THE TRAGEDY AT SAN MIGUEL.—COURT AND CULPRITS.—AGE AND CIRCUMSTANCES
OF THOSE WHO SHOULD COME TO CALIFORNIA.—CONDITION OF THE
PROFESSIONS.—THE WRONGS OF CALIFORNIA.—CLAIMS ON THE CHRISTIAN
COMMUNITY.—JOURNALISTS.
Retribution follows fast on the heels of crime in California. Two
persons, a Hessian and Irishman, whom I had met in the Stanislaus, left
the mines for the seaboard. On their way to Stockton, they fell in with
two miners asleep under a tree, whom they murdered and robbed of their
gold; with this booty they hastened across the valley of the San
Joaquin, and skirting the mountains to avoid all frequented paths, held
their course south to La Solidad. Here they fell in with three deserters
from the Pacific squadron, who joined them, and the whole party
proceeded south to San Miguel, where they quartered themselves for the
night on the hospitality of Mr. Reade, an English ranchero of
respectability and wealth. In the morning they took their departure, but
had proceeded only a short distance, when it was agreed they should
return and rob their host. During the ensuing night they rose on the
household, consisting of Mr. Reade, his wife, and three children, a
kinswoman with four children, and two Indian domestics, and murdered the
whole! Having rifled the money-chest of a large amount of gold dust, the
blood-stained party renewed their flight south, and had reached a
secluded cove in a bend of the sea, below Santa Barbara, where they were
overtaken by a band of citizens, who had tracked them from the
neighborhood of San Miguel. The fugitives were armed, and avowed their
determination to shoot down any person who should attempt to apprehend
them. The citizens, though few, and badly provided with weapons, were
resolute and determined. A desperate conflict ensued, in which one of
the felons was shot dead; another, having discharged the last barrel of
his revolver, jumped into the sea and was drowned; the remaining three
were at length disarmed and secured. Of the citizens several were
wounded, and one—the father of a beloved family—lay a corpse! The next
morning, as there was no alcalde in the vicinity, the three prisoners
were brought before a temporary court organized for the purpose, wherein
twelve good and lawful men took oath to render judgment according to
conscience. Each person when brought to the bar told his own story,
inextricably involving his associates in the guilt of deliberate murder,
and who, in their turn, wove the same terrible web about him. Of their
guilt, though convicted without the testimony of an impartial witness,
no doubt remained to disturb the convictions of the court. They were
sentenced to death, and before the sun went down were in their graves!
The whole five were buried among the stern rocks which frown on the sea,
and which seem as if there to stay the tide of crime, as well as the
storms of ocean. What a tragedy of depravity and despair! Thirteen
innocent persons—men, women, and children—swept in an unsuspecting
moment from life; and the five perpetrators of the crime, crushed into a
hurried grave, under the avenging arm of justice! There is a spirit in
California that will rightly dispose of the murderer; it may at times be
hasty, and too little observant of the forms of law, but it reaches its
object; it leaves the guilty no escape through the defects of an
indictment, the ingenuity of counsel, or the clemency of the executive.
It plants itself on the ground that the first duty society owes itself,
is to protect its members; and to secure this object, it throws around
the sanctity of life, the defenses found in the terrors of death. The
grave is the prison which God has sunk in the path of the murderer. Let
not man attempt to bridge it.
WHO SHOULD STAY AND WHO COME.
The indiscretion with which so many thousands are rushing to California
will be a source of regret to them, and of sorrow to their friends. Not
one in twenty will bring back a fortune, and not more than one in ten
secure the means of defraying the expenses of his return. I speak now of
those whose plans and efforts are confined to the mines, and who rely on
the proceeds of their manual labor: when they have defrayed the expenses
incident to their position, liquidated all demands for food, clothing,
and implements for the year, their yellow heap will dwindle to a point.
This might serve as the nucleus of operations which are to extend
through a series of years; but as the result of the enterprise,
involving privation and hardship, is a failure, no man should come to
California under the impression that he can in a few months pick a
fortune out of its mines. He may here and there light on a more
productive deposit, but the chances are a hundred to one that his gains
will be slenderly and laboriously acquired. He is made giddy with the
reports of sudden wealth; these are the rare _prizes_, while the silence
of the grave hangs over the multitudinous _blanks_.
A young man endowed with a vigorous constitution, and who possesses
sterling habits of sobriety and application, and who has no dependencies
at home, can do well in California. But he should come with the resolute
purpose of remaining here eight or ten years, and with a spirit that can
throw its unrelaxed energies into any enterprise which the progress of
the country may develop. He must identify himself for the time being
with all the great interests which absorb attention, and quicken labor.
If he has not the enterprise and force of purpose which this requires,
he should remain at home. There is another class of persons whom
domestic obligations and motives of prudence should dissuade from a
California adventure. It is blind folly in a man, who has a family
dependent on him for a support, to exhaust the little means, which
previous industry and frugality have left, in defraying the expenses of
a passage here, with the vague hope that in a year or two he can return
with an ample competence. I respect his feelings and motives, but
honorable intentions cannot save him from disappointment. When the
expenses which the most rigid economy could not avoid have been paid,
and the obligations connected with the support of his family at home
have been discharged, the results of his enterprise will leave him poor.
He may never tell you of broken hopes and a shattered constitution, but
his hearth-stone is strewn with their pale, admonitory fragments. Let me
persuade those whom God has blessed with a faithful wife and interesting
family, not to abandon these objects of affection for the gold mines of
California. Do not come out here under the delusive belief that you can
in a few months, or a brief year, on the proceeds of the mattock and
bowl, accumulate a fortune. This has rarely if ever been done, even
where the deposits were first disturbed by the more fortunate
adventurer. If it could not be done in the green tree, what are you to
expect in the dry? If when the _placers_ were fresh, many gathered but
little more than sufficient to meet their current wants, what can you
anticipate when they are measurably exhausted? They who inflame your
imagination with tales of inexhaustible deposits which only wait your
spade and wash-bowl, abuse your credulity, and dishonor their own claims
to truth.
THE PROFESSIONS AND PURSUITS.
All the secular professions and more privileged or prescribed pursuits
in California are crowded to overflowing. Physicians are without
patients; lawyers without clients; surveyors without lands;
hydrographers without harbors; actors without audiences; painters
without pupils; financiers without funds; minters without metals;
printers without presses; hunters without hounds, and fiddlers without
fools. And all these must take to the plough, the pickaxe, and spade.
Even California, with all her treasured hills and streams, fell under
that primal malediction which threw its death-shade on the infant world.
It is as true here as among the granite rocks of New England—in the
sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. Let none think to escape this
labor-destiny here; it environs the globe, and binds every nation and
tribe in its inexorable folds.
The merchant, whose shrewdness avails him everywhere else, will often be
wrecked here. The markets of a single month have all the phases of its
fickle moon. The slender crescent waxes into the circle; and the full
orb passes under a total eclipse. The man that figured on its front is
gone, and with him the hopes of the millionaire. The bullfrog in his
croaking pond, and the owl in his hooting tree, remain; but the
speculator, like a ghost at the glimmer of day, hath fled. You can only
dimly remember the phantom’s shape and where he walked, and half doubt
the dream in which he denizened and dissolved from sight. But still the
gulf of vision swarms with realities—with beings where the play of life
and death, joy and grief, wealth and want, are the portion of the living
and the legacy of the dead. California is a continent swelling between
the hopes of the future and the wrecks of the past; but like all other
continents, will be visited with the alternation of day and night. The
cloud will travel where the sunbeam hath been.
WRONGS OF CALIFORNIA.
The neglect and wrongs of California will yet find a tongue. From the
day the United States flag was raised in this country, she has been the
victim of the most unrelenting oppression. Her farmers were robbed of
their stock to meet the exigences of war; and her emigrants forced into
the field to maintain the conquest. Through the exactions of the
custom-house the comforts and necessaries of life were oppressively
taxed. No article of food or raiment could escape this forced
contribution; it reached the plough of the farmer, the anvil of the
smith; the blanket that protected your person, the salt that seasoned
your food, the shingle that roofed your cabin, and the nail that bound
your coffin. Even the light of heaven paid its contribution in its
windowed tariff. And who were the persons on whom these extortions fell?
Citizens whom the government had promised to relieve of taxation, and
emigrants who had exhausted their last means in reaching their new
abode! There was treachery and tyranny combined in the treatment which
they received. A less provocation sunk the dutied tea in the harbor of
Boston, and severed the indignant colonies from the British crown.
Nor does this gross injustice stop here: this oppressive tax was
enforced at a time when there was but little specie in the country; the
whole circulating medium was absorbed in its unrighteous demands. Nor
was the case materially relieved by the discovery of gold; this precious
ore was extorted at ten dollars the ounce, and forfeited at that
arbitrary valuation if not redeemed within a given time. There was no
specie by which it could be redeemed, and it went to the clutches of the
government at ten dollars, when its real value at our mints is eighteen
dollars. If this be not robbery, will some one define what that word
means? It was worse than robbery—it was swindling under the color of
law. All this has been carried on against a community without a
representation in our national legislature, and without any civil
benefits in return. Not even a light-house rose to relieve its onerous
injustice. Hundreds of thousands, not to say millions thus extorted, are
now locked up in the sub-treasury chest at San Francisco. Every
doubloon, dollar, and dime that reaches the country is forced under that
inexorable key. In this absorption of the circulating medium, commercial
loans can be effected only on ruinous rates of interest, and the civil
government itself is bankrupt.
Every dollar of these ill-gotten gains should be placed forthwith at the
disposal of the state of California. It belongs to her; it never was the
property of the United States under any law of Congress. It has been
exacted under executive circulars, under the naked dictates of arbitrary
power. I blame not the revenue functionaries of the general government
in California; they were bound by the orders and instructions which they
received; the responsibility rests nearer home: it rests with those who
have usurped and exercised powers not conferred by the Constitution, or
the consent of the American people. Nor do these aggressions and wrongs
stop here. Who has authorized a captain of U. S. dragoons to drive, at
the point of his flashing glaive, peaceful citizens from their gardens
and dwellings on the bay of San Francisco, under the pretext of a
government reservation, and then to farm out those grounds under a ten
years’ lease? Who has conferred this impudent stretch of authority, and
this private monopoly of the public domain? Let the citizens thus
trampled upon maintain their right, even with their rifles, till they
can be made the proper subjects of judicial investigation or legislative
action.
CLAIMS ON THE CHRISTIAN.
With the Christian community California has higher claims than those
which glitter in her mines. The moral elements which now drift over her
streams and treasured rocks will ere long settle down into abiding
forms. The impalpable will become the real, and the unsubstantial assume
a local habitation and a name. Shall these permanent shapes, into which
society is to be cast, take their plastic features from the impress of
blind accident and skeptical apathy, or the moulding hand of religion?
These primal forms must remain and wear for ages the traces of their
deformity or beauty, their guilty insignificance or moral grandeur.
Through them circulates your own life-blood; in them is bound up the
hopes of an empire. Not only the destiny of California is suspended on
the issue, but the fate of all the republics which cheer the shores of
the Pacific. The same treason to religion which wrecks the institutions
of this country, will sap the foundations of a thousand other glorified
shrines. It is for you, Christian brethren, to prevent such a disaster;
it is for you to pour into California an unremitted tide of holy light.
The Bible must throw its sacred radiance around every hearth, over every
stream, through every mountain glen. The voice of the heralds of
heavenly love must be echoed from every cliff and chasm and forest
sanctuary. On you devolves this mission of Christian fidelity. It is for
your faith and philanthropy to say what California shall be when her
swelling population shall burst the bounds of her domain. You can write
her hopes in ashes, or stars that shall never set. Every school-book and
Bible you throw among her hills will be a source of penetrating and
pervading light, when the torch of the caverned miner has gone out. The
images which you impress on her gold age will efface; but the insignia
of truth, stamped into her ardent heart, will survive the touch of time,
and gleam bright in the night of the grave.
PROPHETIC SHADOWS AND JOURNALISTS.
Coming events cast their shadows before. When Com. Jones, several years
since, captured Monterey, no political seer discovered in the event the
precursor of an actual, permanent possession. No flag waved on the
horoscope save the Mexican; no thunder broke on the ear of the augur,
except what disturbed the wrong quarter of the heaven; and even the
birds, which carried the fate of nations in their sounding beaks, flew
in a wrong direction. But the first occupation, though it came and went
as a shadow, was an omen, which has now become a reality—a great
eventful _fact_ in the history of the age. The commodore, who struck
this first uncertain blow, is now here entrusted with the defence of the
new acquisition. His spirit of intelligence and enterprise is making
itself felt in every department, that justly falls within the
prerogatives of a commander-in-chief.
There are a multitude of topics connected with the wild life and new
condition of affairs in California, which must escape the pen of any one
journalist. Some of them are touched with vivid force in the graphic
pictures of “El Dorado,” others are sketched with lively effect in the
pages of “Los Gringos,” while California as she was, before gold had
cankered her barbaric bliss, is thrown wildly on our vision, by the
author of “Two Years Before the Mast.” Her geography, the habits of her
citizens, and her resources, when little known beyond the furtive
glances of the coaster, are faithfully delineated in the pioneer pages
of Col. Fremont, Capt. Wilkes, and Mr. Robinson. Every traveller can
find in California some new untouched feature for a sketch. They unroll
themselves on the eye at every glance. With the reader they are rather
sources of wonder and amusement, than solid advantage. Our globe was
invested with no claims to utility till it had emerged from chaos; then
verdure clothed its hills and vales; then flowing streams made vocal the
forest aisles; then rolled the anthem of the morning star.