as a kind of fog bank resting on the sea-wall moun
tains, or rolling down landward through the insterstices of
their summits. When the wind begins to hurry and take on
less composedly, the fog becomes blown fog, a kind of lead
dust driven through the air, reducing it from a transparent to
a semi-transparent or merely translucent state, so that if any

1858.] California^ its Characteristics and Prospects. 5

one looks up the bay, from a point twenty or thirty miles
south of San Francisco, in the afternoon, he will commonly see,
directly abreast of the Golden Gate where this wind drives in
with its greatest power, a pencil of the lead dust shooting up
wards at an angle of thirty or forty degrees, (which is the aim
of the wind preparing to leap the second chain of mountains,
the other side of the bay,) and finally tapering off and vanish
ing, at a mid-air point eight or ten miles inland, where the in
creased heat of the atmosphere has taken up the moisture, and
restored its complete transparency. This wind is so cold, that
one who will sit upon the deck of the afternoon steamer pass
ing up the Bay, will even require his heaviest winter clothing.
And so rough are the waters of the Bay, land-locked and nar
row as it is, that sea-sickness is a kind of regular experience,
with such as are candidates for that kind of felicity.

We return now to the middle strip of the great valley where
the engine, or rather boiler power, that operates the coast
wind in a great part of its velocity, is located. Here the heat,
reverberated as in a forge, or oven (whence Cali—fornid)
becomes, even in the early spring, so much raised that the
ground is no longer able, by any remaining cold there is in it,
to condense the clouds, and rain ceases. A little further on
in the season, there is not cooling influence enough left to al
low even the phenomena of cloud, and for weeks together,,
not a cloud will be seen, unless, by chance, the skirt of one
may just appear now and then, hanging over the summit of
the western mountains. The sun rises, fixing his hot stare on
the world, and stares through the day. Then he returns as in
an orrery, and stares through another, in exactly the same way.
The thermometer will go up, not seldom, to 100° or even 110°,
and judging by what we know of effects here in New Eng
land, we should suppose that life would scarcely be support
able. And yet there is much less suffering from heat in this
valley than with us, for the reason probably that the nights
are uniformly cool. The thermometer goes down regularly
with the sun, and one or two blankets are wanted for the com
fort of the night. This cooling of the night is probably deter
mined by the fact that the cool sea wind, sweeping through the

6 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

upper air of the valley, from the coast mountains on one side,
over the mountains and mountain passes of the Sierra on the
other, is not able to get down to the ground of the valley during
the day, because of the powerfully steaming column of heat
that rises from it ; but as soon as the sun goes down, it drops
immediately to the level of the plain, bathing it for the night
with a kind of perpendicular sea breeze, that has lost for the
time a great part of its lateral motion. The consequence is
that no one is greatly debilitated by the heat. On the contrary,
it is the general testimony, that a man can do as much of men
tal or bodily labor in this climate, as in any other. And it is
a good confirmation of this opinion, that horses will here main
tain a wonderful energy, traveling greater distances, com
plaining far less of heat, and sustaining their spirit a great
deal better than with us. It is also to be noted that there is
no special tendency to fevers in this hot region, except in
what is called the tule bottom, a kind of giant bulrush region,
along the most depressed and marshiest portions of the rivers.
Passing now to the eastern strip or portion, the slope of the
Nevada, the heat, except in those deep canons where the re
verberation makes it sometimes even insupportable, is quali
fied in degree, according to the altitude. A gentle west wind,
heated in the lower parts or foothills by the heat of the valley,
fans it all day. At points which are higher the wind is cooler.
Here also, on the slope of the Nevada, the nights are always
cool in summer, so cool that the late and early frosts leave too
short a space for the ordinary summer crop to mature, even
where the altitude is not more than 3,000 or 4,000 feet.
Meantime, at the top of the Sierra, where the west wind, piling
up from below, breaks over into Utah, travelers undertake to
say that, in some of the passes it blows with such, stress as
even to polish the rocks, by the gravel and sand which it
drives before it. The day is cloudless on the slope of the
Sierra, as in the valley, but on the top there is now and then,
or once in a year or two, a moderate thunder shower. With
this exception, as referring to a part uninhabitable, thunder
is scarcely ever heard in California. The principal thunders of
California are underground.

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 7

We return now to the coast-wise mountain region, where the
multiplicity and confusion of climates is most remarkable.
Their variety we shall find depends on the courses of the wind
currents, turned hither and thither by the mountains ; partly
also on the side any given place occupies of its valley or
mountain; and partly on the proximity of the sea. Sprinkled
in among these mountains, and more or less inclosed by them, are
valleys, large and small, of the highest beauty. But a valley
in California means something more than a scoop, or depres
sion. It means a rich land-lake, leveled between the moun
tains, with a sharply defined, picturesque shore, where it meets
the sides and runs into the indentations of the mountains.
"What is called the Bay of San Francisco, is a large salt water
lake in the middle of a much larger land-lake, sometimes
called the San Jose valley. It extends south of the city forty
miles, and northward among islands and mountains, about twen
ty-five more, if we include what is called the San Pablo Bay.
Three beautiful valleys of agricultural country, the Petaluma,
Sonoma, and Napa valleys, open into this larger valley of the
Bay on the north end of it, between four mountain barriers,
having each a short navigable creek or inlet. Still farther
north is the Russian River valley, opening towards the sea, and
the Clear Lake valley and region, which is the Switzerland of
California. East of the San Jose valley, too, at the foot of Dia-
bolo, and up among the mountains, are the large Amador and
San Ramon valleys, also the little gem of the Sunole. Now these
valleys, which if we except the great valley of the two rivers,
comprise the plow-land of middle California, have each a cli
mate of its own, and productions that correspond. We
have only to observe further, that the east side of any
valley will commonly be much warmer than the west ; for
the very paradoxical reason that the cold coast-wind always
blows much harder on the side or steep slope even, of a moun
tain, opposite or away from the wind, than it does on the
side towards it, reversing all our notions of the sheltering ef
fects of mountain ridges.

Nothing will so fatally puzzle a stranger as the observing of
this fact ; for he will doubt a long time, first, whether it be a

8 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

fact, and then, what possible account to make of it. Crossing
the Golden Gate in a small steamer, for example, to Sau-
celito, whence the water is brought for the city, he will
look for a quiet shelter to the little craft, apparently in danger
of foundering, when it comes under the lee of that grand
mountain wall that almost overhangs the water on the west.
But he is surprised, when he arrives, to find the wind blowing
straight down the face of it, harder even than elsewhere, goug
ing into the water by a visible depression, and actually raising
caps of white within a single rod of the shore. In San Fran
cisco itself, he will find the cold coast-wind pouring down over
the western barrier with uncomfortable rawness, when return
ing from a ride at Point Lobos, on the very beach of the sea,
where the air was comparatively soft and quiet. So, crossing
the Sonoma valley, he will come out into it from the west,
through a cold, windy gorge, to find orange trees growing in
Gen. Yallejo's garden, close under the eastern valley wall, as
finely as in Cuba. In multitudes of places too on the east
ward slopes of the mountains, he will notice that the trees,
which have, all, their growth in the coast-wind season, have
their tops thrown over, like cock's tails turned away from the
wind. After he has been sufficiently perplexed, and stumbled
by these facts, he will finally strike upon the reason, viz, that
this cold, trade wind, being once lifted or driven over the sea
wall mountains, and being specifically heavier than the atmos
phere into which it is going, no sooner passes the summit than
it pitches down as a cold cataract, with the uniformly accel
erated motion of falling bodies. Then, as a confirmation, it
will occur to him perhaps, that he has been seeing it demon
strated all summer long, from his residence on the opposite, or
eastern side of the Bay ; where, during all the fore part of the
day, and sometimes for the whole afternoon, he has noticed a
fog cap, or cloud rolling over the distant top of the western
mountain, and driving more than half-way down the hither
side of it, before it has caught sun enough or heat enough to
become transparent.

Having gotten the understanding of this fact, many things
are made plain. For example, in traveling down the western

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 9

side of the Bay from San Francisco to San Jose, and passing
directly under the mountain range just referred to, he has
found himself passing through as many as four or five distinct
climates ; for, when abreast of some gap or depression in the
western wall, the heavy wind has poured down with a chill
ing coldness, making even an overcoat desirable, though
it be a clear, summer day; and then, when he is abreast
of some high summit, which the fog-wind sweeps by, and
therefore need not pass over, a sweltering and burning heat is
felt, in which the lightest summer clothing is more than
enough. He has also observed that directly opposite the
Golden Gate, at Oakland, and the Alameda point, where the
central column of this wind might be supposed to press most
uncomfortably, the land is covered with growths of evergreen
oak, standing fresh and erect, while north and south, on either
side, scarcely a tree is to be seen for many miles ; a mystery that
is now explained by the fact that the wind, driving here square
against the Contra Costa or second range, is piled and gets no
current, till it slides off north and south from the point of
quiet here made; which also is confirmed by the fact, that, in
riding down from San Pablo on the north, he has the wind in
his face, finds it slacken as he approaches Oakland, and pass
ing on still southward to San Leandro, has it blowing at his
back.

The varieties, and even what appeared to be the incredible
anomalies of the California climates, begin at last to be more
intelligible. The remarkable contrast, for example, between
the climates of Benicia and Martinez is clearly accounted for.
These two places, only a mile and a half apart, on opposite
sides of the straits of Carqiiinez, and connected by a ferry,
like two points on a river, are yet more strikingly contrasted,
in their summer climates, than Charleston and Quebec. Thus
the Golden Gate column, wheeling upon Oakland, as just
now described, sweeps along the face of the Contra Costa
chain in its northward course, setting the few tree tops of San
Pablo aslant, as weather vanes stuck fast by rust, and drives
its cold sea-dust full in the face of Benicia. Meantime, at
Martinez, close under the end of the mountain which has

10 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

turned the wind directly by, and is itself cloven down here to
let the straits of Carquinez pass through, the sun shines hot
and with an almost dazzling clearness, and all the characters
of the climate belong rather to the great valley caldron, whose
rim it may be said is here.

Equally plain now is the solution of those apparent inver
sions of latitude which, at first, perplex the stranger. In the
region about Marysville, for example, he is overtaken by a
fierce sweltering heat in April, and scarcely hears, perhaps, in
the travel of a day, a single bird sing, as if meaning it for a
song. He descends by steamer to San Francisco, and thence
to San Jose, making a distance in all of more than two hun
dred miles, where he finds a cool, spring-like freshness in the
air, and hears the birds screaming with song even more vehe
mently than in New England. It is as if he had passed out
of a tropical into a temperate climate; when, in fact, he is
due south of Marysville by the whole distance passed over.
But the mystery is all removed by the discovery, that instead
of keeping in the great valley, he broke out of it through
the straits of Carquinez into the Bay valley, and the cold bath
atmosphere of the coast-wise mountains ; that now he is in fact
within twenty miles of the sea, separated from it only by a
single wall, while at Marysville, he was more than a hundred
miles from the sea, with four or five high mountain tiers be
tween.

Thus much for the summer climate of California. The win
ter climate is the trade wind reversed. The Sierra is covered
now with snows of incredible depth at the top, and they ex
tend even down to its foot, whitening also not seldom, the
great valley, which is much colder, at this season, than the
coast-mountain region. Temperature, in short, is inverted,
just as the winds are. The temperature in San Francisco, for
example ranges generally between 60° and 70°, as in the sum
mer between 65° and 80° ; though the cold of experience will
be scarcely greater in the winter than in the summer, because,
in winter, the air is comparatively still, and in summer adds a
cooling effect by its motion. Probably there is not a more
even climate in the world. Now and then the thermometer

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 11

will sink low enough, at night, to produce a thin scale of ice,
but geraniums will be seen in full blossom, on the terraces of
the gardens, throughout the winter.

It is hardly necessary to say that this westward return of
the trade winds brings the rainy season. All the rain of the
year is from it. It sometimes blows too with terrific violence
and pours even cascades of rain for whole days together, pro
ducing immense floods ; though generally the whole amount
of rain which it brings is much too small, for the supply of the
springs and the due moistening of the soil for the year. It is
not to be understood that what is called the rainy season is a
season of continual rain. It is scarcely more rainy, if at all,
than our three autumnal months. And at about the mid-point
of the season, or in the month of February, there is commonly a
suspension, which separates what may be called the early from
the latter rain, as in Palestine. This month of February is, in
fact, the most lovely and, in many respects, the most beautiful
month of the year. The green of the landscape is then fresh
est, the air is soft, the sky clear, the roads neither wet nor
dusty — all the conditions of comfort and beauty meet, to crown
it as the June of the Pacific.

If now it should appear that we have spent too much time
on the winds and meteorologic phenomena of California, it is
sufficient to answer, that while such an impression would be
right if New England were the subject, it is not right when
the subject is California. The wTinds of our Eastern shore are
a confused mixture, of which nothing can be predicated with
certainty, except the uncertainty of the weather. The Pacific
winds, on the other hand, are very nearly calculable quanti
ties ; and by them are determined, to a great degree, the tem
perature of places, the rains, the seasons, the almost uniform
salubrity of the country, (for with all its varieties there is prob
ably no healthier region on the globe,) the growths also, as re
spects both their rates and kinds, and further still, the immense
commercial advantages ; for California, as we shall by and
by see, is elected for the great metropolitan centre of the
commerce of the Pacific, quite as much by its winds, as by the
magnificent harbor, whose Gate is here set open, to let the ships

12 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

fly in, as doves to their windows, from all the seas of the
world. The gold of California, taken as a determining cause
and physical endowment of its future, is not once to be com
pared with its winds. They are more necessary, by a thousand
times, to the greatness of California than the mines. If any
one judges, from our description, that they are too cold, or too
strong, or too much laden with moisture, he will greatly mis
take. If they were warmer, softer and more dry on the coast,
even by a few degrees, it would greatly injure the country and
might even be a fatal blight on its prospects. Indeed, if Cali
fornia has any prospects, it is just because the light baffling
winds, or rather no winds of the coast below, are here dis
placed by such blasts as have power to drive across its whole
width and fan it with their cooling breath. Otherwise its rich
valleys and lowlands would be arid deserts, its shores and riv
ers reeking places of disease, and even its mining region too
hot to be worked or even inhabited, in the summer months.

Having gotten our advantage therefore, in a due understand
ing of the winds and the climate of California, our description
may now proceed more rapidly. The scenery of California
depends partly on the surfaces and partly on the seasons. It
differs from our Eastern shore, in the fact that it is made up of
concave or scooped surfaces, flowing into convex summits or
rounded surfaces, only to a very limited extent ; all the valleys
being plains, or land-lakes, with definite indented shores, like
shores of water. It differs also from the western prairies and
the plains of the south, where the horizon is sunk and the sky
becomes a small inverted bowl, in the fact that every spot, even
in the widest of the valleys, has a mountain wall and horizon
visible in the distance, which props the sky and lifts the vault
of it, giving a look of airiness and expansion, and connect
ing impressions even of grandeur and beauty. Mountain and
plain, plain and mountain, stretching generally coastwise in
their figure, make up the rough calico of the surface. Some
times the mountains are bare, or nearly so, showing a mottled
look in the distance, where the sun, glancing down their sides,
burnishes the points and casts a shade on the hollows. Here

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 13

the cattle on a thousand hills are no figure ; for the hills are
pastures, covered many of them with a rich growth of grass
and wild oats even to the top, and the cattle paths, beaten like
shelve rows into their steep sides, just save them apparently
from sliding off into the abysses, making every rod of pasture
accessible and permitting them finally to emerge, as the tri
umph of their engineering instinct, on summits 2,000, or even
3,000 feet high, where they are seen from below, in clean relief
on the sky. Sometimes again the mountain sides are covered
with a dense chapparal, appearing in the distance just as they
would if darkened by a forest ; save that, now and then, the
chapparal is of a most intense, transparently green color, show
ing a summit that emerges into the sun, when surrounded by
the driving clouds below, like a huge pile of emerald. Some
times the distant summits are seen to be covered with a growth
of redwoods, that stand posted there as giant sentinels, every
trunk distinctly visible, and all together, 200 or 300 feet high,
combing the sky in dark relief upon it, giving to the horizon
thus a most peculiar look of spirit and majesty. The lower half of
the Sierra Nevada, comprising the foothills and the whole mining
region, is covered extensively with a timber growth of pines,
cedars and other evergreens. The upper half is bald, ragged
granite, the highest peaks of which are covered a great part
of the year with snow. All the mountains differ from those
of the east, in the fact that they are seamed or furrowed from
the tops downward, every few rods, by a ravine or water course.
These ravines are many of them dry in the summer, though
generally, or at least frequently, displaying a green line of
shrubbery and trees in their course, which makes them very
conspicuous from a distance ; especially when the mountains
are bare on their general surface. These ravines, too, are
often cut miles deep into the hills, becoming immense chasms,
canons or gorges, out of which all the earth has been swept,
to fill the rich valley bottom and make up the land-lake
deposit of the plain. All the mountains accordingly 'are
flanked by spurs with intervening gorges, and these again by
spurs, and these again by the same ; so that, standing on the
side of some grand amphitheatre, the spectator may some-

14: California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

times see that he is on the spur of a spur, even in the fifth
degree ; all of which spurs are run together, like pig iron
castings in a furnace, only with a more disorderly complica
tion. Hence, too, the impossibility in California, as we may
here remark in passing, that any railroad should ever get
over a mountain, as with us, by skirting along its sides till it
has made the ascent ; for such a line would be cut by the
side canons, or gorges, from a hundred to a thousand ,or even
two thousand feet deep, every half mile. There is no way but
to follow up the bottom of some great canon, or river gorge, till
it becomes too steep, and escape by a tunnel ; or else to find
some spur whose back can be ascended, and keep it to the top.

From these general descriptions of the surface it will be natu
rally inferred that there is a great deal, both of beautiful and of
grand scenery, in California. Few countries are richer in
their varieties, and none more peculiar in all. Here sleeps
in quiet, earthly beauty the rich vale of Sonoma, backed in
rough grandeur by the towering Diabolo, a picture in a
frame. Here in the deep chasm or angle that foots the Yo
Hamite Falls, a river is beheld pitching off a summit 2,400
feet high, and by two leaps reaching the bottom ; type, as it
were, of heaven's mercy pouring from the sky. Here on the
other hand, at the Geysers, in the cracking, cannonading,
whistling and roaring of steam, and the spouting of hot mud,
and the brimstone fumes of the place, we look on a field,
under which we may well enough imagine the infernals, swel
tering and tearing, as it were, diabolically, to break loose.
At the Big Trees, we enter a dell, quietly lapped in the
mountains, where the majestic vegetable minarets are
crowded, as in some city of pilgrimage ; there to look up,
for the first time, in silent awe of the mere life principle.

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 15

city, and the open Gate showing the Farralone Islands far off
at sea ; right and left, each side of the Gate, the grand sea-wall
of mountains stretches north and south, for a background, at
least fifty miles — it is not the bay of Naples, the dreamy soft
ness and quiet luxury are not here, but with more severity,
the scene unites a higher spirit and a beauty as much more
impressive and brilliant. The Gate itself, cleaving down the
mountains, to let the commerce of the Great Ocean of the
world pass in, has a look of destiny in it strong enough to be
sublime.

There is a little valley owned by a wealthy and respect
able Spanish Californian, Mr. Sufiole, which is commonly
called by his name, and is occupied as a pasture ground or ranch
for his herds. It lies over among the Contra Costa, or second
range of mountains east of Mission San Jose, and is entered by
a pass some four hundred feet above the valley bottom, which
comprises about a thousand acres. Through this valley
bottom runs a clear, rapid stream, which, in the spring,
would be called a river, and which, wheeling round to the
northwest, cuts the mountain to its base, dashing through one
of the wildest gorges that can be conceived, 1,500 feet deep,
and hurrying off into1 the Bay. On the north rises a huge
bare summit 2,000 feet high. On the southwest the Mission
Peak, 2,500 feet high. On the southeast, across the narrow
wooded-gorge, through wrhich the river breaks into the valley,
other fantastic peaks 3,000 feet high. On the east, the enclo
sure is made by a low, steep range of naked hills showing
others, higher and still higher, behind them. A stranger, fresh
arrived in May, at the Mission, takes his horse, for example,
the next morning, and finding a road that turns into the
narrow gorge, or opening of the hills near by, goes in to ex
plore a little and find whither it leads. The steep, smooth
faced hills, or rather mountains, pile in with rounding
fronts on either side, just leaving a passage between, and
they are so lighted up by the sun brushing down their trans
lucent surfaces of green, and tuned to such wild harmony
by their many-colored flowers, that sight overflows, and he
begins unwittingly to listen ; as if there must be something

16 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

audible, some hymn or note of Memnon in the scene. Pass
ing a low summit, the beautiful valley opens to view, and
such a combination of colors no eastern man or European
has ever seen or conceived. The green is not what we call
a grass green. Neither is it the pale bluish green of England,
but a soft yellow green, covering the whole landscape, the
steeps even to their summits, all the roundings and hollows,
as well as the rich floor of the valley bottom, like an im
mense carpet of plush spread over the scene ; which carpet
is so matted with flowers in all the highest colors, sprinkled
sometimes in groups, that we call it by this name without
any effort of fancy — we can think of nothing else. No
painter, practiced in our common styles of scenery, could
manage at all such a picture, without much study, assisted
probably by many failures.

Descending next into the valley, he finishes out the
picturesque of the morning, in looking on a scene quite
as new and peculiar as the scenery. In the extreme south
ern angle of the plain, just where the river issues from
the gorge of the mountains, he observes a cloud of dust
rising, and horsemen rushing wildly through it in all di
rections. Something brisk is evidently going on here, and
he must needs find what it is. Approaching the spot he
discovers an immense herd of cattle brought together from
the hills, which the owners and their herdsmen are either
sorting by their marks, or which else they are sorting out, in
sale of a part, for the market — they are Spanish, native Cali-
fornians all, and do not answer English questions. This at
least is plain, that they are gathering out of the great herd of
a thousand or more, to make up another and separate herd
a short distance off, and the lasso practice is the power.
Hiding into the herd and through it, they chase out one,
turning him towards the new herd. But he runs by, and
back into the herd, or he strikes out into the plain, in some
other direction. But the pursuer is after him. Round and
round swings the fatal loop or noose above his head as he
goes, till he gets within reach, at three or four rods distance,
when he lets it fly, and it drops with a kind of astronomic

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 17

certainty round the poor animal's horns. Feeling it fast
upon him, the animal now turns upon his persecutor, and it is
convenient for him also to fly in his turn — only keeping the
cord still fast to the horn of his saddle. Another horseman
follows immediately, and another lasso drops and is drawn
fast. Now the animal, in a line between the two pur
suers, strikes off, throwing his whole momentum, if he can,
upon the straight line, at right angles to it, which gives
him advantage enough to unhorse both of them, if they let
him come to the blow. All three, therefore, now are in a
race together, and as soon as this is seen, a third horseman is
in pursuit, and throwing his lasso, he picks up a hind leg of
the ox as he runs, doing it as easily as a knitter might
take up a fallen stitch. This clone, while the two others
are spreading right and left, he darts off sideways in a prick
of the spur, and jerks the refractory beast flat upon the
ground; where he lies bellowing in fright and despair, held
fast by three cords, at three angles, as little able to escape as a
fly in a spider's web. Next a huge, fiery bull is seen rushing
out of the herd, pursued by a small, sharp looking herdsman,
who says, by a certain look of his eye, that he will show the
green stranger a trick. Bolting into the plain, the mettle
some, tall animal, leads off in a race which puts the horse
to his best speed. But as the pursuer comes up with him, he
seizes the tail of the renegade, streaming level behind him,
winds it by a quick turn round the horn of his saddle, and
darting off suddenly by a spring, as if it were done by some
concussion of gunpowder, he jerks the bull flat down and rolls
him clean over ! Whereupon there is a shout from all — but the
bull ; who gets up, as it were, in an effort of self-recollection,
and walks off meekly where they show him the way.

We only add, as regards the scenery in California, that ev
erything is here inverted which we commonly assume in re
spect to the effects of culture. Culture improves nothing.
California was finished as a world of beauty, before civilization
appeared. The magnificent valleys opened wide and clean.
The scattered oaks stood in majesty, here and there, and took
away the nakedness. Civilization comes, cuts down the oaks
for firewood, fences off the plains into squares,^ covers them

18 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

with grain or stubble, scatters wild mustard over them, it may
be, and converts them into a weedy looking desolation. The
only attractive looking surface ever to be seen in California, is
the native original surface ; for there is never to be a lawn, or
a neat grassy slope, as with us, because there is no proper turf.
Shrubbery itself can never be made ornamental in California,
. except where there is irrigation to maintain it. Where there
is irrigation, a garden or house lot may be covered in with
trees and set off with flowers, so as to be really fresh in beauty
at all times, but this is not the kind of beauty that makes a
landscape. In the mining country, the natural beauty of the
scenery is defaced by another process. Here a thin but stately
growth of evergreens is sprinkled over the generally graceful
slopes and roundings of the hills, and a pure crystal stream
leaps along down the trough of the hills, over cliffs of rock and
pebbly beds. But the miner comes. Finding gold that will
" pay " in the soil, he rents a head of water from the Ditch
Company, whose ditch, bringing on the water from some level
far up in the Sierra, flows it along from hill top down to hill
top, and across from one hill to another, leaping hollows and
ravines on wooden tressle work, sometimes even two hundred
feet high, till it reaches a point abreast of his placer, and di
rectly above it. Bringing it down the hill in an immense cot
ton hose, with a nozzle pipe like that of a fire engine, he
plays it into the side of the hill, with a pressure of perhaps
one hundred and fifty feet fall ; tears down the hill, acre by
acre, and floats it off, rolling the loose stones with it down his
wooden trunk or sluice, in which the gold is arrested, and so
continues, till he has carried off a large section of the hill side,
even a hundred feet deep. His neighbors are doing the same
thing right and left. Pits also are sunk downward, and tun
nels bored in level into the sides of the hills, and the earth
from so many burrows, is piled at their mouths. The
trees are cut down for timber and fire wood. The stream of
the valley runs thick with creamy richness, and the cliffs and
pebbly beds are covered fifty feet deep with stones and mud-
washings. The result is a most horrid desolation, of which
every line of the natural beauty is gone forever. If some

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 19

camp of demons had been pitched here for a year, tearing the
earth by their fury, and con verting it to the model of their
own bad thought, they could hardly make it look worse. The
whole mining region is finally to become a desolation in just
this manner. There is no possibility of a process more delicate
for extracting the gold. Indeed there seems to be a kind of
prior necessity, which nature must needs recognize, that gold
and desolation go together. What we see then, at the mines,
only represents too faithfully what holds good historically in
the moral desolations of plunder, fraud, and avarice, instigated
by this treasure of the mountains. The only part of Califor
nia, in short, that will not be damaged in its scenery by the
arrival of culture, is the broken country of the coast region,
or the region of natural pasturage ; except that possibly the
Artesian wells may be carried so far as to irrigate a considera
ble part of the valley surfaces. Thus, while there is almost no
stream running through a valley bottom in the summer, be
cause every issue from the mountains sinks immediately into
the gravel beds of the plains, and runs under, it may turn out
generally, in the narrow valleys, as in that of San Jose, that
Artesian wells, sunk two hundred or three hundred feet, will
bring it up, spouting into liberty on the surface. Two or three
of the wells in this town throw a column nine inches in diam
eter, ten or fifteen feet high, discharging water enough to turn
a mill and of course to irrigate a large surface.

It will doubtless occur to many, that the dry season of the
year, which is the summer, must be a season of utter desola
tion as regards the scenery. "What can be more desolate than
a universal dry death? And if the water-runs, or ravines are
green, if the chapparal on some of the mountains, and occa
sionally trees in the plains, that have the faculty to bore deep
for their water, show a semblance of life, if the gardens which
are irrigated show a patch of luxuriancy here and there, like
an oasis in the yellow desert, what after all is the landscape
but a desert? Suppose then it were to be covered with snows
two or three feet deep, and every solitary thing stripped of its
green, would the scenery be less desolate? But this is our
winter. The wintry, or suspension time of California is in the

20 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

summer, and the winter months of the almanac are dressed
in the richest, freshest green. And yet the Californians all
speak of beautiful scenery in the summer, and any one who
has been there a few months begins to sympathize with them.
Trees and chapparal are stronger marks on the landscape than
with us, green spots, such as watered fields and gardens,
have a fascinating freshness. And even the dry surfaces, in
certain lights, make a picture, by aid of the shadows on the
hollow surfaces, and the occasional green of trees and chap
paral and gardens, that is really beautiful. The little valley
just described, for example, puts off its green and takes on a
dress of drab, velvety and soft in the glancing strokes of the
light, and becomes for all the world a neat Quaker bonnet;
only that the deep blue green of the gorges, and the lively
green ribands that dangle down the water courses are a little
too dressy and fantastic, and suggest a case of sumptuary dis
cipline. The most that can be said of this Pacific hyberriation
time is, that while our winter is absolute, unconquerable deso
lation, the Californian can go into his garden, turn on the
water, make an outdoor green-house of it, filled wTith all
richest fruits and singing birds, and there wait patiently till
the months of green return.

The growths of California are as peculiar and various as their
climate. To make this subject intelligible, let it be understood
that where there is no irrigation, natural or artificial, nothing
grows perennially in California, except trees that have a tap
root, and shrubs and grasses that have some peculiar kind of
root that enables them to get sufficient moisture, where only a
little is given. There is a coarse, perennial grass, for example,
that is found, when dug, to grow out of perpendicular rootlets
eight or ten inches long, which themselves grow out of large
horizontal roots, that serve as water cisterns or sponges for the
uses overhead. None of the common upland, or hay grasses,
live through the summer, and therefore none make what can
be called a turf. The grasses of every season are started in
November, from the ripe seeds dropped into the chinks of the
ground, in the dry season previous. It results accordingly,

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 21

that no crop can be raised in California, which does not ripen
before the dry season commences, or by about the first of
June. The only exceptions possible to this are made by irri
gation, either where water is artificially supplied, or where,
as will sometimes be the case, there is a supply from stores, or
filterings underneath. It is only under these conditions that a
crop of Indian corn, or potatoes, can be raised. Though an
early crop of potatoes, ripening in June or in July, can be
raised anywhere ; and where the ground is sufficiently moist
ened from below, two crops a year are frequently grown upon
the same soil. Potatoes of the late crop are grown too in
some places near the coast, where they get moisture enough
from the atmosphere and the fog, to answer their purpose. A
summer garden will commonly make but a poor figure, unless
it is recruited by supplies of water not contained in the
natural soil of the place. The dry season is, in fact, the
wintering season of vegetation, though it is the summer.
Whatever lives, hybernates, rests. The strawberry, for exam
ple, ripens its fruit in April, has its growth, ceases, begins to
look rusty, and passes into the state of suspension, finally to
die. Let on now a flow of water, and it wakes, blossoms
again, bears another crop, and passes into a second suspension,
and then is ready to be wakened and bear a third crop. And
so by alternating in times with different beds, a succession is
kept up, and a bountiful supply is obtained from April to No
vember.

The principal growths, or products of California, 'are accord
ingly the fruits and the cereals. Most of the fruits really
want irrigation, though there are many tracts of soil in which
they will flourish without, and will not ripen prematurely.
The fruits are grapes, figs, olives, pomegranates, almonds,
plums, apricots, pears, peaches and apples. Finer grapes are
grown nowhere in the world. The apples are large and fair,
and wonderfully precocious in bearing, but there is reason to
suspect, from experiments made in the old mission gardens,
that they may be short lived. Peaches, plums, and pears bear
only too profusely. Indeed, there is a wondrous tendency to
fructification in every kind of growth, animal and vegetable.

22 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

As yet, the fruits sell at enormous prices, because of the short
ness of supply. In a very few years they will be plenty and
cheap. And even now there is no city on the earth, where the
fruit shops make as fine a show as in San Francisco. Consid
ering the size, the fairness, the varieties, and all that goes to
make a show of richness and profusion, there is probably
nothing in the world, to match the displays of fruit in this new
city of the Pacific.

But the great agricultural crops of California are the cereals,
wheat, and barley, and oats. These are sown at any time,
when it is both wet enough and dry enough to plow, between
November and March ; harvested any time between the rip
ening of June and the rain-falls of November; for they will
stand uninjured, or lie, as left by the reaper, uninjured and
without shelling, all that time ; so that a small force suffices
both to raise and to harvest a large crop. And the yield is from
twenty to sixty bushels of wheat to the acre, subject to no
contingencies but wet and premature drought, which latter
only shortens the crop. Even one hundred and forty bushels
of barley have been harvested on a single acre. Oats are said
to degenerate in the seeding, but we have seen the stalk even
twelve feet high. These crops, again, will sow themselves
for a second crop the next year, and that will yield more than
any crop sown in the "Western or Atlantic states. Sixty or
eighty bushels have been gathered for the volunteer crop of
barley. This, in fact, is one of the evils to be encountered by
California agriculture, that every crop perpetuates itself as a
weed ; so that no good wheat crop, for example, can be raised
on a field once sown with barley, till the barley is extermina
ted; and one barley-sowing will sometimes yield three or four
volunteer crops that are worth harvesting. Even potatoes
will perpetuate themselves in the same way. Change of crops,
therefore, is difficult. When the problem accordingly is
raised, how or by what process exhausted soils are to be re
stored in California, it is not easy now to answer; but some
process will be doubtless discovered in clue time. In many
cases this exhaustion will come to pass slowly ; for the good
soil is not unfrequently two, and three, and sometimes eight

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 23

feet deep. A piece of ground sown regularly with wheat
for sixteen years, lias been known to yield forty bushels and
more to the acre. A single deep plowing, probably enough,
would make it good for another sixteen years.

As regards the enormous growths of California, it should be
understood that they are not ordinary. The ordinary fruits,
for example, are not larger than ours, and where the trees are
overloaded are commonly small. The extraordinary growths
appear to be easily accounted for. First, there is a soil too
deep and rich for any kind of growth to measure it. Next,
there is either a natural under-supply of water, or an artificial
irrigation. Next, the settings of fruit are limited. And then,
as no time is lost in cloudings and rain, and the sun drives on
his w^ork unimpeded, month by month, the growth is pushed
to its utmost limit. So a pear will occasionally be produced
weighing three and a half pounds, or an apple-tree, or a
cherry, will grow a stem ten or twelve feet high in a season.
The mammoth turnips, onions, beets and cabbages, depend on
a like concurrence. But these are freaks, or extravagances of
nature — only they are such as can be equaled nowhere else.
The Big Trees depend, in part, on these same contingencies,
and partly on the remarkable longevity of their species. A
tree that is watered without rain, having a deep vegetable mold
in which to stand, and not so much as one hour's umbrella of
cloud, to fence off the sun, for the whole warm season, and a
capacity to live withal for two thousand years or more, may as
well grow three hundred and fifty or four hundred feet high
and tw^enty-five feet in diameter, and show the very centre-
point or pith still sound, at the age of thirteen hundred years,
as to make any smaller figure with conditions proportionally
restricted.

24: California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

demand, the prices fall as extravagantly. And then, as the
producers are flying always towards that which yields the best
reward, every kind of product is likely to be overgrown in its
turn, and so the prices become even more capricious, for the
reason that they are capricious. When markets are opened by
an outside commerce, as they will be, and when all the
whaling ships are fitted and sent out from San Francisco and
Puget Sound, the mischief will be repaired. At present,
owing to this caprice of the market, agriculture is scarcely
less of a venture, than mining.

Accordingly the attention of land owners is now being
turned, more than before, to pasturage. The old Spanish
breed of cattle is giving way to the new cultivated breeds
most valued here, and large ranges of land are taken up in the
hill regions, where immense herds of from one to ten thousand
head of cattle are collected, which are yielding a rich revenue
to their owners. These herds are kept sometimes wholly
without fodder, and generally with very little. They fatten
most in the summer, when the feed is dry, and only suffer,
when the falling rains have rotted the old growth, and have
not yet sufficiently started the new. Hence it is common to
burn over a considerable portion of the ranges, just before the
rains, that the cattle may be able to get access to the first
sprouting of the seeds, at the earliest moment possible. The
air, accordingly, is filled with smoke for many days ; the
mountains are flaming round the horizon day and night, as if
the last day had come, and horsemen are rushing hither and
thither to fight off the fires from the wheat fields and the

pastures of the plains. And then the result is, that the yel
low, yellow, ever yellow hills that were, as soon as a good rain
has sprouted the seeds, come forth — green out of black — and
the body of the high burnt hill or mountain, is turned to a
beryl, without so much as a twig, or a weed-stalk, to mar the
color. This great interest of pasturage promises even to
exceed the plowing interest in importance. The home market
for it is equally reliable, and the salted and dried meats, the
hides, the tallow, and wool, are products that can take the
world for their market.

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 25

The culture of the grape, too, promises much. Whether it
can be successfully prosecuted without irrigation is doubtful,
though it is well known that old, deep rooted vines will bear a
crop without. It is commonly believed that California is
hereafter to become the great wine growing country of the
Pacific.

With so many advantages, it is impossible that California
should not become one of the richest countries in the world, on
the score of its mere land interest and the products yielded by
its soil. It has garnered up also, in the soil itself, treasures
that no other country can boast. It will take a thousand years
to wash over all the pay dirt of the gold mines. It is compu
ted also to have, in a single quartz lead, more gold, five times
over, than is now owned by the whole world; and other veins
are being opened, almost every month, which are ready to
yield great revenues of profit, as soon as they are worked.
The quartz mills, once supposed to be a failure, are now so
perfected as to yield immense profits, almost without excep
tion. The waters too of the mountain are a great wealth, and
the thirty or forty millions already invested in the ditches,
ought to be yielding a great revenue, as much of it already
is. Besides, there are mines of quicksilver, such as make all
other mines in the world comparatively worthless, deposits of
borax, rocks of alum, hills of sulphur, quarries of marble,
beds of coal and of iron — in short, there was never a country
so underlaid with treasure of every kind.

26 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

And yet California is on the great water highway of the Pa
cific, and her Gate the certain goal of its travel. For it is re
markable that this Golden Gate is at the southmost limb of the
variable trade winds, and that these, blowing in, a little from
the south of west, and out, from a little north of east, will
drive a ship directly out to China, or directly in from China —
whichever way they blow — laying a straight course on one of
the great circles of the earth ; while, immediately south of the
Gate, the winds begin to change character, and are much less
available for sailing purposes, and continue to be so, even down
as far in south latitude as to Valparaiso. Thus to sail a ship
up the western coast of the continent, from Panama to San
Francisco, would probably require a whole summer, and even
that might not suffice for the passage. No ship can ever ap
proach that shore by sail without falling into a contest with
currents, which the light baffling winds and Doldrums make
it difficult to maintain with success. To get in is difficult, to
get away more difficult. And hence perhaps it is, at least in
part, that one may pass down that whole stretch of coast, a
distance of 3000 miles, in one of the California steamers,
and actually not see, on the passage, so much as a rag
of sail of any description. On the other hand, at Puget
Sound, the only available harbor ground on the north,
the winds blow off the coast with such violence, that vessels
after pounding there for weeks together, till the crews were
quite worn out, have returned to San Francisco to refit for
a new trial. Besides in the winter trades, which are from
the northeast, a vessel sailing from China for the Sound will
have the whole distance to make, with a wind directly against
her ; while she might lay her course for San Francisco and
straight in, without once shifting her sail.

Nature, it will thus be seen, has set her seal on San Fran
cisco, appointing it to be the great commercial centre of that
coast and ocean. Here rests the future axis of motion. In
deed it is hardly extravagant to imagine that, in some distant
age, when the enterprise and the resources of that Ocean, with
its islands and coasts, are fully developed, the Atlantic com
merce will be a thing by the way, an affair of the outskirts.

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 27

All such expectations, it is obvious, must depend, in a great
degree, on the political and moral condition of California. And
here one very great danger happily is already past ; viz, the in
troduction of human slavery. There is no state in the Union
where slavery could he worked to greater advantage than in Cal
ifornia. Connected with this fact, we have also the concomitant
fact, that the office-holders and political operators of the state
have very generally "been men from the South. To understand,
therefore, even after the fact, how it is that slavery is excluded,
is what any stranger will accomplish with the greatest difficulty.
Xo inquiries he can make will quite solve the riddle. Some
have spoken of the known weight of the laboring and money
making classes, being always opposed to slavery, and silently
constraining the politicians, who were not, to respect their posi
tion. Some have ascribed much to the personal influence of
Mr. Fremont. Others have given the credit of the fact mainly
to Capt. Halleck, sometimes called the father of the constitu
tion, a gentleman of great weight and capacity, who is known
to have been the draughtsman of many of its provisions, but
has since that time given himself wholly to his profession as
a lawyer, and withdrawn himself altogether from the game of
political life. Be it as it may, slavery is forever excluded from
California, and so from that whole coast ; and that without
even so much as a word of debate ; for this article of the con
stitution was simply read and passed by consent, in absolute
silence. What a fact of history, this, to be the child of
silence !

California unites in its population great elements of divers
ity. The 50,000 or 60,000 Chinese simply stay as foreigners.
The native Californian or Spanish race, comprises gentlemen
of real respectability, wealth, and character ; but the inferior
class of herdsmen and retainers that were, are more wild and
vicious, and really more hopeless, than before the change of
masters. They live on horseback, without contracting any
friendship with their horses, which might raise them a little.
They are cruel to animals of all kinds, cowardly to superiors,
ignorant, superstitious, frivolous, with little prospect of being
advanced to anything better hereafter.

28 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

A considerable part of tlie emigration to California, since
we took possession, is made up of persons from the extreme
west, who crossed over by the plains — the class who are called
Border Ruffians with us, and which there are called, more or
less derisively, Pikes, from Pike county in Missouri. They
are, by no means, any such desperate, or ruffian class of people,
as they are just now commonly regarded here. They are, for
the most part, uncultivated and rough, crude in their notions
of religion, and like all such people, coarse in their prejudices ;
but they have great honesty and frankness, their impulses are
strong, and generally magnanimous. They really contain
the staple qualities, or possibilities of a high character. They
have true manhood, which is not to be said of every people.

Another element of the emigration is from the southern,
or southwestern states, comprising many gentlemen, with their
families, who are a great accession to the society and manners
of the cities, and particularly of San Francisco; and, with
these, a much larger, or at least noisier class of broken down
politicians, who have fled, as it were, to California, to farm the
voters and offices of a new world, where their stock of capital
has not yet been exhausted. The former class comprises men
who appear, like Mr. Stanley, to have emigrated rather to get
away from political life, and to apply themselves to other pur
suits. The latter, trained to public speaking and the manage
ment of assemblies, and having this for their trade, have hith
erto been able to obtain almost all the offices of the state, and
have distributed the rewards of office to themselves, in a scale
of unexampled liberality. Happily there was an end to the
credit of the state, and that limit has been finally reached.
The bankrupt people too, are beginning to ask questions they
had no time to ask before ; competitors also are coming into
the field, whose morality and trustworthiness in other relations
have been already proved. The dynasty of plunder, there
fore, is rapidly coming to an end.

Another large class of the emigration is from New England,
New York and the Middle and Northwestern states. And
these again are in two classes. First the merchants, bankers,
lawyers, engineers, surveyors, and many of the head miners —

1858.] California^ its Characteristics and Prospects. 29

men who have come to California as to a field of enterprise,
and who bend all their energies to the particular personal
calling that engages them. Secondly, a class of reprobates in
all styles and degrees, who find their way to California, just be
cause they are not wanted anywhere. These are the fugitives
from justice, the absconding bigamists, the felons and prison
birds who want a new field where they are not known, de-
fa! cators, pimps, shoulder strikers and prize fighters, drunkards,
sous that could not be endured at home, and vagabond gentle
men whose friends have been willing to escape the burden of
their support, by giving them an outfit for some very distant
region. These and such like characters were turned for a
time, in shoals, upon California. But the pistol, the knife,
the halter, the bad liquors, and the Vigilance Committees are
scattering them rapidly and killing them off. They flourished
for a time, as the under-fighters and ballot-box operators of
the politician class just referred to ; assuming the alliance
to be one of natural good fellowship, inasmuch as they too
use the tools of honor themselves. But their trade is gone,
they cannot even be drunk in the streets, or draw a knife out
of their jpcket, without a painfully certain prospect of ap
pearing in the chain gang the next morning. Meantime, the
former and better class above named, with many of the better
class from the South, are building churches, organizing insti
tutions, looking after charities, and showing more and more
distinctly that the great hope of California is in them. They
will even consent to serve on juries, and some of them also to
be named for public ofiices of trust and power, which formerly
they would not. Time is giving them the controlling posi
tion, as by a kind of necessary process, and even compelling
them to assume it.

The composition, or the combined elements of the emigra
tion, it will be seen, are not favorable to the immediate coales
cence of the new state, in terms of order and public virtue.
Besides a good many hostile influences of a more special char
acter, it will be easy to perceive, concur in detaining or hold
ing back the new community, from the kind of civil adminis
tration necessary to its good name and social comfort.

30 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

Thus, in the mining towns, are gathered large bodies of
men, without wives or children, living as cenobites in their
dens, and no one needs to be informed that men, living sepa
rately from women, are sure to make a large stride towards
barbarism. The occupation of mining is also more adventur
ous in itself, than consists with the best habits of application ;
for if the digging is a venture, why should there not be a
venture at the gambling table, without the digging ? It is
not unfrequent that the placer mining gives out, and it is
known to be always more or less precarious. Hence many of
the towns are mere encampments, and are called " camps."
And Kome that assumed to be more are already given up and
nearly forsaken. Hence the miners become more or less migra
tory themselves, and their towns are too nearly so, many of
them, to be much cared for, either in the building, or in the
establishment of social and religious institutions. A stranger,
too, will see a very distinct and significant character in the
names given to places ; such as Yankee Jim, Fiddletown,
Jackass' Gulch, Whisky Bar, and a whole hundred names, of
which, these are the choicer specimens. It appears to be the
general opinion, that there is a decided moral and social im
provement in the mining population. But one who has at
tended church for two Sundays, in a mining town of the very
first order, finding about forty persons present to hear a good
Christian sermon, and passing in the street when returning
from church, in both cases, full five hundred men, who had
rushed together as spectators of a street fight, will hardly
think it possible that there should have been a very great
moral improvement there.

Agriculture, too, has been connected, in California, with
unwonted and even wholly peculiar causes of moral deterio
ration. The titles to land have many of them been so uncer
tain, or so far unsettled, by frauds and charges of fraud, that
there has been a natural reluctance in emigrants to incur the
risk of a loss, in purchasing the soil. Hence, also, in part,
the very peculiar kind of squatting that has come into vogue
in California, and probably a full half of the agriculture of
the state is either now, or at some former time, has been

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 31

carried on, as an operation of squatting in this manner, viz,
by taking possession of lands generally known to be vested
in private owners by a title derived from the Mexican govern
ment, and not in the United States as in other new territories,
where the laws of Congress authorize the occupation and
make it a perfectly legitimate act. An American purchaser,
for example, buys one of the old Mission properties, com
prising a tract, seven or eight miles square, of the very best
land in California, and everybody knows the title to be per
fect, because the land has been held and occupied by the
Mission, for more than fifty years. He expends over $100,000
in fencing it, and the property rises in value so rapidly, that
he begins to be rated and to rate himself as being worth, at
least, a million of dollars. But behold, a cloud of squatters
suddenly appears pouring in upon his lands, squatting inside
of his fences and among his wheat, erecting their tents or
huts, and leaving him to pay the taxes, while they reap the
harvests. He is now the bankrupt purchaser and they are
the occupants, till at least six or eight years of litigation,
terminated at Washington, have established the title in his
creditors, which everybody knew was in himself. Meantime
they have gotten the use or rent for so many years, which is
to them a handsome outfit. The old native Californians are
treated in the same way. No chapter of wrong and oppress
ion, in which our countrymen have had their part, is more
sad or revolting. Even between the old ranchero's house and
well, the squatter has taken his post and set up his hut.
Then, assuming also that the cattle are wild, as that the
lands are public, the squatter wanting a steak has taken his
rifle and killed an ox. And so the poor herdsman has been
stripped both of lands and herds, by these remorseless Sabeans,
and that with airs of indignity and low-bred consequence,
more difficult to bear than the robberies themselves. The
truculent savage spirit generated by these land-piracies, will
be readily understood. The tragedy of young Sunole is
happily an extreme instance. lie was a gentleman, educa
ted, as we have heard, in Paris, equal, if not superior, in per
sonal accomplishments, to most of the educated Americans.

32 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

But he ventured to remonstrate very gently with a squatter
for cutting down the trees of his father's exquisite little val
ley in the mountains, and selling them for wood, giving him
liberty at the same time, to cut what he wanted for himself;
but the next time he passed by, on his way over to the
ranch, in company with a friend, the savage came out with
his rifle, got him in range as he threw himself over on the
side of his horse, and drew him dead to the ground. Sheltered
and secreted by others like himself, he could never be found.
As the titles are now being settled by the decisions of the
courts, the squatters are very gradually yielding to the law
and becoming purchasers. All these wrongs will finally be a
thing of the past.

By the very latest advices, it appears that the squatter
combination is just beginning to yield some respect to the
decisions of law. Heretofore the owners, in establishing their
title, have commonly not gotten possession, but only a right to
pay the taxes. Indeed, this third estate of squatterdom had
sufficient power in the legislature, two years ago, to get a law
enacted, requiring owners, when dislodging or ejecting them,
to pay for the improvements, according to the apprisal of a
committee from the precinct ; a plan by which they expected
to get back the value of the land ; for the apprisers would
be squatters almost of course. Happily the courts would
not execute the law. And but a year since, the venerable
patriarch of the Napa valley, who came over from Missouri
as a trapper, more than forty years ago, having finally
established his old homestead title, comprising eight or ten
thousand acres of the best land in the state, was evidently
beginning also to find a much harder question on his hands ;
viz, how to move the squatters without periling his life.
And yet, among these land-pirates, called squatters, are a
great many persons from the East, and even from Massa
chusetts and Connecticut ; and, what is more, from our Chris
tian churches ; and some of them appear even now to be
seriously minded and conscientious in their life. Because
the same word, squatter, is used to designate this known act
of robbery, (for it is often such and nothing else,) they really

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 33

suppose that they are doing the same lawful and right thing,
which is practiced under the acts of Congress, at the West.

As the mining and the agriculture of California appear, thus
far, to have been connected with unpropitious moral influ
ences, so also it has been, even to a much greater degree,
with the trade of politics. Composed of elements so various
and repellant, it was not to be expected, for a time, that there
would be much confidence in public men or proceedings.
And the moral character of the political operators and office
holders was generally not of a kind to inspire confidence.
They were gamblers, debauchees, drunkards, men who lined
their bosoms, not with virtue, but with knives and pistols.
They were just such men, in short, as could never be in confi
dence, even if they violated no trust. The bullies they had in
their employ, as inspectors of the ballot, could not swear to a
true count and be believed. Juries wrere distrusted, because
the panel was so easily made up, to include one whom the
criminal, on trial, might " hang," to stand out for him in the
verdict. The judges were such characters that they plainly
ought to be bribed, if they were not. Administrators and
trustees were suspected, as being appointed by the connivance
of judges. Legislators and governors were distrusted also.
This distrust became, in due time, a torment to the public
peace, by its uncertainty ; and none the less a torment that
the worst rumors and suspicions were most likely to be true ;
till finally, everything bad began to be true ; and the public
prints to make a point of heroism, in dealing out their accusa
tions with unsparing boldness. A stranger could hardly guess
what it meant. Every print was for California. Nothing
too laudatory could be said for it ; meantime, as if a paradisaic
whole could be made up of diabolical particulars, the sweep
ing denunciations of individuals appeared to have no honest
man in it. And what was most remarkable in all these accu
sations, was that every charge made against judges and others
of bribery, or of fraud, was given circumstantially ; names,
dates, amounts, agents, all stated with exactness. Probably a
very considerable share of these charges of bribery, and per
jury, and fraud, were true. But the misery was, that no one

34: California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

could guess which. Society was dissolved and law reduced to
an instrument of suspicion. It was a state most bitter and
even horrible. Whether their facts were only suspicions and
rumors converted into facts by repetition, or real and veri
table truths of history ; whether it was the licentiousness of the
press or its uncommon fidelity ; or whether, possibly, it was
not all the fatality which attends every community where
confidence is gone, no one could know, or satisfactorily judge.
Be it as it may, out of this general distrust and demoraliza
tion, came the Yigilance Committee. It was raised by the
torture that exasperates society when confidence is gone. So
far not to sympathize with it is impossible, and the more that
almost all the better citizens were in it. Even Christian pro
fessors left the church and the communion, to be in the out
break, and bear arms in that vast congregation, gathered as a
'thunder-cloud round the jail, on the distant hill side.

It is not our design to discuss the committee. Suffice it to
say, that their intent was good, their proceedings honest and
carefully deliberate, and their military conduct admirably de
cisive and efficient. Their great fault was that they did not
see their point exactly, and offered reasons for their action,
a great deal worse than their action. If they had undertaken,
not to administer the laws, or take them back into their own
hands, but to restore the laws, by plucking down the usurpers,
who stood in no right of law, being elected only by the perjury
of the inspectors, their question would have been greatly simpli
fied. Then, because of the almost impossibility of convicting
the perjured inspectors, by any ordinary proceedings of law,
they would only have done it by extraordinary ; and it would
have been all the better if, to make a due impression of this
crime, as the greatest of all crimes, they had sacked the whole
tribe, be they many or few, and sunk them in the bottom
of the Bay. Doing this, instead of resuming functions, the
right of which strikes at the root of all constitutional govern
ment, they need only have insisted on some extraordinary
means of restoring functions already taken away. The whole
experiment was critical, more critical than our eastern com
munities know ; for there was a time, a terrible twelve hours,

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 35

just after the release of Judge Terry, when the question of a
new Executive Committee, who should be more efficient and
bolder, i. e., more bloody, was pending and apparently just
ready to be carried by the whirlwind of passion outside ;
which new committee, if it had not been dexterously avoided,
would have been like the new committee of Paris, and similar
scenes would probably have followed. The escape was nar
row, so narrow that if the leading gentlemen concerned had
now the question of a new vigilance committee movement on
hand, they would probably hesitate long. And yet it must be
granted for the honor of this same questionable, perilous adven
ture of reform, that San Francisco is probably now the best
governed city in the union. The laws are now enforced,
the economies are duly attended to, there is no plunder,
and every evil doer stands in fear. It is the beginning, ap
parently, of a great moral reaction, which is felt by the
whole state. Whatever may be true, therefore, of this great
popular movement, whether it is right or wrong, wise or un
wise, it will be impossible ever to turn it as a reproach on the
certainly patriotic men wTho were foremost in it. They are
much more likely to be celebrated hereafter, with Plarmodius
and Aristogiton and other great leaders of mutiny, that have
been deliverers of their country.

We state these facts concerning the moral aspects of mining;
the occupation, by force, of lands known to be held by a legal
right ; and the usurpations and perjuries and briberies of polit
ical intriguers and demagogues, connected with the general
destruction of confidence and the necessary throes of violence
by which they must inevitably be redressed, not as being, in
themselves, any picture of California. We know that they
are not. They are only facts, without which any description is
rose colored and without sound verity, — such facts as will
meet a stranger first, because they are most outstanding and
impressive. And for this the reader will make due allowance,
even as in reading any history ; for it is not the virtues and
the smooth and silent flowings of goodness that make up ever
the staple of a history, but the explosive wrongs and outrages
rather, by which the evenness of good was disturbed. For our-

36 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

selves we regard these facts, not with any feeling of despair or
discouragement. On the contrary, we perceive a certain sub
limity, in the contest here begun and the clearing process going
forward, which creates appetite in us. We know the cer
tain victory, we see it coining, and we envy especially those
young heroic spirits who have set themselves, in the love of
God and their newly adopted state, to such works of duty and
sacrifice, as are necessary to the sublime future they have in
prospect.

Opposite to these facts that we have stated are others, which
awaken our respect and inspire our confidence. They have a
good and able ministry, for example, such a ministry as will
compare favorably, in all the denominations, with any of the
older states. They have churches in every denomination, not
inferior to churches here. The attendance is good, especially
in the cities, and the order, the dress, the music are only too
much evened by the manner of the East.

The Sabbath also is becoming a more established institution,
and to-be without a Sabbath, as a day of rest, is more and
more distinctly felt to be an oppression. And therefore the
traders and shopkeepers, in most of the country villages, are
petitioning the Legislature, more earnestly every year, for the
establishment of a complete suspension of trade.

Education is not forgotten. The towns and cities are allow
ed by statute to tax themselves for this purpose, and many of
them do it most liberally. The public schools of San Francisco
are not inferior to those of our Eastern cities — many think
them even superior.

There is no reason to apprehend any loss of natural vigor
and tone from the climate on that shore. Some have taken it
as a bad indication that the Digger Indians, (the aboriginals
of California,) are the most spiritless and abject of all known
tribes on the continent, and about the lowest specimens of hu
manity known upon the earth. But this may be sufficiently
accounted for, by the general softness of the climate and the
fact that they have never been required to feed themselves by
the manly exploits of hunter-life ; having always at hand
enough of bugs, and fish, and sugar pine bark to serve their
.purpose. Sometimes also a degree of discouragement has

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 37

been derived from 'the analogical or symbolical fact, that
there is not a stick of smart, hard timber in all California ;
nothing out of which an axe handle, or a spoke, or a felley
could be made ; every hardest, soundest tree, even the oak,
being always brittle to such a degree (" brash " they say in
California, and in New England " spalt ") that the trunk
will commonly break asunder five or six times when it is fell
ed, and lie as a pile of fragments on the ground, even though
it is three feet in diameter. Is this a natural token, some
have asked, with a little feeling of superstition, that the future
men of California are to be only a brittle or brash stock and
without any real timber of endurance in them ? Why any
more a token than the giant pines, and redwoods, and cedars
are a token of prodigiously tall men, a race at least twelve or
fifteen feet high ? "Why any more than the often naked hills
and plains are a token of no men at all ? "What other sign do
we in fact require that the future stock of California will be
a stock of high capacity, than that the climate is healthy, the
growths bountiful, and that we are capable ourselves of the
greatest endurance there, both bodily and mental, and have,
in fact, a sense of robustness that we have nowhere else ?

At the same time, it requires no gift of prophecy to perceive,
in the physical resources and commercial advantages of that
country, that an immense wealth is, in due time, to be devel
oped there, such wealth as will give vigor to all institutions
and works that require expense, and put everything on a scale
of breadth and magnificence. If there is any country in the
world where the future men are not to be cramped and whit
tled by close restrictions, it is California. At present the Cal
ifornians say that they are poor ; they feel poor, because they
are now at the dead point of retrocession, where their extrav
agant expectations are being shortened in for that second be
ginning, which every new state . and city has to make. And
yet there is nothing more wonderful, with all this depression,
than the amount of wealth already created on that shore.
How many thousand years of day labor has it taken simply
to build so many houses, fences, shops, steamers, ditches,
towns and cities. Three of these cities, San Francisco, Sacra-

38 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

mento and Marysville, have so much of. city life and charac
ter, that we hardly recognize their newness. And yet only
nine years have passed, since all this immense wealth began
to be created ! — and that, 5,000 miles away, on the shore, as it
were, of another continent.

There is good and cultivated society in California, such as
there never has been in any other new state in the Union. The
number of liberally educated men is greater by far, than was ever
found in any other state of twice the same political age. Car
pets, good beds, clean tables, bright knives and forks, courtesy,
hospitality, public entertainments and pleasures on a footing of
civilization — all these indications of comfort and society are
widely diffused. One sign or token of this kind we cannot for
bear to mention, because it signifies much. Passing hither and
thither on the little steamers, up to Marysville, to Stockton,
to the towns north of the bay, where often the number of pas
sengers did not exceed thirty, we have seen, again and again,
a table most neatly set, the silver bright and clean, the meats
well prepared and good, without any nonsense of show dishes, the
servants tidy, quiet, and respectful — in short, the whole figure
of the entertainment more rational and better than we have
ever seen, either on the boats of the Mississippi or of the At
lantic coast. Such facts indicate society, more than any most
splendid entertainment gotten up by private opulence can.

One other consideration must be named, if California is
to be well understood ; viz, that with all the violence and the
savage wrongs and dark vices that have heretofore abounded
there, they seldom do a mean thing. They can perpetrate
real atrocities, but they must be generous. A considerable
part of their blameable profusion comes of their extreme
jealousy of littleness, or meanness. Men really poor will
often share their last dollar in helping a sick friend, or
even a sick stranger. If a poor minister, whom they have
only seen at their funerals, is known to be on short allowance,
they will have a ticketed supper, not unlikely, to help him ;
which, if it is not the best way of establishing religion, does
at least show their generosity. If a preacher asks the privilege
of addressing them in a gambling saloon, on Sunday, they

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 39

are very likely to accede, to hear him respectfully, pass round a
hat and make up a liberal purse for him, then put down
their stakes and resume the play ! The recent vote of the
people to assume and pay the state debt was an act of pure
magnanimity. Here was a debt of $5,000,000 which was
expressly forbidden by the constitution of the state. This
provision of the constitution was known, discussed, openly
understood, and the loan was obtained directly in the face
of it. The money too had gone for nothing but to feed the
political vampires, for whose plunder it was raised, and the
state has not a vestige of property to show for it, but some
old benches, that belonged to the state house at Yallejo.
If then a people have any right, by constitution, to guard
themselves against being plundered by their rulers, the
people of California had a right to stand upon the restriction
so prudently established in their constitution, and were
under no obligations, whether of right or of honor, to pay
this debt — to refuse was no act of repudiation. But their in
stincts were too generous, they had too much pride of feeling
to insist on their right. Where Mississippi raised a quibble to
get off from her honest debt, California took a gratuitous obli
gation to get it on, and to fasten it.

There remains a single topic to which, in the conclusion of
our article, already too far extended, we must briefly refer ;
viz, to the effort now on foot to establish a College or Univer
sity in California. The heaviest detraction, after all, from the
future prospects of California, is in the fact that so many go
thither only as adventurers, not meaning to stay, and that so
many, often the most prosperous, are continually returning.
And they do it, in great part, because they cannot educate
their families there, as their means allow them to desire. In
the first place, many never take out their families for this
reason, and, in the next place, when they have done it, and
their sons are grown up to the age at which they begin
to want the best advantages, they return with them, and are
so lost to the state as a family ; for the distance and the moral
perils of a separation from parents are so great, that there is
no alternative, but a re-emigration. This begets an unsettled

4:0 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

feeling in those who remain, which makes them careless often
of the good of the state, and, besides, it carries off a large
percentage of the wealth created ; for the families that return
are commonly such as have been most successful, and all
which they have gained is carried with them. And the
probability is, that if the contemplated railroad were built
across the Continent, (which it will not be for a long time to
come,) it would scarcely help them at all, but might rather
hasten them in this losing process.

"What they want therefore at this time, above all things else,
is a good College or University. Such an institution would
do more to consolidate and settle their state, and to settle the
confidence of their future, than even the railroad itself.
There are no five states together in our western world, which,
if they had none at all, would want an institution of this kind
so much as California. For the supply of this want, some of
their best and ablest men are preparing. They have had a
charter for three years, organizing the " College of California."
Their Board of Trustees contains a representation of all the
Christian denominations, who are united in cordiality and
good understanding. They are said to have lately fixed on
their site — on the eastern side of the Bay, opposite San Fran
cisco. They have had a preparatory school for three years
past, under the tuition of Rev. Henry Durant, an accom
plished scholar and a Christian, and the design is to organize
a Freshman Class the coming autumn.

What then is wanted now is the endowment, and for this
everything is ready. To obtain this endowment in California,
except in part, will now be impossible. Much of the wealth
is not in the right hands, and where it is not, where there is
every disposition to aid. the possibility is very much reduced
by the heavy loads of debt, which many who ought to be
rich, are required just now to carry. When money will bring
three per cent, a month, year by year, on perfect security, the
lending party is not likely to put much of it in a College, and
the borrowing party still less. Are there no great rich men
in the East, no millionaires or less in computation, who will
be induced to look at such an opportunity? Had we the

1858.] California, its Characteristics and Prospects. 41

fortune of but half a million, in our editorial hands, we are
quite sure of this, that whoever might want to assume the en
dowment of such an institution, would have to be very quick
in his action, or he would lose the chance. What an opportu
nity for the man of fortune, who has no object in life, no fam
ily to provide for, or none but such as are already rich enough,
and who would be greatly more ennobled by his name and
example, as the founder of such an institution, than by all his
property without the name. How many such too are there
who are really meaning, when they die, to accomplish some
great work with their money ! Why not do it when they are
living, and have the satisfaction of a consciousness enriched
and a heart enlarged by their beneficence? To have one's
name on such an institution as this, connected with the great
history and with all the learning, and all the most forward in
fluences of this new world on the Pacific, is a thought which
might quicken the blood even of a man most sluggish and
dull. For it is to win a greater honor, by many times, than
to be President of our great Republic. That is an honor,
which, as the line grows longer, loses more and more its sig
nificance, till finally, it will signify as little to have been
one of the Presidents as to have been one of the Doges of
Venice. But the other, like the names of Harvard and Yale,
will brighten and gather to itself a greater weight and power,
as long as the tongue itself may exist. And the satisfaction
one may have in this honor is sublimely justified in the fact,
that he is not merely to be known, or mentioned in the future
ages of the world — that might be a very common ambition,
for who is there who does even naturally desire as much ? — but
is permitted to know that his name is to be a power, and
to work for all the coming ages, growing brighter and doing
more good even than he himself while living. That is a legiti
mate and glorious ambition — the highest that a mortal can
cherish. The Trustees, in the Appeal they published a year
ago, placed the subject thus :

" Could some rich citizen, who can do it without injury to
himself, step forward at this time of our beginning, and set his
name upon the institution itself, by the side of a Harvard or

42 California, its Characteristics and Prospects. [Feb.

a Yale, by subscribing a large part of the proposed endow
ment ; giving us an opportunity, assisted by Lis beginning and
example, to carry up the subscription even to the highest point
we have named, he would be enriched by the sense of his mu
nificence, as no man ever was or can be by the count of his
money. We have no delicacy in respect to the customary
honors conferred by universities, when they set the names of
their benefactors on the halls, libraries and professorships
endowed by their munificence ; or when they drop the dry,
impersonal name of their charter for one that represents the
public spirit, and the living heart of a living man who could
be more than rich, the patron of learning, the benefactor and
father of the coming ages. These are monuments that may
well provoke a degree of ambition ; not even an Egyptian
pyramid raised over a man's ashes could so far ennoble him, as
to have the learning and science of long ages and eternal
realms of history superscribed by his name. And yet this
better kind of monument is itself a power so beneficent, that
he ought, even as duty, to desire it, and for no false modesty
decline it. Such monuments are not like those of stone or
brass, which simply stand doing nothing; they are monuments
eternally fruitful, showing to men's eyes and ears what belongs
to wealth, and what the founders of the times gone by have
set as examples of beneficence."

ERRATUM. — Page 145, line 19. Instead of "whence Call — -fornia" read —
"whence Call— fornia (Caleo and/o

THE NEW EIGLAOER

Is a Magazine devoted to the discussion of all the great moral
questions of the day. It is intended to be an exponent of the
views of New England men on all the questions which interest
Christian citizens. It is under the control of a club of gentle
men residing in New Haven, Connecticut. Among their
number are the President and many of the Professors of Yale
College, together with some of the Pastors of the Congrega
tional churches in the city. It receives also constant assistance
and contributions from many of the ablest writers among the
sons of New England in all parts of the country.

The Magazine is published in quarterly numbers, in Febru
ary, May, August and November. The price is $3 a year
payable in advance. Single numbers, $1. Subscibers can
commence with the current year, or with any particular num
ber, at their option.

Address all letters to'

WILLIAM L. KINGSLEY,

Proprietor and Editor,

New Haven, Conn.

CHARACTERISTICS

PROSPECTS

<&lnttw bir llcb. fjorate

£1. 0., a«b

orighmlb tit tljc

SAN FRANCISCO:

WHITTOX, TOWNE & GO'S EXCELSIOR STEAM PRESSES,

Xo. T25 CLAY STREET, CORNER OF SAXSOME.

1858.

CALIFOKNIA:

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS.

(Strilim Jig $M. Jorace §tisljndl, S. gl., anb publisljcb ortginallg in

fnghmber."

SAN FRANCISCO :

WHITTON, TOWNE & CO., PRINTERS AND PUBLISHERS-

South West Corner Clay and Sansome Streets.

1858.

<
»

CALIFORNIA,

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS.

WHOEVER wishes, for health's sake or for any other reason, to
change the sceneries or the objects and associations of his life,
should set off, not for Europe, but for California. And this the more
certainly, if he is a loving and sharp observer of nature ; for nature
meets us here in moods entirely new ; so that we, have even to make
her acquaintance over again ; going back, as it were, to be started
in a fresh childhood. All our common, or previously formed im
pressions, calculations and weather- wisdoms are at fault. We find
that we really understand nothing and have everything to learn. We
begin to imagine, for example, that her way is to be thus, or thus ; or
that her operations are to be solved in this, or thaF manner, but we
very soon discover that it will not hold. Our guess must be given up
and we must try again. A person who is at all curious in the study
of natural phenomena, will be held in a puzzle thus for whole months,
and will nearly complete the cycle of the year, before he seems to him
self to have come into any real understanding with the new world he
is in ; just as if he were sent on a visit to Jupiter, and wanted to sail
round the-sun with him, for at least once, and feel out his year, before
he can be sure that he understands a single day.

of the Republic. It is not to be supposed that every particular repre
sentation or suggestion we may offer will be verified by the experi
ments and exact observations of science, or by the tests of moral and
economical statistics ; we only look on with our mere eyes, giving our
impressions, and venturing what guesses and possible applications may
occur to us.

The first and most difficult thing to apprehend respecting California
is the climate, upon which, of course, depend the advantages of health
and physical development, the growths and their conditions and kinds,
and the modus operandi, or general cast, of the seasons. But this,
again, is scarcely possible, without dismissing, first of all, the word
climate, and substituting the plural climates. For it cannot be said of
California, as of New England, or the Middle States, that it has a cli
mate. On the contrary, it has a great multitude of them, curiously
pitched together, at short distances, one from another, defying too, not
seldom, our most accepted notions of the effects of latitude and altitude
and the defences of mountain ranges. The only way, therefore, is to
dismiss generalities, cease to look for a climate, and find, if we can, by
what process the combinations and varieties are made ; for when we
get hold of the manner and going on of cause, all the varieties are
eas'ly reducible.

To make this matter intelligible, conceive that middle California, the
region of which we now speak, lying between the head waters of the
two great rivers, and about four hundred and fifty or five hundred
miles long from north to south, is divided lengthwise, parallel to the
coast, into three strips, or ribands of about equal width. First, the
coast-wise region, comprising two, three, and sometimes four parallel
tiers of mountains, from five hundred to four thousand, five thousand,
or even ten thousand feet high. Next, advancing inward, we have a
middle strip, from fifty to seventy miles wide, of almost dead plain,
which is called t"ne great valley ; down the scarcely perceptible slopes
of which, from south, to north, run the two great rivers, the Sacramento
and the San Joaquin, to join their waters at the middle of the basin and
pass off to the sea. The third long strip or riband, is the slope of the
Sierra Nevada chain, which bounds the great valley on the east, and
contains in its foot-hills, or rather in its lower half, all the gold mines.
The upper half is, to a great extent, bare granite rock, and is crowned
at the summit with snow, about eight months of the year. ,

** '*

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 5

when the rarefaction of the great central valley comes to its aid ; that
is from ten o'clock in the morning until the setting of the sun. Con
ceive such a wind, chilled by the cold waters which have come down
from the Northern Pacific, perhaps from Behring Straits, combing the
tops and wheeling through the valleys of the coast-wise mountains,
crossing the great valley at a much retarded rate, and growing hot
and dry, fanning gently the foot-hills and sides of the Sierra, still more
retarded by the piling necessary to break over into Utah, and the con
ditions of the California climate, or climates, will be understood with
general accuracy. Greater simplicity in the matter of climate is im
possible, and greater variety is hardly to be imagined.

For the whole dry season, viz, from May to November, this wind is
in full blast, day by day, only sometimes approaching a little more
nearly to a tempest than at others. It never brings a drop of rain,
however thick and ram-like the clouds it sometimes drives before it.
The cloud element, indeed, is always in it. Sometimes it is floated
above, in the manner commonly designated by the term cloud. Some
times, as in the early morning, when the wind is most quiet, it may be
seen as a kind of fog bank resting on the sea-wall mountains, or rolling
clown landward through the interstices of their summits. When the
wind begins to hurry and take on less composedly, the fog becomes
blown fog, a kind of lead dust driven through the air, reducing it from
a transparent to a semi-transparent or merely translucent state, so that
if any one looks up the bay, from a point twenty or thirty miles south
of San Francisco, in the afternoon, he will commonly see, directly
abreast of the Golden Gate, where the wind drives in with its greatest
power, a pencil of the lead dust shooting upward at an angle of thirty
or forty degrees, (which is the aim of the wind preparing to leap the
second chain of mountains, the other side of the bay,) and finally
tapering off and vanishing, at a mid-air point eight or ten miles inland,
where the increased heat of the atmosphere has taken up the moisture,
and restored its complete transparency. The wind is so cold, that one
who will sit upon the deck of the afternoon steamer passing up the
Bay, will even require his heaviest winter clothing. And so rough are
the waters of the Bay, land-locked and narrow as it is, that sea-sick
ness is a kind of regular experience, with such as are candidates for
that kind of felicity.

We return now to the middle strip of the great valley, where the
engine or rather boiler power, that operates the coast wind in a great
part of its velocity, is located. Here the heat, reverberated as in a
forge or oven, whence Call — -forma (^Caleo and/Oman) becomes, even
in the early spring, so much raised that the ground is no longer able,
by any remaining cold there is in it, to condense the clouds, and rain
ceases. A little further on in the season, there is not cooling influ
ence enough left to allow even the phenomena of a cloud, and for
weeks together not a cloud will be seen, unless, by chancejthe skirt

6 CALIFORNIA,

of one may appear now and then, hanging over the summit of the
western mountains. The sun rises, fixing his hot stare on the world,
and stares through the day. Then he returns as in an orrery, and
stares through another, in exactly the same way. The thermometer
will go up, not seldom, to 100 or even 110 deg., and judging by what
we know of effects here in New England, we should suppose that life
would scarcely be supportable. And yet there is much less suffering
from heat in this valley than with us, for the reason probably that the
nights are uniformly cool. The thermometer goes down regularly with
the sun, and one or two blankets are wanted for the comfort of the
night. This cooling of the night is probably determined by the fact
that the cool sea-wind, sweeping through the upper air of the valley,
from the coast mountains on one side, over the mountains and moun
tain passes of the Sierra on the other, is not able to get down to
the ground of the valley during the day, because of the powerfully
steaming column of heat that rises from it ; but as soon as the sun goes
down, it drops immediately to the level of the plain, bathing it for the
night with a kind of perpendicular sea breeze, that has lost for the time
a great part of its lateral motion. The consequence is, that no one
is greatly debilitated by the heat. On the contrary, it is the general
testimony, that a man can do as much of mental or bodily labor in this
climate, as in any other. And it is goo 1 confirmation of this opinion,
that horses will here maintain a wonderful energy, traveling greater
distances, complaining far less of heat, and sustaining their spirit a
great deal better than with us. It is also noted that there is no spe
cial tendency to fevers in this hot region, except in what is called the
tide bottom, a kind of giant bulrush region, along the most depressed
and marshiest portions of the rivers.

Passing now to the eastern strip or portion, the slope of the Nevada,
the heat, except in those deep canons where the reverberation makes
it sometimes even insupportable, is qualified in degree, according to
the altitude. A gentle west wind, heated in the lower part of the foot
hills by the heat of the valley, fans it all day. At points which are
higher, the wind is cooler. Here also, on the slope of the Nevada,
the nights are always cool in summer ; so cool that the late and early
frosts leave too short a space for the ordinary summer crop to mature,
even where the altitude is not more than 3,000 or 4,000 feet. Mean
time, at the top of the Sierra, where the west wind piling up from be
low, breaks over into Utah, travellers undertake to say that, in some
passes it blows with such stress as even to polish the rocks, by the
gravel and sand which it drives before it. The day is cloudless on the
slope of the Sierra, as in the valley, but on the top there is now and
then, or once in a year or two, a moderate thunder shower. With
this exception, as referring to a part uninhabitable, thunder is scarcely
ever heard in California. The principal thunders of California are
under ground.

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 7

We return now to the coast- wise mountain region, where the multi
plicity and confusion of climates is most remarkable. Their variety
we shall find depends on the courses of the wind currents, turned hith
er and thither by the mountains ; partly also on the side any given
place occupies of its valley or mountain ; and partly on the proximity
of the sea. Sprinkled in among these mountains, and more or less en
closed by them, are valleys, large and small, of the highest beauty.
But a valley in California means something more than a scoop, or de
pression. It means a rich land-lake, leveled between the mountains,
with a sharply defined, picturesque shore, where it meets the sides
and runs into the indentations of the mountains. What is called the
Bay of San Francisco, is a large salt water lake in the middle of a
much larger land-lake, sometimes called the San Jos6 valley. It
extends south of the city forty miles, and northward among islands and
mountains twenty-five more, if we include what is called the San Pablo
Bay. Three beautiful valleys of agricultural country, the Petaluma,
Sonoma, and Napa valleys, open into this larger valley of the Bay on
the north end of it, between four mountain barriers, having each a
short navigable creek or inlet. Still farther north is the Russian River
valley, opening towards the sea, and the Clear Lake valley and region,
which is the Switzerland of California. East of the San Jos6 valley,
too, at the foot of Diabolo, and up among the mountains, are the large
Amador and San Ramon valleys, also the little gem of the Sunole.
Now these valleys, which if we except the great valley of the two riv
ers, comprise the plow-land of middle California, have each a climate
of their own. and productions that correspond. We have only to ob
serve further, that the east side of any valley will commonly be much
warmer than the west ; for the very paradoxical reason that the cold
coast-wind always blows much harder on the side or steep slope even,
of a mountain, opposite or away from the wind, than it does on the
side towards it, reversing all our notions of the sheltering effects of
mountain ridges.

Nothing will so fatally puzzle a stranger as the observing of this
fact ; for he will doubt for a long time, first, whether it be a fact, and
then, what possible account to make of it. Crossing the Golden Gate
in a small steamer, for example, to Saucelito, whence the water is
brought for the city, he will look for a quiet shelter to the little craft,
apparently in danger of foundering, when it comes under the lee of
that grand mountain wall that overhangs the water on the west. But
he is surprised when he arrives, to find the wind blowing straight
down the face of it, harder even than elsewhere, gouging into the water
by a visible depression, and actually raising caps of white within a rod
of the shore. In San Francisco itself, he will find the cold coast-
win:! pouring down over the western barrier with uncomfortable rawness,
when returning from a ride at Point Lobos, on the very beach of the sea,
where the air was comparatively soft and quiet. So, crossing the

Sonoma valley, he will come out into it from the west, through a cold
windy gorge, to find orange trees growing in Gen. Vallejo's garden,
close under the eastern valley wall, as finely as in Cuba. In multi
tudes of places too on the eastern slopes of the mountains, he will
notice that the trees, which have all their growth in the coast-wind
season, have their tops thrown over, like cock's tails turned away from
the wind. After he has been sufficiently perplexed, and stumbled by
these facts, he will finally strike upon the reason, viz, that this cold,
trade wind, being once lifted or driven over the sea-wall mountains,
and being specifically heavier than the atmosphere into which it is
going, no sooner reaches the summit than it pitches down as a cold
cataract, with the uniformly accelerated motion of falling bodies.
Then as confirmation, it will occur to him, perhaps, that he has been
seeing it demonstrated all summer long, from his residence on the op
posite or eastern side of the Bay ; where, during all the fore part of
the day, and sometimes for the whole afternoon, he has noticed a fog
cap, or cloud rolling over the distant top of the western mountain, and
driving more than half-way down the hither side of it, before it has
caught sun enough or heat enough to become transparent.

Having gotten the understanding of this fact, many things are made
plain. For example, in travelling down the western side of the Bay
from San Francisco to San Jose', and passing directly under the moun
tain range just referred to, he has found himself passing through as
many as four or five distinct climates ; for, when abreast of some gap
or depression in the western wall, the heavy wind has poured down
with a chilling coldness, making even an overcoat desirable, though it
be a clear, summer day ; and then, when he is abreast of some high
summit, which the fog-wind sweeps by, and therefore need not pass
over, a sweltering and burning heat is felt, in which the lightest sum
mer clothing is more than enough. He has also observed that directly
opposite the Golden Gate, at Oakland, and the Alameda point, where
the central column of this wind might be supposed to press most un
comfortably, the land is covered with growths of evergreem oak, stand
ing fresh and erect, while north and south, on either side, scarcely a
tree is to be seen for many miles ; a mystery that is now explained by
the fact that the wind, driving here square against the Contra Costa
or second range, is piled and gets no current, till it slides off north and
south from the point of quiet here made ; which also is confirmed by
the fact, that, in riding down from San Pablo on the north, he has the
wind in his face, finds it slacken as he approaches Oakland, and pass
ing on, till southward to San Leandro, has it blowing at his back.

The TOrieties, and even what appeared to be the incredible anoma
lies of the California climates, begin at last to be intelligible. The
remarkable contrast, for example, between the climates of Benicia and
Martinez, is clearly accounted for. These two places, only a mile and
a half apart, on opposite sides of the straits of Carquinez, and con-

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 9

nected by a ferry, like two points on a river, are yet more strikingly
contrasted, in their summer climates, than Charleston and Quebec.
Thus the Golden Gate column, wheeling upon Oakland, and just now
described, sweeps along the face of the Contra Costa chain in its north
ward course, setting the few tree tops of San Pablo aslant, as weather
vanes stuck fast by rust, and drives its cold sea-dust full in the face of
Benicia. Meantime, at Martinez, close under the end of the mountain
which has turned the wind directly by, and is itself cloven down here
to let the straits of Carquinez pass through, the sun shines hot and with
an almost dazzling clearness, and all the characters of the climate
belong rather to the great valley cauldron, whose rim it may be said is
here.

Equally plain now is the solution of those apparent inversions of lat
itude, which at first perplex the stranger. In the region about Marys-
ville, for example, he is overtaken by a fierce sweltering heat in April,
and scarcely hears, perhaps, in the travel of a day, a single bird sing
as if meaning it for a song. He descends by steamer to San Fran
cisco, and thence to San Jose, making a distance in all of more than
two hundred miles, where he finds a cool, spring-like freshness in the
air, and hears the birds screaming with song even more vehement than
in New England. It is as if he had passed out of a tropical into a
temperate climate, when, in fact, he is due south of Marysville by the
whole distance passed over. But the mystery is all removed by the
discovery, that instead of keeping in the great valley, he broke out of
it through the straits of Carquinez into the Bay valley, and the cold
bath atmosphere of the coast-wise mountains ; that now he is in fact
within twenty miles of the sea, separated from it only by a single wall,
while at Marysville, he was more than a hundred miles from the sea,
with four or five high mountain tiers between them.

Thus much for the summer climate of California. The winter cli
mate is the trade wind reversed. The Sierra is covered with snows of
incredible depth at the top, and they extend even down to its foot,
whitening also, not seldom, the great valley, which is much colder, at
this season, than the coast-mountain region. Temperature, in short, is
inverted, just as the winds are. The temperature in San Francisco,
for example, ranges generally between 60 and 70 deg., as in the sum
mer between 65 and 80 deg. ; though the cold of experience will be
scarcely greater in the winter than in the summer, because /in winter
the air is comparatively still, and in summer adds a cooling effect by
its motion. Probably there is not a more even climate in the world.
Now and then the thermometer will sink low enough, at night, to pro
duce a thin scale of ice ; but geraniums will be seen in full blossom, on
the terraces of the gardens, throughout the winter.

^ It is hardly necessary to say that this westward return of the trade
winds brings the rainy season. All the rain of the year is from it.
It sometimes blows too with terrific violence, and pours even cascades

10 CALIFORNIA,

of rain for whole days together, producing immense floods ; though
generally the whole amount of rain which it brings is much too small
for the supply of the springs and due moistening of the soil for the
year. It is not to be understood that what is called the rainy season
is a season of continual rain. It is scarcely more rainy, if at all, than
our three autumnal months. And at about the mid-point of the sea
son, or in the month of February, there is commonly a suspension,
which separates what may be called the early from the latter rain, as
in Palestine. This month of February is, in fact, the most lovely, and
in many respects, the most beautiful month of the year. The green
of the landscape is then freshest, the air is soft, the sky clear, the
roads neither wet nor dusty — all the conditions of comfort and beauty
meet, to crown it as the June of the Pacific.

If now it should appear that we have spent too much time on the
winds and meteorological phenomena of California, it is sufficient to
answer, that while such an impression would be right if New England
were the subject, it is not right when the subject is California. The
winds of our eastern shore are a confused mixture, of which nothing
can be predicated with certainty, except the uncertainty of the
weather. The Pacific winds, on the other hand, are very nearly cal
culable quantities ; and by them are determined, to a great degree,
the temperature of places, the rains, the seasons, the almost uniform
salubrity of the country, (for with all its varieties there is probably
no healthier region on the globe,) the growths also, as respects both
their rates and kinds, and further still, the immense commercial ad
vantages ; for California, as we shall by and by see, is elected for the
great metropolitan centre of the commerce of the Pacific, quite as
much by its winds, as by the magnificent harbor, whose Gate is here
set open to let the ships fly in, as doves to their windows, from all the
seas of the world. The gold of California, taken as a determining
cause and physical endowment of its future, is not once t6 be com
pared with its winds. They are more necessary, by a thousand times,
to the greatness of California than the mines. If any one judges
from our description, that they are too cold, or too strong, or too much
laden with moisture, he will greatly mistake. If they were warmer,
softer and more dry on the coast, even by a few degrees, it would
greatly injure the country and might even be a fatal blight on its
prospects. Indeed, if California has any prospects, it is just because
the light baffling winds, or rather no winds of the coast below, are
here displaced by such blasts as have power to drive across its whole
width and fan it with their cooling breath. Otherwise its rich valleys
and lowlands would be arid deserts, its shores and rivers reeking
places of disease, and even in its mining region too hot to be worked
or even inhabited, in the summer months.

Having gotten our advantage therefore, in a due understanding of
the winds and climate of California, our description may now proceed

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 11

more rapidly. The scenery of California depends partly on the sur
faces and partly on the seasons. It differs from our eastern shore, in
the fact that it is made up of concave or scooped surfaces, flowing into
convex summits or rounded surfaces only to a very limited extent ;
all the valleys being plains, or land-lakes, with definite indented shores,
like shores of water. It differs also from the western prairies and the
plains of the south, where the horizon is sunk and the sky becomes a
small inverted bowl, in the fact that every spot, even in the widest of
the valleys, has a mountain wall and horizon visible in the distance,
which props the sky and lifts the vault of it, giving a look of airiness
and expansion, and connecting impressions even of grandeur and
beauty. Mountain and plain, plain and mountain, stretching generally
coastwise in their figure, make up the rough calico of the surface.
Sometimes the mountains are bare, or nearly so, showing a mottled
look in the distance, where the sun, glancing down their sides, bur
nishes the points and casts a shade on the hollows. Here the cattle
on a thousand hills are no figure ; for the hills are pastures, covered
many of them with a rich growth of grass and wild oats even to the
top, and the cattle paths, beaten like shelf rows in their steep sides,
just save them apparently from sliding off into the abysses, making
every rod of pasture accessible and permitting them finally to emerge,
as the triumph of their engineering instinct, on summits two thousand,
or even three thousand feet high, where they are seen from below in
clean relief of the sky. Sometimes again the montain sides are cov
ered with a dense chapparal, appearing in the distance just as they
would if darkened by a forest ; save that, now and then, the chappa
ral is of a most intense, transparently green color, showing a summit
that emerges into the sun, when surrounded by the driving clouds
below, like a huge pile of emerald. Sometimes the distant summits
are seen to be covered with a growth of redwoods, that stand posted
there as giant sentinels, every trunk distinctly visible, and altogether,
two hundred or three hundred feet high, combing the sky in dark
relief upon it, giving to the horizon thus a most peculiar look of spirit
and majesty. The lower half of the Sierra Nevada, comprising the
foot hills and the whole mining region, is covered extensively with a
timber growth of pines, cedars and other evergreens. The upper half
is bald, ragged granite, the highest peaks of which are covered a great
part of the year with snow. All the mountains differ from those of
the east, in the fact that they are seamed or furrowed from the tops
downwards, every few rods, by a ravine or water course. These
ravines are many of them dry in the summer, though generally, or at
least frequently, displaying a green line of shrubbery and trees in
their course, which makes them very conspicuous from a distance ;
especially when the mountains are bare on their general surface.
These ravines, too, are often cut miles deep into the hills, becoming
immense chasms, canons or gorges, out of which all the earth has

been swept, to fill the rich valley bottom and make up the land-lake
deposit of the plain. All the mountains accordingly are flanked by
spurs with intervening gorges, and these again by spurs, and these
again by the same ; so that, standing on the side of some grand am
phitheater, the spectator may sometimes see that he is on the spur of
a spur even in the fifth degree ; all of which spurs run together, like
pig iron castings in a furnace, only with a more disorderly complica
tion. Hence, too, the impossibility in California, as we may here re
mark in passing, that any railroad should ever get over a mountain,
as with us, by skirting along its sides till it has made the ascent ; for
such a line would be cut by the side canons, or gorges, from a hun
dred to a thousand or even two thousand feet deep, every half mile.
There is no way but to follow up the bottom of some great canon, or
river gdfge, until it becomes too steep, and escape by a tunnel ; or
else to find some spur whose back can be ascended, and keep it to the
top.

From these general descriptions of the surface it will be naturally
inferred that there is a great deal, both of beautiful and of grand
scenery, in California. Few countries are richer in their varieties,
and none more peculiar in all. Here sleeps in quiet, earthly beauty
the rich vale of Sonoma, backed in rough grandeur by the towering
Diabolo, a picture in a frame. Here in the deep chasm or angle that
fcots the Yo Harnite Falls, a river is beheld pitching off a summit
twenty-four hundred feet high, and by two leaps, reaching the bottom ;
type, as it were, of heaven's mercy pouring from the sky. Here on
the other hand, at the Geysers, in the cracking, cannonading, whist
ling and roaring of steam, and spouting of hot mud, and the brimstone
fumes of the place, we look on a field,, under which we may well
enough imagine the infernals, sweltering and tearing, as it were, dia
bolically, to break loose. At the Big Trees, we enter a dell quietly
lapped in the mountains, where the domestic vegetable minarets are
crowded, as in some city of pilgrimage ; there to look up, for the first
time, in silent awe of the mere life principle.

The scene of the city and bay, from the high background of the
city, is one that any lover of nature might travel far to see. The
same reversed, from the east side of the bay, at Clinton, is more
remarkable. In the unalterable green foreground, are the oaks of
Oakland and Alameda ; here and there flows a strip or armlet of
water; next comes the Bay, in the middle, with its picturesque
islands ; beyond are the City, and the open Gate, showing the Farra-
lone Islands far off to sea ; right and left each side of the Gate, the
grand sea-wall of mountains stretches north and south, for a back
ground, at least fifty miles — it is not the bay o£ Naples, the dreamy
softness and quiet luxury are not here — but with more severity, the
scene unites a higher spirit and beauty as much more impressive and
brilliant. The Gate itself, cleaving down the mountains to let the

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 13

commerce of the Great Ocean of the world pass in, has a look of
destiny in it strong enough to be sublime.

There is a little valley owned by a wealthy and respectable Spanish
Californian, Mr. Sunole, which is commonly called by his name, and
is occupied as a pasture ground or ranch for his herds. It lies over
among the Contra Costa, or second range of mountains east of Mission
San Jose, and is entered by a pass some four hundred feet above the
valley bottom, which comprises about a thousand acres. Through this
valley bottom runs a clear, rapid stream, which in the spring would
be called a river, and which, wheeling round to the northwest, cuts
the mountain to its base, dashing through one of the wildest gorges
that can be conceived, fifteen hundred feet deep, and hurrying off into
the Bay. On the north rises a huge bare summit two thousand feet
high. On the southwest the Mission Peak, twenty-five hundred feet
high. On the southwest, across the narrow wooded gorge through
which the river breaks into the valley, other fantastic peaks three
thousand feet high. On the east the enclosure is made by a low,
steep range of naked hills showing others higher and still higher be
hind them. A stranger, fresh arrived in May, at the Mission, takes
his horse, for example, the next morning, and finding a road that turns
into the narrow gorge or opening of the hills near by, goes in to ex
plore a little and find whither it leads. The steep, smooth-faced hills,
or rather mountains, pile in with rounding fronts on either side, just
leaving a passage between ; and they are so lighted up by the sun
brushing down their translucent surfaces of green, and tuned to such
wild harmony by their many-colored flowers, that sight overflows, and
he begins unwittingly to listen ; as if there must be something audible,
some hymn or note of Memnon in the scene. Passing a low summit,
the beautiful valley opens to view, and such a combination of colors
no eastern man or European has ever seen or conceived. The green
is not what we call a grass green. Neither is it the pale bluish green
of England, but a soft yellow green, covering the whole landscape — the
steeps even to the summits, all the roundings and hollows, as well as
a rich floor of the valley bottom — like an immense carpet of plush
spread over the scene ; which carpet is so matted with flowers in all
the highest colors, sprinkled sometimes in groups, that we call it by
this name without any effort of fancy — we can think of nothing else.
No painter, practised in our common styles of scenery, could manage
at such a picture, without much study, assisted probably by many
failures.

14 CALIFORNIA,

what it is. Approaching the spot he discovers an immense herd of
cattle brought together from the hills, which the owners and their
herdsmen are either sorting by their marks, or which else they are
sorting out, in sale of a part, for the market — they are Spanish, na
tive Californians all, and do not answer English questions. This at
least is plain, that they are gathering out of the great herd of a
thousand or more, to make up another and separate herd a short dis
tance off, and the lasso practice is the power. Riding into the herd
and through it, they chase out one, turning him towards the new herd.
But he runs by, and back into the herd, or he strikes out into the
plain, in some other direetion. But the pursuer is after him. Round
and round swings the fatal loop or noose above his head as he goes,
till he gets in reach, at three or four rods distance, when he lets it
fly, and it drops with a kind of astronomic certainty round the poor
animal's horns. Feeling it fast upon him, the animal now turns upon
his persecutor, and it is convenient for him also to fly in his turn —
only keeping the cord still fast to the horn of his saddle. Another
horseman follows immediately, and another lasso drops and is drawn
fast. Now the animal, in a line between the two pursuers, strikes off,
throwing his whole momentum, if he can, upon the straight line, at
right angles to it, which gives him advantage enough to unhorse both
of them, if they let him come to the blow. All three, therefore, now
are in a race together, and as soon as this is seen, a third horseman is
in pursuit, and throwing his lasso, he picks up a hind leg of the ox as
he runs, doing it as easily as a knitter might take up a fallen stitch.
This done, while the two others are spreading right and left, he darts
off sideways at a prick of the spur, and jerks the refractory beast flat
upon the ground ; where he lies bellowing in fright and despair, held
fast by three cords, at three angles, as little able to escape as a fly in
a spider's web. Next a huge, fiery bull is seen rushing out of the
herd, pursued by a small, sharp looking herdsman, who says, by a cer
tain look of his eye, that he will show the green stranger a trick.
Bolting into the plain, the mettlesome, tall animal, leads off in a race
which puts the horse to his best speed. But as the pursuer comes
up with him, he seizes the tail of the renegade, streaming level behind
him, winds it by a quick turn round the horn of his saddle, and dart
ing off suddenly by a spring, as if it were done by some concussion of
gunpowder, he jerks the bull flat down and rolls him clean over !
Whereupon there is a shout from all — but the bull ; who gets up, as
it were, in an effort of self-recollection, and walks off meekly where
they show him the way.

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 15

here and there, and took away the nakedness. Civilization comes,
cuts down the oaks for firewood, fences off the plains into squares,
covers them with grain or stubble, scatters wild mustard over them,
it may be, and converts them into a weedy desolation. The only at
tractive looking surface ever to be seen in California, is the native
original surface ; for there is never to be a lawn, or a neat grassy
slope, as with us, because there is no proper turf. Shrubbery itself
can never be made ornamental in California, except where there is
irrigation to maintain it. Where there is irrigation, a gardener house
lot may be covered in with trees and set off with flowers, so as to be
really fresh in beauty at all times ; but this is not the kind of beauty
that makes a landscape. In the mining country, the natural beauty
of the scenery is defaced by another process. Here a thin but stately
growth of evergreens is sprinkled over the generally graceful slopes
and rounds of the hills, and a pure crystal leaps along down the
trough of the hills, over cliifs of rock and pebbly beds. But the
miner comes. Finding gold that will " pay " in the soil, he rents a
head of water from the ditch company, whose ditch bringing on the
water from some level far up in the Sierra, flows it along from hill top
down to hill top, and across from one hill to another, leaping hollows
and ravines on wooden tressel-work, sometimes even two hundred feet
high, till it reaches a point abreast of his placer, and directly above
it. Bringing it down the hill in immense cotton hose, with a nozzle
pipe like that of a fire engine, he plays it into the side of the hill,
with a pressure perhaps of one hundred and fifty feet fall ; tears down
the hill, acre by acre, and floats it off, rolling the loose stones with it
down his wooden trunk or sluice, in which the gold is arrested, and so
continues, till he has carried off a large section of the hill-side, even a
hundred feet deep. His neighbors are doing the same thing right and
left. Pits are also sunk downward, and tunnels bored in level into
the sides of the hills, and the earth from so many burrows, is piled at
their mouths.

The trees are cut down for timber and firewood. The stream of
the valley runs thick with creamy richness, and the cliffs and pebbly
beds are covered fifty feet deep with stones and mudwashings. The
result is a most horrid desolation, of which every line of the natural
beauty is gone forever. If some camp of demons had been pitched
here for a year, tearing the earth by their fury, and converting it to
the model of their own bad thought, they could hardly make it look
worse. The whole mining region is finally to become a desolation in
just this manner. There is no possibility of a process more delicate
for extracting the gold. Indeed there seems to be a kind of prior
necessity, which nature must needs recognize, that gold and desola
tion go together. What we see then, at the mines, only represents
too faithfully what holds good historically in the moral desolations of
plunder, fraud, and avarice, instigated by this treasure of the moun-

16 CALIFORNIA,

tains. The only part of California, in short, that will not be damaged
in its scenery by the arrival of culture, is the broken country of the
coast region, or the region of natural pasturage ; except that possibly
the artesian wells may be carried so far as to irrigate a considerable
part of the valley surfaces. Thus while there is almost no stream
running through a valley bottom in the summer, because every issue
from the mountains sinks immediately into the gravel beds of the
plains, and runs under, it may turn out generally, in the narrow val
leys, as in that of San Jose*, that artesian wells, sunk two hundred or
three hundred feet, will bring it up, spouting into liberty on the sur
face. Two or three of the wells in this town throw a column nine
inches in diameter, ten or fifteen feet high, discharging water enough
to turn a mill, and of course to irrigate a large surface.

It will doubtless occur to many, that the dry season of the year,
which is the summer, must be a season of utter desolation as regards
the scenery. What can be more desolate than a universal dry death ?
And if the water-runs, or ravines, are green ; if the chapparal on some
of the mountains, and occasionally trees in the plains, that have the
faculty to bore deep for their water, show a semblance of life ; if the
gardens which are irrigated show a patch of luxuriance here and
there, like an oasis in the yellow desert, what after all is the landscape
but a desert ? Suppose then it were to be covered with snows two or
three feet deep, and every solitary thing stripped of its green, would
the scenery be less desolate ? But this is our winter. The wintry,
or suspension time of California is in the summer, and the winter
months of the almanac are dressed in the richest, freshest green.
And yet the Californians speak of beautiful scenery in the summer,
and any one who has been there a few months begins to sympathize
with them. Trees and chapparal are stronger marks on the landscape
than with us ; green spots, such as watered fields and gardens, have a
fascinating freshness. And even the dry surfaces, in certain lights,
make a picture, by aid of the shadows on the hollow surfaces, and the
occasional green of trees and chapparal and gardens, that is really
beautiful. The little valley just described, for example, puts off its
green and puts on a dress of drab, velvety and soft in the glancing
strokes of light, and becomes for all the world a neat Quarker bonnet ;
only that the deep blue green of the gorges, and the lively green
ribands that hang down the water courses are a little too dressy and
fantastic, and suggest a case of sumptuary discipline. The most that
can be said of the Pacific hybernation time is, that while our winter is
absolute, unconquerable desolation, the Californiari can go into his gar
den, turn on the water, make an outdoor green-house of it, filled with
all richest fruits and singing birds, and there wait patiently till the
months of green return.

The growths of California are as peculiar as their climate. To
make this subject intelligible, let it be understood that where there is

—r V|K" ^^ r "S

OF TH*

I UNIVERSITY

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 17

no irrigation, natural or artificial, nothing grows perennially in Califor
nia, except trees that have a tap root, and shrubs and grasses that
have some peculiar kind of root that enables them to get sufficient
moisture, where only a little is given. There is a coarse perennial
grass, for example, that is found, when dug, to grow out of perpendic
ular rootlets eight or ten inches long, which themselves grow out of
large horizontal roots, that serve as water cisterns or sponges for the
uses overhead. None of the common upland, or hay grasses, live
through the summer, and therefore none make what can be called a
turf. The grasses of every season are started in November, from the
ripe seeds dropped into the chinks of the ground, in the dry season
previous. It results accordingly, that no crop can be raised in Cali
fornia which does not ripen before the dry season commences, or by
about the first of June. The only exceptions possible to this are
made by irrigation, either where water is artificially supplied, or
where, as will sometimes be the case, there is a supply from stores, or
filterings underneath. It is only under these conditions that a crop
of Indian corn or potatoes can be raised ; though an early crop of
potatoes, ripening in June or July, can be raised anywhere ; and
where the ground is sufficiently moistened from below, two crops a
year are frequently grown upon the same soil. Potatoes of the late
crop are grown too in some places near the coast, where they get
moisture enough from the atmosphere and the fog, to answer their
purpose. A summer garden will commonly make but a poor figure,
unless it is recruited by supplies of water not contained in the natural
soil of the place. The dry season is, in fact, the wintering season of
vegetation, though it is the summer. Whatever lives, hybernates,
rests. The strawberry, for example, ripens its fruit in April, has its
growth, ceases, begins to look rusty, and passes into the state of sus
pension, finally to die. Let on now a flow of water, and it wakes,
blossoms again, bears another crop, and passes into another suspen
sion, and then is ready to be wakened and bear a third crop. And so
by alternating in times with different beds, a succession is kept up,
and a bountiful supply is obtained from April to November.

The principle growths or products of California are, accordingly,
the fruits and the cereals. Most of the fruits really want irrigation,
though there are many tracts of soil in which they will flourish with
out, and will not ripen prematurely. The fruits are grapes, figs,
olives, pomegranates, almonds, plums, apricots, pears, peaches and
apples. Finer grapes are grown nowhere in the world. The apples
are large and fair, and wonderfully precocious in bearing, but there is
reason to suspect, from experiments made in the old mission gardens,
that they may be short lived. Peaches, plums, and pears bear only
too profusely. Indeed, there is a wonderous tendency to fructification
in every kind of growth, animal and vegetable. As yet, the fruits
sell at enormous prices, because of the shortness of supply. In a
2

18 CALIFORNIA,

very few years they will be plenty and cheap. And even now there
is no city on the earth, where the fruit shops make as fine a show as
in San Francisco. Considering the size, the fairness, the varieties,
and all that goes to make a show of richness and profusion, there is
probably nothing in the world to match the displays of fruit in this
new city of the Pacific.

But the great agricultural crops of California are the cereals, wheat,
and barley, and oats. These are sown at any time, when it 'is both
wet enough and dry enough to plow, between November and March ;
harvested any time between the ripening of June and the rain-falls of
November ; for they will stand uninjured, or lie, as left by the reaper,
and without shelling, all that time ; so that a small force suffices
both to raise and to harvest a large crop. And the yield is
from twenty to sixty bushels of wheat to the acre, subject to no con
tingencies but wet and premature drought, which latter only shortens
the crop. Even one hundred and forty bushels of barley have been
harvested on a single acre. Oats are said to degenerate in the seed
ing, but we have seen the stalk even twelve feet high. These crops
again, will sow themselves for a second crop the next year, and that
will yield more than any crop sown in the Western or Atlantic States.
Sixty or eighty bushels have been gathered from the volunteer crop of
barley. This, in fact, is one of the evils to be encountered by Cali
fornia agriculture, that every crop perpetuates itself as a weed ; so
that no good wheat crop, for example, can be raised on a field once
sown with barley, till the barley is exterminated ; and one barley-
sowing will sometimes yield three or four volunteer crops that are
worth havesting. Even potatoes will perpetuate themselves in the
same way. Change of crops, therefore, is difficult. When the prob
lem accordingly is raised, how or by what process exhausted soils are
to be restored in California, it is not easy now to answer ; but some
process will be doubtless discovered in due time. In many cases this
exhaustion will come to pass slowly ; for the good soil is not unfre-
quently two, and three, and sometimes eight feet deep. A piece of
ground sown regularly with wheat for sixteen years, has been known
to yield forty bushels and more to the acre. A single deep plowing,
probably enough, would make it good for another sixteen years.

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 19

weighing three and a half pounds, or an apple tree, or a cherry will
grow a stem ten or twelve feet high in a season. The mammoth tur
nips, onions, beets and cabbages, depend on a like occurrence. But
these are freaks, or extravagances of nature — only they are such as
can be equalled nowhere else. The Big Trees depend, in part, on
these same contingencies, and partly on the remarkable longevity of
their species. A tree that is watered without rain, having a deep
vegetable mold in which to stand, and not so much as one hour's um
brella of cloud to fence off the sun for the whole warm season, and a
capacity to live withal for two thousand years or more, may as well

trow three hundred and fifty or four hundred feet high and twenty-
ve feet in diameter, and show the very centre point or pith still
sound, at the age of thirteen hundred years, as to make any smaller
figure with conditions proportionally restricted.

The agricultural capacities of California, it will be seen, are very
great as regards the rate and facility of production. The only draw
back now experienced is in the want of a reliable and sufficient market.
The mines and the cities are now the principal consumers. The result
is, that if the product is a little short, the prices rise extravagantly,
because there is no other supply. On the other hand, if it is a little
over the demand, the prices fall as extravagantly. And then, as the
producers are flying always towards that which yields the best reward,
every kind of product is likely to be overgrown in its turn, and so the
prices become even more capricious, for the reason that they are ca
pricious. When markets are opened by an outside commerce, as they
will be, and when all the whaling ships are fitted and sent from San
Francisco and Puget Sound, the mischief will be repaired. At pres
ent, owing to this caprice of the market, agriculture is scarcely less
of a venture than mining.

Accordingly the attention of land-owners is now being turned, more
than before, to pasturage. The old Spanish breed of cattle is giving
way to the new cultivated breeds most valued here, and large ranges
of land are taken up in the hill regions, where immense herds of from
one to ten thousand head of cattle are collected, which are yielding a
rich revenue to their owners. These herds are kept sometimes wholly
without fodder, and generally with very little. They fatten most in
the summer, when the feed is dry, and only suffer when the falling
rains have rotted the old growth, and have not yet sufficiently started
the new. Hence it is common to burn over a considerable portion of
the ranges, just before the rains, that the cattle may be able to get
access to the first sprouting of the seeds, at the earliest moment pos
sible. The air, accordingly, is filled with smoke for many days ; the
mountains are flaming round the horizon day and night, as if the last
day had come, and horsemen are rushing hither and thither to fight
off the fires from the wheat fields and the pastures of the plains. And
then the result is, that the yellow, yellow, ever yellow hills that were,

20 CALIFORNIA,

as soon as good rain has sprouted the seeds, come forth — green out
of black — and the body of the high burnt hill or mountain, is turned
to a beryl, without so much as a twig or a weed-stalk, to mar the
color. This great interest of. pasturage promises even to exceed the
plowing interest in importance. The home market for it is equally
reliable, and the salted and dried meats, the hides, the tallow, and
wool, are products that can take the world for their market.

The culture of the grape, too, promises much. Whether it can be
successfully prosecuted without irrigation is doubtful, though it is well
known that old, deep rooted vines will bear a crop without. It is
commonly believed that California is hereafter to become the great
wine growing country of the Pacific.

With so many advantages, it is impossible that California should not
become one of the richest countries in the world, on the score of its
mere land interest and the products yielded by its soil. It has garn
ered up also, in the soil itself, treasures that no other can boast. It
will take a thousand years to wash over all the pay dirt of the gold
mines. It is computed also to have, in a single quartz lead, more
gold, five times over, than is owned by the whole world ; and other
veins are being opened, almost every month, which are ready to yield
great revenues of profits as soon as they are worked. The quartz
mills, once supposed to be a failure, are now so perfected as to yield
immense profits, almost without exception. The waters too of the
mountains are a great wealth, and the thirty or forty millions already
invested in the ditches ought to be yielding a great revenue, as much
of it already is. Besides, there are mines of quicksilver, such as
make all other mines in the world comparatively worthless ; deposits
of borax, rocks of alum, hills of sulphur, quarries of marble, beds of
coal and of iron — in short, there was never a country so underlaid
with treasure of every kind.

The commercial advantages are not yet developed, and will not be,
till the Pacific shores are lined with new nations, and the untold riches
of their natural resources are brought into the circulations of trade.
Even if a railroad were built across the continent, it is not likely that
any very great amount of merchandise, or any but the most precious
forms of merchandise, would pass that way. Probably there is a
greater amount of expectation vested in such an improvement, than
the actual experiment will justify. The distance is too great, the
grades too heavy, (as heretofore reported,) the running expenses too
enormous, to allow the freight of common articles of trade. And yet
California is on the great water highway of the Pacific, and her Gate
the certain goal of its travel. For it is remarkable that this Golden
Gate is at the southrnost limb of the variable trade winds, and that
these, blowing in a little north of east, will drive a ship directly out
to China, directly in from China — whichever way they blow — laying
a straight course on one of the great circles of the earth ; while im-

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 21

mediately south of the Gate the winds begin to change character,
and are much less available for sailing purposes, and continue to be
so, even down as far in the south latitude as to Valparaiso. Thus to
sail a ship up the western coast of the continent, from Panama to San
Francisco, would probably require a whole summer, and even that
might not suffice for the passage. No ship can ever approach that
shore by sail without falling into a contest with currents, which the
light baffling winds and doldrums make it difficult to maintain with
success. To get in is difficult, to get away more difficult. And hence
perhaps it is, at least in part, that one may pass down that whole stretch
of coast, a distance of three thousand miles, in one of the California
steamers, and actually not see on the passage so much as a rag of
sail of any description. On the other hand, at Puget Sound, the only
available harbor ground on the north, the winds blow off the coast
with such violence that vessels after pounding there for weeks to
gether, till the crews were quite worn out, have returned to San Fran
cisco to fit for a new trial. Besides in the winter-trades, which are
from the northeast, a vessel sailing from China for the Sound will have
the whole distance to make with a wind directly against her ; while
she might lay her course for San Francisco and straight in, without
once shifting her sails.

Nature, it will thus be seen, has set her seal on San Francisco, ap
pointing it to be the great commercial centre of that coast and ocean.
Here rests the future axis of motion. Indeed it is hardly extravagant
to imagine that, in some distant age, when the enterprise and resources
of that ocean, with its islands and coasts, are fully developed, the
Atlantic commerce will be a thing by the way, an affair of the out
skirts.

All such expectation, it is obvious, must depend, in a great degree,
on the political and moral condition of California. And here one very
great danger happily is already past, viz.; the introduction of human
slavery. There is no State in the Union where slavery could be
worked to greater advantage than in California. Connected with this
fact, we have also the concomitant fact, that the office holders and
political operators of the State have very generally been men from the
south. To understand, therefore, even after the fact, how it is that
slavery is excluded, is what any stranger will accomplish with the
greatest difficulty. No inquiries he can make will quite solve the
riddle. Some have spoken of the known weight of laboring and money
making classes being always opposed to slavery, and silently con
straining the politicians, who were not, to respect their position. Some
have ascribed much to the personal influence of Colonel Fremont.
Others have given the credit of the fact mainly to Captain Halleck,
sometimes called the father of the constitution, a gentleman of weight
and capacity, who is known to have been the draughtsman of many
of its provisions, but has since that time given himself wholly to his

22 CALIFORNIA.

profession as a lawyer, and withdrawn himself altogether from the
game of political life. Be it as it may, slavery is forever excluded from
California, and so from that whole coast ; and that without even so
much as a word of debate ; for this article of the constitution was
simply read and passed by consent, in absolute silence. What a fact
of history, this, to be the child of silence !

California unites in its population great elements of diversity. The
fifty thousand or sixty thousand of Chinese simply stay as foreigners.
The native Californian or Spanish race, comprises gentlemen of real
respectability, wealth, and character ; but the inferior class of herds
men and retainers that were, are more wild and vicious, and really
more hopeless, than before the change of masters. They live on horse
back, without contracting any friendship with their horses, which might
raise them a little. They are cruel to animals of all kinds, cowardly
to superiors, ignorant, superstitious, frivolous, with little prospect of
being advanced to anything better hereafter.

A considerable part of the emigration to California since we took
possession, is made up of persons from the extreme west, who crossed
over by the plains — the class who are call Border Ruffians with us,
and which there are called, more or less derisively, Pikes, from Pike
county in Missouri. They are by no means any such desperate or
ruffian class of people as they are just now commonly regarded here.
They are, for the most part, uncultivated and rough, crude in their
notions of religion, and like all such people, coarse in their prejudices ;
but they have great honesty and frar-Joiess, their impulses are strong,
and generally magnanimous. They really contain the staple qualities
or possibilities of a high character. They have true manhood, which
is not to be said of every people.

Another element of the emigration is from the southern and south
western States, comprising many gentlemen with their families, who
are a great accession to the society and manners of the cities, and
particularly of San Francisco ; and with these a much larger, or at
least noisier class of broken down politicians, who have fled, as it were,
to California, to farm the voters and offices of a new world, where
their stock of capital has not yet been exhausted. The former class
comprise men who appear, like Mr. Stanly, to have emigrated rather
to get away from political life, and to apply themselves to other pur
suits. The latter, trained to public speaking and the management of
assemblies, and having this for their trade, have hitherto been able to
obtain almost all the offices of the State, and have distributed the
rewards of office to themselves, in a scale of unexampled liberality.
Happily there was an end to the credit of the State, and that limit
has been finally reached. The bankrupt people, too, are beginning to
ask questions they had no time to ask before ; competitors also are
coming into the field, whose morality and trust worthiness in other

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 23

relations have been already proved. The dynasty of plunder, there
fore, is rapidly coming to an end.

Another large class of the emigration is from New England, New
York and the middle and north-western States. And these again are
in two classes. First, the merchants, bankers, lawyers, engineers,
surveyors, and many of the head miners — men who have come to Cal
ifornia as to a field of enterprise, and who bend all their energies to
the particular personal calling that engages them. Secondly, a class
of reprobates in all styles and degrees, who find their way to Califor
nia just because they are not wanted anywhere. These are the
fugitives from justice, the absconding bigamists, the felons and prison-
birds who want a new field where they are not known, defalcators,
pimps, shoulder-strikers and prize fighters, drunkards, sons that could
not be endured at home, and vagabond gentlemen whose friends have
been willing to escape the burden of their support, by giving them an
outfit for some very distant region. These and such like characters
were turned for a time, in shoals, upon California. But the pistol, the
knife, the halter, bad liquors, and the Vigilance Committees are scat
tering them rapidly and killing them off. They flourished for a time,
as the under-fighters and ballot-box operators of the politician class
just referred to ; assuming the alliance to be one of natural good-fel
lowship, inasmuch as they too use the tools of honor themselves. But
their trade is gone ; they cannot even be drunk in the streets, or draw
a knife out of their pocket, without a painfully certain prospect of
appearing in the chain gang the next morning. Meantime, the former
and better class above named, with many of the better class from the
South, are building churches, organizing institutions, looking after
charities, and showing more and more distinctly that the great hope
of California is in them. They will even consent to serve on juries,
and some of them also to be named for public offices of trust and
power, which formerly they would not. Time is giving them the con
trolling position, as by a kind of necessary process, and even compel
ling them to assume it.

The composition, or the combined elements of the emigration, it will
be seen, are not favorable to the immediate coalescence of the new
state, in terms of order and public virtue. Besides a good many hos
tile influences of a more special character, it will be easy to perceive,
concur in detaining or holding back the new community, from the kind
of civil administration necessary to its good name and social comfort.

24 CALIFORNIA,

quent that the placer mining gives out, and it is known to be always
more or less precarious. Hence many of the towns are mere encamp
ments, and are called " camps." And some that assumed to be more
are already given up and nearly forsaken. Hence the miners become
more or less migratory themselves, and their towns are too nearly so,
many of them, to be much cared for, either in the building, or in the
establishment of social and religious institutions. A stranger, too,
will see a very distinct and significant character in the names given to
places ; such as Yankee Jim, Fiddletown, Jackass' Gulch, Whisky
Bar, and a whole hundred names, of which these are the choicer
specimens. It appears to be the general opinion, that there is a
decided moral and social improvement in the mining population. But
one who has attended church for two Sundays, in a mining town of the
very first order, finding about forty persons present to hear a good
Christian sermon, and passing in the street when returning from church,
in both cases full five hundred men, who had rushed together as spec
tators of a street fight, will hardly think it possible that there should
have been a very great moral improvement there.

Agriculture, too, has been connected in California with unwonted
and even wholly peculiar causes of moral deterioration. The titles to
land have many of them been so uncertain, or so far unsettled by
frauds and charges of fraud, that there has been a natural reluctance
in emigrants to incur the risk of a loss, in purchasing the soil. Hence,
also in part, the very peculiar kind of squatting that has come into
vogue in California and probably a full half of the agriculture of the
State, either now or at some former time, has been carried on as an
operation of squatting in this manner, viz., by taking possession of
lands generally known to be vested in private owners by title derived
from the Mexican government, and not in the United States as in
other new territories, where the laws of Congress authorize the occu
pation and make it a legitimate act. An American purchaser, for
example, buys one of the old Mission properties, comprising a tract
seven or eight miles square, of the very best land in California, and
everybody knows the title to be perfect, because the land has been
held and occupied by the Mission for more than fifty years. He ex
pends over 1100,000 in fencing it, and the property rises in value so
rapidly, that he begins to be rated and to rate himself as being worth,
at least a million dollars. But behold, a cloud of squatters suddenly
appears pouring in upon his lands, squatting inside of his fences and
among his wheat, erecting their tents or huts, and leaving him to pay
the taxes, while they reap the harvests. He is now the bankrupt pur
chaser, and they are the occupants, till at least six or eight years of
litigation, terminated at Washington, have established the title to his
creditors, which everybody knew was in himself. Meantime they have
gotten the use of the rent for so many years, which is to them a
handsome outfit. The old native Californians are treated in the same

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 25

way. No chapter of wrong and oppression, in which our countrymen
have had their part, is more sad or revolting. Even between the old
ranchero's house and wall, the squatter has taken his post and set up
his hut. Then, assuming also that the cattle are wild, as that the
lands are public, the squatter wanting a steak has taken his rifle and
killed an ox. And so the poor herdsman has been stripped both of
lands and herds, by the remorseless Sabeans, and that with airs of in
dignity and low-bred consequence more difficult to bear than the rob
beries themselves. The truculent savage spirit generated by these
land-piracies, will be readily understood. The tragedy of young Sunole
is happily an extreme instance. He was a gentleman, educated as we
have heard in Paris, equal if not superior to most of the educated
Americans. But he ventured to remonstrate very gently with a squat
ter for cutting down the trees of his father's exquisite valley, and sell
ing them for wood, giving ,him liberty at the same time, to cut
what he wanted for himself ; but the next time he passed by, on his
way over the ranch in company with a friend, the savage came out
with his rifle, got him in range as he threw himself over the side of
his horse, and drew him dead to the ground. Sheltered and secreted
by others like himself, he could never be found. As the titles are
now being settled by the decisions of the courts, the squatters are grad
ually yielding to the law and becoming purchasers. All these wrongs
will gradually be a thing of the past. Bancroft Libraiy.

By the very latest advices, it appears that the squatter combination
is just beginning to yield some respect to the decisions of law. Here
tofore the owners, in establishing their title, have commonly got pos
session, but only a right to pay the taxes. Indeed, this third estate
of squatterdom had sufficient power in the legislature, two years ago,
to get a law enacted requiring owners, when dislodging or ejecting
them, to pay for the improvements according to the appraisal of a
committee from the precinct ; a plan by which they expected to get
back the value of the land, for the appraisers would be squatters almost
of course. Happily the courts would not execute the law. And but
a year since, the venerable patriarch of the Napa valley, who came
over from Missouri as a trapper more than forty years ago, having
finally established his old homestead title, comprising eight or ten
thousand acres of the best land in the State, was evidently beginning
also to find a much harder question on his hands, viz., how to move the
squatters without periling his life. And yet, among the land-pirates
called squatters, are a great many persons from the East, and even
from Massachusetts and Connecticut ; and what is more, from our
Christian churches ; and some of them appear even now to be seriously
minded and conscientious in their life. Because the same word, squat
ter, is used to designate this known act of robbery, (for it is often such
and nothing else,) they really suppose that they are doing the same

lawful and right thing, which is practised under the acts of Congress,
in the West.

As the mining and agriculture of California appear, thus far, to have
been connected with unpropitious moral influences, so also it has been,
even to a much greater degree, with the trade of politics. Composed
of elements so various and repellant, it was not to be expected, for a
time, that there would be much confidence in public men or proceed
ings. And the moral character of the political operators and office
holders, was generally of a kind not to inspire confidence. They were
gamblers, debauchees, drunkards, men who lined their bosoms not with
virtue, but with knives and pistols. They were just such men, in short,
as could never be in confidence, even if they violated no trust. The
bullies they had in their employ, as inspectors of the ballot, could not
swear to a true count and be believed. Juries were distrusted, be
cause the panel was so easily made up, to include one whom the crim
inal on trial might " hang " to stand out for him in the verdict. The
judges were such characters that they plainly ought to be bribed, if
they were not. Administrators and trustees were suspected, as being
appointed by the connivance of judges. Legislators and governors
were distrusted also. This distrust became, in due time, a torment to
the public peace, by its uncertainty ; and none the less a torment that
the worst rumors and suspicions were most likely to be true ; till finally
everything bad began to be true ; and the public prints made it a point
of heroism in dealing out their accusations with unsparing boldness.
A stranger could hardly guess what it meant. Every print was for
California. Nothing too laudatory could be said for it ; meanwhile, as
if a paradasaic whole could be made up of diabolical particulars, the
sweeping denunciations of individuals appeared to leave no honest man
in it. And what was more remarkable in all these accusations, was
that every charge made against judges or others of bribery or of fraud
was given circumstantially ; names, dates, amounts, agents, all stated
with exactness. Probably a very considerable share of these charges
of bribery, and perjury, and fraud, were true. But the misery was,
that no one could guess which. Society was dissolved and law was
reduced to an instrument of suspicion. It was a state most bitter and
even horrible. Whether their facts were only suspicions and rumors
converted into facts by repetition, or real and veritable truths of his
tory ; whether it was the licentiousness of the press or its uncommon
fidelity, or whether, possibly, it was not all the fatality which attends
every community where confidence is gone, no one could know, or sat
isfactorily judge. Be it as it may, out of this general distrust and
demoralization came the Vigilance Committee. It was raised by the
torture that exasperates society when confidence is gone. So far not
to sympathize with it is impossible, and the more that almost all the
better citizens were in it. Even Christian professors left the church
and the communion to be in the outbreak, and to bear arms in that

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 27

vast congregation, gathered as a thunder-cloud round the jail, on the
distant hill side.

It is not our design to discuss the Committee. Suffice it to say that
their intent was good, their proceedings honest and carefully deliber
ate, and their military conduct admirably decisive and efficient. Their
great fault was that they did not see their point exactly, and offered
reasons for their action a great deal worse than their action. If they
had undertaken, not to administer the laws, or take them back into
their own hands, but to restore the laws by plucking down the usurp
ers, who stood in no right of law, being elected only by the perjury of
the inspectors, their question would have been greatly simplified.
Then, because of the almost impossibility of convicting the perjured
inspectors, by any ordinary proceedings of law, they would only have
done it by extraordinary ; and it would have been all the better if, to
make a due impression of this crime, as the greatest of all crimes, they
had sacked the whole tribe, be they many or few, and sunk them in
the bottom of the Bay. Doing this, instead of resuming functions, the
right of which strikes at the root of all constitutional government, they
need only have insisted on some extraordinary means of restoring
functions already taken away. The whole experiment was critical,
more critical than our eastern communities know ; for there was a time,
a terrible twelve hours, just after the release of Judge Terry, when the
question of a new Executive Committee, who should be more efficient
and bolder, i. e., more bloody, was pending and apparently just ready
to be carried by the whirlwind of passion outside, which new commit
tee, if it had not been dexterously avoided, would have been like the
new committee of Paris, and similar scenes would probably have fol
lowed. The escape was narrow ; so narrow that if the leading gentle
men concerned had now the question of a new Vigilance Committee
on hand, they would probably hesitate long. And yet it must be
granted for the honor of this same questionable, perilous adventure of
reform, that San Francisco is probably now the best governed city in
the Union. The laws are now enforced, the economies are duly at
tended to, there is no plunder, and every evil doer stands in fear. It
is the beginning, apparently, of a great moral reaction, which is felt by
the whole State. Whatever may be true, therefore, of this great pop
ular movement, whether it is right or wrong, wise or unwise, it will be
impossible ever to turn it as a reproach on the certainly patriotic men
who were foremost in it. They are much more likely to be celebrated
hereafter, with Harmodius and Aristogiton, and other great leaders of
mutiny that have been deliverers of their country.

We state these facts concerning the moral aspects of mining ; the
occupation by force of lands known to be held by legal right ; and the
usurpations, and perjuries, and briberies of political intriguers and dem
agogues, connected with the general destruction of confidence, and the
necessary throes of violence by which they must inevitably be redress-

ed, not as being, in themselves, any picture of California. We know
they are not. They are only facts, without which any description is
rose colored and without sound verity — such facts as will meet a stran
ger first, because they are most outstanding and impressive. And for
this the reader will make due allowance, even as in reading history ;
for it is not the virtues, and the smooth and silent Sowings of goodness
that make up ever the staple of history, but the explosive wrongs and
outrages rather, by which the evenness of good was disturbed. For
ourselves, we regard these facts not with any feelings of despair or dis
couragement. On the contrary, we perceive a certain sublimity in
the contest here begun, and the clearing process going forward, which
creates appetite to us. We know the certain victory, we see it com
ing, and we envy especially those young heroic spirits who have set
themselves, in the love of God and their newly adopted State, to such
works of duty and sacrifice as are necessary to the sublime future they
have in prospect.

Opposite to these facts we have stated others which awaken our re
spect and inspire our confidence. They have a good and able minis
try, for example, such a ministry as will compare favorably, in all
denominations, with any of the older States. They have churches in
every denomination, not inferior to the churches here. The attend
ance is good, especially in the cities, and the order, the dress, the
music, are only too much evened by the manner of the East.

The Sabbath also is becoming a more established institution, and to
be without a Sabbath, as a day of rest, is more and more distinctly
felt to be an oppression. And therefore the traders and shopkeepers,
in most of the country villages, are petitioning the Legislature, more
earnestly every year, for the establishment of a complete suspension
of trade.

Education is not forgotten. The towns and cities are allowed by
statute to tax themselves for this purpose, and many of them do it
most liberally. The public schools of San Francisco are not inferior
to those of our Eastern cities — many think them even superior.

There is no reason to apprehend any loss of natural vigor and tone
from the climate on that shore. Some have taken it as a bad indica
tion that the Digger Indians (the aboriginals of California) are the
most spiritless and abject of all known tribes on the continent, and
about the lowest specimens of humanity found upon the earth. But
this may be sufficiently accounted for by the general softness of the
climate and the fact that they have never been required to feed them
selves by the manly exploits of a hunter life ; having always at hand
enough of bugs, and fish, and sugar pine bark, to serve their purpose.
Sometimes also a degree of discouragement has been derived from the
analogical or symbolical fact, that there is not a stick of smart, hard
timber in all California ; nothing out of which an axe-handle, or a
spoke, or a felloe could be made ; every hardest, soundest tree, being

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AXD PROSPECTS. 29

brittle to such a degree (" brash," they say in California, and in New
England " spalt") that the trunk will probably break asunder five or
six times when it is felled, and lie as a ]3ile of fragments on the ground,
even though it is three feet in diameter. Is this a natural token, some
have asked with a little feeling of superstition, that the future men of
California are to be only a brittle or brash stock, and without any real
timber of endurance in them ? Why any more a token than the giant
pines, and redwoods, and cedars, are a token of prodigiously tall men,
a race at least twelve or fifteen feet high ? Why any more than the
often naked hills and plains are a token of no men at all ? What oth
er sign do we in fact require that all the future stock of California will
be a stock of high capacity, than that the climate is healthy, the
growths bountiful, and that we are capable ourselves of the greatest
endurance there, both bodily and mental, and have, in fact, a sense of
robustness that we have nowhere else ?

At the same time it requires no gift of prophecy to perceive in the
physical resources and commercial advantages of the country, that an
immense wealth is, in due time, to be developed there ; such wealth as
will give vigor to ah1 institutions and works that require expense, and
put everything on a scale of breadth and magnificence. If there is
any country in the world where the future men are not to be cramped
and whittled by close restrictions, it is California. At present the
Californians say that they are poor ; they feel poor, because they are
now at the dead point of retrocession, where their extravagant ex
pectations are being shortened in for that second beginning which
every new State and city has to make. And yet there is nothing
more wonderful, with all this depression, than the amount of wealth
already created on that shore. How many thousand years of day
labor, has it taken simply to build so many houses, fences, shops,
steamers, ditches, towns, and cities. Three of these cities, San Fran
cisco, Sacramento, and Marysville, have so much of city life and
character that we hardly recognize their newness. And yet only
nine years have passed since all this immense wealth began to be cre
ated ! — and that five thousand miles away, on the shore, as it were,
of another continent.

There is* good and cultivated society in California such as there
never has been in any other State in the Union. The number of
liberally educated men is greater by far than was ever found in any
other State twice the same political age. Carpets, good beds, clean
tables, bright knives and forks, courtesy, hospitality, public entertain
ments and pleasures on a footing of civilizotion — all these indications
of comfort and society are widely diffused. One sign or token of this
kind we cannot forbear to mention, because it signifies much. Passing
hither and thither on the little steamers, up to Marysville, to Stock
ton, to the towns north of the bay, where often the number ef passen
gers did not exceed thirty, we have seen, again and again, a table

"%• * 4 Ji^ '•"
30 CALIFORNIA,

most neatly set, the silver bright and clean, the meats well prepared
and good, without any nonsense of show dishes, the servants tidy,
quiet, and respectful — in short, the whole figure of the entertainment
more rational and better than we have ever seen, either on the boats
of the Mississippi or the Atlantic coast. Such facts indicate society,
more than any most splendid entertainment gotten up by private opu
lence can.

One other consideration must be named, if California is to be well
understood, viz : that with all the violence and savage wrongs, and
dark vices that have heretofore abounded there, they seldom do a
mean thing. They can perpetrate real atrocities, but they must be
generous. A considerable part of their blameable profusions comes of
their extreme jealousy of littleness, or meanness. Men really poor
will often share their last dollar in helping a sick friend, or even a sick
stranger. If a poor minister, whom they have only seen at their
funerals, is known to be on short allowance, they will have a ticketed
supper, not unlikely, to him ; which, if it is not the best way of estab
lishing religion, does at least show their generosity. If a preacher
asks the privilege of addressing them in a gambling saloon, on Sun
day, they are very likely to accede, to hear him respectfully, pass
round a hat and make up a liberal purse for him, then put clown their
stakes and resume their play ! The recent vote of the people to as
sume and pay the State debt was an act of pure magnanimity. Here
was a debt of 15,000,000, the creation of which was expressly forbidden
by the Constitution of the State. This provision of the Constitution
was known, discussed, openly understood, and the loan was obtained
directly in the face of it. The money, too, had gone for nothing but
to feed the political vampires for whose plunder it was raised ; and the
State has not a vestige of property to show for it, but some old
benches that belonged to the State House at Vallejo. If then a
people *have any right, by Constitution, to guard themselves against
being plundered by their rulers, the people of California had a right
to stand upon the restriction so prudently established in their Consti
tution, and were under no obligations, wrhether of right or of honor,
to pay this debt — to refuse was no act of repudiation. But their
instincts were too generous, they had too much pride of feeling to in
sist on their right. Where Mississippi raised a quibble to get off her
honest debt, California took a gratuitous obligation to get it on, and to
fasten it.

There remains a single topic to which, in the conclusion of our arti
cle, already too far extended, we must briefly refer, viz : to the effort
now on foot to establish a College or University in California. The
heaviest detraction, after all, from the future prospects of California, is
in the fact that so many only go thither as adventurers, not meaning
to stay, and that so many, often the most prosperous, are continually
returning. And they do it, in great part, because they cannot edu
cate their families there, as their means allow them to desire. In the

ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS. 31

first place, many never take out their families for this reason, and in
the next place, when they have done it, and their sons are grown up
to the age at which they begin to want the best advantages, they
return with them, and are so lost to the State as a family ; for the
distance, and the moral perils of a separation from parents are so great,
that there is no alternative but a reemigration. This begets an unset
tled feeling in those who remain, which makes them careless often of
the good of the State, and besides it carries off a large per centage of
the wealth created ; for the families that return are commonly such as
have been most successful, and all which they have gained they carry
with them. And the probability is, that if the contemplated railroad
were built across the continent, (which it will not be for a long time to
come,) it would scarcely help them at all, but might rather hasten
them in this losing process.

What they want, therefore, at this time, above all things else, is a
good College, or University. Such an institution would do more to
consolidate and settle their State, and to settle the confidence of their
future, than even the railroad itself. There are no five States together,
in our western world, which, if they had none at all, would want an
institution of this kind so much as California. For the supply of this
want, some of their best and ablest men are preparing. They have
had a charter for three years, organizing the " College of California."
Their Board of Trustees contains a representation of all the Christian
denominations, who are united in cordiality and good understanding.
They are said lately to have fixed on their site — on the eastern side of
the Bay, opposite San Francisco. They have had a preparatory school
for three years past, under the tuition of Rev. Henry Durant, an
accomplished scholar and a Christian, and the design is to organize a
Freshman Class the coming autumn.

What then is now wanted is the endowment, and for this everything
is ready. To obtain this endowment in California, except in part, will
now be impossible. Much of the wealth is not in the right hands ; and
where it is not, where there is every disposition to aid, the possibility
is very much reduced by the heavy loads of debt, which many who
ought to be rich are required just now to carry. When money will
bring three per cent, per month, year by year, on perfect security,
the lending party is not likely to put much of it in a College, and the
borrowing party still less. Are there no great men in the East, no
millionaires or less in computation, who will be induced to look at such
an opportunity ? Had we the fortune of but half a million in our
editorial hands, we are quite sure of this, that whoever might want to
assume the endowment of such an institution would have to be very
quick in his action, or he would lose the chance. What an opportunity
for a man of fortune, who has no object in life, no family to provide for,
or none but such as are already rich enough, and who would be greatly
more ennobled, by his name and example, as the founder of such an
institution, than by all his property without a name. How many such

32 CALIFORNIA, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS.

too, are there, who are really meaning, when they die, to accomplish
some great work with their money ! Why not do it when they are
living, and have a^ satisfaction of a consciousness enriched, and a heart
enlarged by their beneficence ? To have one's name on such an insti
tution as this, connected with the great history, and with all the learn
ing, and all the most forward influences of this New World on the
Pacific, is a thought which might quicken the blood even of a man
most sluggish and dull. For it is to win a greater honor, by many
times, than the President of our great Republic. That is an honor,
which, as the line grows longer, loses more and more its significance,
till finally, it will signify as little to have been one of the Presidents
as to have been one of the Doges of Venice. But the other, like the
names of Harvard and Yale, will brighten and gather to itself a
greater weight and power, as long as the tongue itself may exist.
And the satisfaction one may have in this honor is sublimely justified
in the fact, that he is not merely to be known, or mentioned in the
future ages of the world — that might be a very common ambition,
for who is there who does even naturally desire as much ? — but is
permitted to know that his name is to be a power, and to work for all
the coming ages, growing brighter and doing more good than he him
self while living. That is a legitimate and glorious ambition ^— the
highest that a mortal can cherish. The Trustees, in the Appeal they
published a year ago, placed the subject thus :

" Could some rich citizen, who can do it without injury to himself,
step forward at this time of our beginning, and set his name upon the
institution, itself, by the side of a Harvard or a Yale, by subscribing a
large part of the proposed endowment ; giving us an opportunity, as
sisted by his beginning and example, to carry up the subscription even
to the highest point we have named, he would be enriched by the
sense of his munificence, as no man ever was or can be by the count
of his money. We have no delicacy in respect to the customary
honors conferred by universities, when they set the names of the ben
efactors on the halls, libraries and professorships endowed by their
munificence ; or when they drop the dry, impersonal name of their
charter for one that represents the public spirit, and the living heart
of a living man who could be more than rich, the patron of learning,
the benefactor and father of coming ages. There are monuments
that may well provoke a degree of ambition ; not even an Egyptian
pyramid raised over a man's ashes could so far ennoble him, as to
have the learning and science of long ages and eternal realms of his
tory superscribed to his name. And yet this better kind of monu
ment is itself a power so beneficent, that he ought, even as duty, to
desire it, and for no false modesty decline it. Such monuments are
not like those of stone or brass, which simply stand doing nothing ;
they are monuments eternally fruitful, showing to men's eyes and
ears what belongs to wealth, and what the founders of the times gone
by have set as examples of beneficence." ^S^\&*

TTxr-nrr/RSlTY

THE NOISY CARRIERS'

BOOK & STATIONERY

Commercial Street, between Montgomery and Leidesdorff Streets,

Nail Francisco.

THOMAS N. I1IBBEN having withdrawn from the Noisy Carriers' Book and
Stationery Co., the balance of the Company will continue the "business as heretofore.
and will keep constantly on hand a large assortment of

to be sold cheap for cash.

CHAS. P. KIMBALL, Pres.

PACIFIC FOUNDRY

A N D

M A. C H I ^ E SHOP.

FIRST STREET, BETWEEN MISSION AND HOWARD STREETS.

GODDARD & CO.,

Grateful to their numerous friends for their liberal patronage, are constantly making
additions to their extensive works. Among these is a POWERFUL STEAM HAM
MER, which enables them to execute the largest and heaviest Forge Works, cheaper
than at any other establishment in the city ; and they can, with the greatest confidence,
announce to the public the best Foundry and Machine Shop on the Pacific coast. With
the largest assortment of PATTERNS, and new ones constantly making, wre can
« execute orders on the shortest notice, for

HIGH AND LOW PRESSURE;

Quartz Mills of every Model, and Stampers of White Iron,

superior to any for this use, and imported only by ourselves.

Mining; Pumps of all kinds; Flouring Hills, Gang, Sash, Muley
and Circular Saw Mills,

SHINGLE MACHINES, cutting 24,000 per day, and more perfectly than any other
in use; CAR \VIIEELS and AXLES, of all dimensions ; BUILDING FRONTS,
ROUND, SQUARE and FLUTED COLUMNS ; BALCONY RAILINGS ; HORSE
POWERS ; STOVE and PLOW CASTINGS ; RETORTS, GRATE BARS,
RANGE PLATES, BOILER FRONTS, WATER BACKS, WHEELBARROW
WHEELS, SMUT MILLS, SASH WEIGHTS, BRASS WORK; and indeed,
CASTINGS and MACHINERY of every description whatever.
All Work Warranted according to Order.

Orders from the Country, by Express or otherwise, with a remittance or satisfactory
reference, will be promptly filled.

GODDARD & CO.

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "California, its characteristics and prospects"

See other formats