Friday, September 16th. Lat. 38° N., lon. 69° 00' W. A fine
southwest wind; every hour carrying us nearer in toward the land.
All hands on deck at the dog watch, and nothing talked about but
our getting in; where we should make the land; whether we should
arrive before Sunday; going to church; how Boston would look;
friends; wages paid; and the like. Every one was in the best
spirits; and, the voyage being nearly at an end, the strictness
of discipline was relaxed, for it was not necessary to order in
a cross tone what all were ready to do with a will. The differences
and quarrels which a long voyage breeds on board a ship were
forgotten, and every one was friendly; and two men, who had been on
the eve of a fight half the voyage, were laying out a plan together
for a cruise on shore. When the mate came forward, he talked to the
men, and said we should be on George's Bank before to-morrow noon;
and joked with the boys, promising to go and see them, and to take
them down to Marblehead in a coach.
Saturday, 17th. The wind was light all day, which kept us back
somewhat; but a fine breeze springing up at nightfall, we were
running fast in toward the land. At six o'clock we expected to
have the ship hove-to for soundings, as a thick fog, coming up,
showed we were near them; but no order was given, and we kept on
our way. Eight o'clock came, and the watch went below, and, for
the whole of the first hour the ship was driving on, with
studding-sails out, alow and aloft, and the night as dark as a
pocket. At two bells the captain came on deck, and said a word to
the mate, when the studding-sails were hauled into the tops, or
boom-ended, the after yards backed, the deep-sea-lead carried
forward, and everything got ready for sounding. A man on the
spritsail yard with the lead, another on the cat-head with a
handful of the line coiled up, another in the fore chains, another
in the waist, and another in the main chains, each with a quantity
of the line coiled away in his hand. ``All ready there, forward?''--
``Aye, aye, sir!''-- ``He-e-ave!''-- ``Watch! ho! watch!'' sings
out the man on the spritsail yard, and the heavy lead drops into
the water. ``Watch! ho! watch!'' bawls the man on the cat-head, as
the last fake of the coil drops from his hand, and ``Watch! ho!
watch!'' is shouted by each one as the line falls from his hold,
until it comes to the mate, who tends the lead, and has the line
in coils on the quarter-deck. Eighty fathoms and no bottom! A
depth as great as the height of St. Peters! The line is snatched
in a block upon the swifter, and three or four men haul it in and
coil it away. The after yards are braced full, the studding-sails
hauled out again, and in a few minutes more, the ship had her
whole way upon her. At four bells backed again, hove the lead, and--
soundings! at sixty fathoms! Hurrah for Yankee land! Hand over
hand we hauled the lead in, and the captain, taking it to the
light, found black mud on the bottom. Studding-sails taken in;
after yards filled, and ship kept on under easy sail all night,
the wind dying away.
The soundings on the American coast are so regular that a
navigator knows as well where he has made land by the soundings,
as he would by seeing the land. Black mud is the soundings of
Block Island. As you go toward Nantucket, it changes to a dark
sand; then, sand and white shells; and on George's Banks, white
sand; and so on. As our soundings showed us to be off Block
Island, our course was due east, to Nantucket Shoals and the South
Channel; but the wind died away and left us becalmed in a thick
fog, in which we lay the whole of Sunday. At noon of--
Sunday, 18th, Block Island bore, by calculation, N.W. 1/4 W. fifteen
miles; but the fog was so thick all day that we could see nothing.
Having got through the ship's duty, and washed and changed our
clothes, we went below, and had a fine time overhauling our
chests, laying aside the clothes we meant to go ashore in, and
throwing overboard all that were worn out and good for nothing.
Away went the woollen caps in which we had carried hides upon our
heads, for sixteen months, on the coast of California; the duck
frocks for tarring down rigging; and the worn-out and darned
mittens and patched woollen trousers which had stood the tug of
Cape Horn. We hove them overboard with a good will; for there is
nothing like being quit of the very last appendages, remnants, and
mementos of our hard fortune. We got our chests all ready for
going ashore; ate the last ``duff'' we expected to have on board
the ship Alert; and talked as confidently about matters on shore
as though our anchor were on the bottom.
``Who'll go to church with me a week from to-day?''
``I will,'' says Jack; who said aye to everything.
``Go away, salt water!'' says Tom. ``As soon as I get both legs
ashore, I'm going to shoe my heels, and button my ears behind me,
and start off into the bush, a straight course, and not stop till
I'm out of the sight of salt water!''
``Oh! belay that! If you get once moored, stem and stern, in old
Barnes's grog-shop, with a coal fire ahead and the bar under your
lee, you won't see daylight for three weeks!''
``No!'' says Tom, ``I'm going to knock off grog and go and board
at the Home, and see if they won't ship me for a deacon!''
``And I,'' says Bill, ``am going to buy a quadrant and ship for
navigator of a Hingham packet!''
Harry White swore he would take rooms at the Tremont House and set
up for a gentleman; he knew his wages would hold out for two weeks
or so.
These and the like served to pass the time while we were lying
waiting for a breeze to clear up the fog and send us on our way.
Toward night a moderate breeze sprang up; the fog, however,
continuing as thick as before; and we kept on to the eastward.
About the middle of the first watch, a man on the forecastle sang
out, in a tone which showed that there was not a moment to be
lost,-- ``Hard up the helm!'' and a great ship loomed up out of
the fog, coming directly down upon us. She luffed at the same
moment, and we just passed each other, our spanker boom grazing
over her quarter. The officer of the deck had only time to hail,
and she answered, as she went into the fog again, something about
Bristol. Probably a whaleman from Bristol, Rhode Island, bound
out. The fog continued through the night, with a very light
breeze, before which we ran to the eastward, literally feeling our
way along. The lead was heaved every two hours, and the gradual
change from black mud to sand showed that we were approaching
Nantucket South Shoals. On Monday morning, the increased depth and
dark-blue color of the water, and the mixture of shells and white
sand which we brought up, upon sounding, showed that we were in
the channel, and nearing George's; accordingly, the ship's head
was put directly to the northward, and we stood on, with perfect
confidence in the soundings, though we had not taken an
observation for two days, nor seen land; and the difference of an
eighth of a mile out of the way might put us ashore. Throughout
the day a provokingly light wind prevailed, and at eight o'clock,
a small fishing schooner, which we passed, told us we were nearly
abreast of Chatham lights. Just before midnight, a light
land-breeze sprang up, which carried us well along; and at four
o'clock, thinking ourselves to the northward of Race Point, we
hauled upon the wind and stood into the bay, west-northwest, for
Boston light, and began firing guns for a pilot. Our watch went
below at four o'clock, but could not sleep, for the watch on deck
were banging away at the guns every few minutes. And indeed, we
cared very little about it, for we were in Boston Bay; and if
fortune favored us, we could all ``sleep in'' the next night, with
nobody to call the watch every four hours.
We turned out, of our own will, at daybreak, to get a sight of
land. In the gray of the morning, one or two small fishing smacks
peered out of the mist; and when the broad day broke upon us,
there lay the low sand-hills of Cape Cod over our larboard
quarter, and before us the wide waters of Massachusetts Bay, with
here and there a sail gliding over its smooth surface. As we drew
in toward the mouth of the harbor, as toward a focus, the vessels
began to multiply, until the bay seemed alive with sails gliding
about in all directions; some on the wind, and others before it,
as they were bound to or from the emporium of trade and centre of
the bay. It was a stirring sight for us, who had been months on
the ocean without seeing anything but two solitary sails; and over
two years without seeing more than the three or four traders on an
almost desolate coast. There were the little coasters, bound to
and from the various towns along the south shore, down in the
bight of the bay, and to the eastward; here and there a
square-rigged vessel standing out to seaward; and, far in the
distance, beyond Cape Ann, was the smoke of a steamer, stretching
along in a narrow black cloud upon the water. Every sight was full
of beauty and interest. We were coming back to our homes; and the
signs of civilization and prosperity and happiness, from which we
had been so long banished, were multiplying about us. The high
land of Cape Ann and the rocks and shore of Cohasset were full in
sight, the light-houses standing like sentries in white before the
harbors; and even the smoke from the chimneys on the plains of
Hingham was seen rising slowly in the morning air. One of our boys
was the son of a bucket-maker; and his face lighted up as he saw
the tops of the well-known hills which surround his native place.
About ten o'clock a little boat came bobbing over the water, and
put a pilot on board, and sheered off in pursuit of other vessels
bound in. Being now within the scope of the telegraph stations,
our signals were run up at the fore; and in half an hour
afterwards, the owner on 'Change, or in his counting-room, knew
that his ship was below; and the landlords, runners, and sharks in
Ann Street learned that there was a rich prize for them down in
the bay,-- a ship from round the Horn, with a crew to be paid off
with two years' wages.
The wind continuing very light, all hands were sent aloft to strip
off the chafing gear; and battens, parcellings, roundings, hoops,
mats, and leathers came flying from aloft, and left the rigging
neat and clean, stripped of all its sea bandaging. The last touch
was put to the vessel by painting the skysail poles; and I was
sent up to the fore, with a bucket of white paint and a brush, and
touched her off, from the truck to the eyes of the royal rigging.
At noon we lay becalmed off the lower light-house; and, it being
about slack water, we made little progress. A firing was heard in
the direction of Hingham, and the pilot said there was a review
there. The Hingham boy got wind of this, and said if the ship had
been twelve hours sooner he should have been down among the
soldiers, and in the booths, and having a grand time. As it was,
we had little prospect of getting in before night. About two
o'clock a breeze sprang up ahead, from the westward, and we began
beating up against it. A full-rigged brig was beating in at the
same time, and we passed each other in our tacks, sometimes one
and sometimes the other working to windward, as the wind and tide
favored or opposed. It was my trick at the wheel from two till
four; and I stood my last helm, making between nine hundred and a
thousand hours which I had spent at the helms of our two vessels.
The tide beginning to set against us, we made slow work; and the
afternoon was nearly spent before we got abreast of the inner
light. In the meanwhile, several vessels were coming down, outward
bound; among which, a fine, large ship, with yards squared, fair
wind and fair tide, passed us like a race-horse, the men running
out upon her yards to rig out the studding-sail booms. Toward
sundown the wind came off in flaws, sometimes blowing very stiff,
so that the pilot took in the royals, and then it died away; when,
in order to get us in before the tide became too strong, the
royals were set again. As this kept us running up and down the
rigging, one hand was sent aloft at each mast-head, to stand by to
loose and furl the sails at the moment of the order. I took my
place at the fore, and loosed and furled the royal five times
between Rainsford Island and the Castle. At one tack we ran so
near to Rainsford Island that, looking down from the royal yard,
the island, with its hospital buildings, nice gravelled walks, and
green plats, seemed to lie directly under our yard-arms. So close
is the channel to some of these islands, that we ran the end of
our flying-jib-boom over one of the outworks of the fortifications
on George's Island; and had an opportunity of seeing the
advantages of that point as a fortified place; for, in working up
the channel, we presented a fair stem and stern, for raking, from
the batteries, three or four times. One gun might have knocked us
to pieces.
We had all set our hearts upon getting up to town before night and
going ashore, but the tide beginning to run strong against us, and
the wind, what there was of it, being ahead, we made but little by
weather-bowing the tide, and the pilot gave orders to cock-bill
the anchor and overhaul the chain. Making two long stretches,
which brought us into the roads, under the lee of the Castle, he
clewed up the topsails, and let go the anchor; and for the first
time since leaving San Diego,-- one hundred and thirty-five days,--
our anchor was upon bottom. In half an hour more, we were lying
snugly, with all sails furled, safe in Boston harbor; our long
voyage ended; the well-known scene about us; the dome of the State
House fading in the western sky; the lights of the city starting
into sight, as the darkness came on; and at nine o'clock the
clangor of the bells, ringing their accustomed peals; among which
the Boston boys tried to distinguish the well-known tone of the
Old South.
We had just done furling the sails, when a beautiful little
pleasure-boat luffed up into the wind, under our quarter, and the
junior partner of the firm to which our ship belonged, Mr. Hooper,
jumped on board. I saw him from the mizzen-topsail yard, and knew
him well. He shook the captain by the hand, and went down into the
cabin, and in a few minutes came up and inquired of the mate for
me. The last time I had seen him I was in the uniform of an
undergraduate of Harvard College, and now, to his astonishment,
there came down from aloft a ``rough alley'' looking fellow, with
duck trousers and red shirt, long hair, and face burnt as dark as
an Indian's. We shook hands, and he congratulated me upon my
return and my appearance of health and strength, and said that my
friends were all well. He had seen some of my family a few days
before. I thanked him for telling me what I should not have dared
to ask; and if--
``The first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office; and his tongue
Sounds ever after like a sullen bell,''--
certainly I ought ever to remember this gentleman and his words
with pleasure.
The captain went up to town in the boat with Mr. Hooper, and left
us to pass another night on board ship, and to come up with the
morning's tide under command of the pilot.
So much did we feel ourselves to be already at home, in
anticipation, that our plain supper of hard bread and salt beef
was barely touched; and many on board, to whom this was the first
voyage, could scarcely sleep. As for myself, by one of those
anomalous changes of feeling of which we are all the subjects, I
found that I was in a state of indifference for which I could by
no means account. A year before, while carrying hides on the
coast, the assurance that in a twelvemonth we should see Boston
made me half wild; but now that I was actually there, and in sight
of home, the emotions which I had so long anticipated feeling I
did not find, and in their place was a state of very nearly entire
apathy. Something of the same experience was related to me by a
sailor whose first voyage was one of five years upon the Northwest
Coast. He had left home a lad, and when, after so many years of
hard and trying experience, he found himself homeward bound, such
was the excitement of his feelings that, during the whole passage,
he could talk and think of nothing else but his arrival, and how
and when he should jump from the vessel and take his way directly
home. Yet, when the vessel was made fast to the wharf and the crew
dismissed, he seemed suddenly to lose all feeling about the
matter. He told me that he went below and changed his dress; took
some water from the scuttle-butt and washed himself leisurely;
overhauled his chest, and put his clothes all in order; took his
pipe from its place, filled it, and, sitting down upon his chest,
smoked it slowly for the last time. Here he looked round upon the
forecastle in which he had spent so many years, and being alone
and his shipmates scattered, began to feel actually unhappy. Home
became almost a dream; and it was not until his brother (who had
heard of the ship's arrival) came down into the forecastle and
told him of things at home, and who were waiting there to see him,
that he could realize where he was, and feel interest enough to
put him in motion toward that place for which he had longed, and
of which he had dreamed, for years. There is probably so much of
excitement in prolonged expectation that the quiet realizing of it
produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as of effort.
It was a good deal so with me. The activity of preparation, the
rapid progress of the ship, the first making land, the coming up
the harbor, and old scenes breaking upon the view, produced a
mental as well as bodily activity, from which the change to a
perfect stillness, when both expectation and the necessity of
labor failed, left a calmness, almost an indifference, from which
I must be roused by some new excitement. And the next morning,
when all hands were called, and we were busily at work, clearing
the decks, and getting everything in readiness for going up to the
wharves,-- loading the guns for a salute, loosing the sails, and
manning the windlass,-- mind and body seemed to wake together.
About ten o'clock a sea-breeze sprang up, and the pilot gave
orders to get the ship under way. All hands manned the windlass,
and the long-drawn ``Yo, heave, ho!'' which we had last heard
dying away among the desolate hills of San Diego, soon brought the
anchor to the bows; and, with a fair wind and tide, a bright sunny
morning, royals and skysails set, ensign, streamer, signals, and
pennant flying, and with our guns firing, we came swiftly and
handsomely up to the city. Off the end of the wharf, we
rounded-to, and let go our anchor; and no sooner was it on the
bottom than the decks were filled with people: custom-house
officers; Topliff's agent, to inquire for news; others, inquiring
for friends on board, or left upon the coast; dealers in grease,
besieging the galley to make a bargain with the cook for his
slush; ``loafers'' in general; and, last and chief, boarding-house
runners, to secure their men. Nothing can exceed the obliging
disposition of these runners, and the interest they take in a
sailor returned from a long voyage with a plenty of money. Two or
three of them, at different times, took me by the hand; pretended
to remember me perfectly; were quite sure I had boarded with them
before I sailed; were delighted to see me back; gave me their
cards; had a hand-cart waiting on the wharf, on purpose to take my
things up; would lend me a hand to get my chest ashore; bring a
bottle of grog on board if we did not haul in immediately; and the
like. In fact, we could hardly get clear of them to go aloft and
furl the sails. Sail after sail, for the hundredth time, in fair
weather and in foul, we furled now for the last time together, and
came down and took the warp ashore, manned the capstan, and with a
chorus which waked up half North End, and rang among the buildings
in the dock, we hauled her in to the wharf.[1] The city bells were
just ringing one when the last turn was made fast and the crew
dismissed; and in five minutes more not a soul was left on board
the good ship Alert but the old ship-keeper, who had come down
from the counting-house to take charge of her.
[1] [Sept. 21, 1836.]
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER
It was in the winter of 1835-6 that the ship Alert, in the
prosecution of her voyage for hides on the remote and almost
unknown coast of California, floated into the vast solitude of the
Bay of San Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One
vessel, a Russian, lay at anchor there, but during our whole stay
not a sail came or went. Our trade was with remote Missions, which
sent hides to us in launches manned by their Indians. Our
anchorage was between a small island, called Yerba Buena, and a
gravel beach in a little bight or cove of the same name, formed by
two small, projecting points. Beyond, to the westward of the
landing-place, were dreary sand-hills, with little grass to be
seen, and few trees, and beyond them higher hills, steep and
barren, their sides gullied by the rains. Some five or six miles
beyond the landing-place, to the right, was a ruinous Presidio,
and some three or four miles to the left was the Mission of
Dolores, as ruinous as the Presidio, almost deserted, with but few
Indians attached to it, and but little property in cattle. Over a
region far beyond our sight there were no other human habitations,
except that an enterprising Yankee, years in advance of his time,
had put up, on the rising ground above the landing, a shanty of
rough boards, where he carried on a very small retail trade
between the hide ships and the Indians. Vast banks of fog,
invading us from the North Pacific, drove in through the entrance,
and covered the whole bay; and when they disappeared, we saw a few
well-wooded islands, the sand-hills on the west, the grassy and
wooded slopes on the east, and the vast stretch of the bay to the
southward, where we were told lay the Missions of Santa Clara and
San José, and still longer stretches to the northward and
northeastward, where we understood smaller bays spread out, and
large rivers poured in their tributes of waters. There were no
settlements on these bays or rivers, and the few ranchos and
Missions were remote and widely separated. Not only the
neighborhood of our anchorage, but the entire region of the great
bay, was a solitude. On the whole coast of California there was
not a light-house, a beacon, or a buoy, and the charts were made
up from old and disconnected surveys by British, Russian, and
Mexican voyagers. Birds of prey and passage swooped and dived
about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak groves, and as we
slowly floated out of the harbor with the tide, herds of deer came
to the water's edge, on the northerly side of the entrance, to
gaze at the strange spectacle.
On the evening of Saturday, the 13th of August, 1859, the superb
steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting
the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of
red, green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and
staterooms, bound up from the Isthmus of Panama, neared the
entrance to San Francisco, the great centre of a world-wide
commerce. Miles out at sea, on the desolate rocks of the
Farallones, gleamed the powerful rays of one of the most costly
and effective light-houses in the world. As we drew in through the
Golden Gate, another light-house met our eyes, and in the clear
moonlight of the unbroken California summer we saw, on the right,
a large fortification protecting the narrow entrance, and just
before us the little island of Alcatraz confronted us,-- one
entire fortress. We bore round the point toward the old
anchoring-ground of the hide ships, and there, covering the
sand-hills and the valleys, stretching from the water's edge to
the base of the great hills, and from the old Presidio to the
Mission, flickering all over with the lamps of its streets and
houses, lay a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. Clocks
tolled the hour of midnight from its steeples, but the city was
alive from the salute of our guns, spreading the news that the
fortnightly steamer had come, bringing mails and passengers from
the Atlantic world. Clipper ships of the largest size lay at
anchor in the stream, or were girt to the wharves; and capacious
high-pressure steamers, as large and showy as those of the Hudson
or Mississippi, bodies of dazzling light, awaited the delivery of
our mails to take their courses up the Bay, stopping at Benicia
and the United States Naval Station, and then up the great
tributaries-- the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Feather Rivers-- to
the far inland cities of Sacramento, Stockton, and Marysville.
The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were
densely crowded with express wagons and hand-carts to take
luggage, coaches and cabs for passengers, and with men,-- some
looking out for friends among our hundreds of passengers,-- agents
of the press, and a greater multitude eager for newspapers and
verbal intelligence from the great Atlantic and European world.
Through this crowd I made my way, along the well-built and
well-lighted streets, as alive as by day, where boys in high-keyed
voices were already crying the latest New York papers; and between
one and two o'clock in the morning found myself comfortably abed
in a commodious room, in the Oriental Hotel, which stood, as well
as I could learn, on the filled-up cove, and not far from the spot
where we used to beach our boats from the Alert.
Sunday, August 14th. When I awoke in the morning, and looked from
my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses,
towers, and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals;
its daily journals; its well-filled learned professions; its
fortresses and light-houses; its wharves and harbor, with their
thousand-ton clipper ships, more in number than London or
Liverpool sheltered that day, itself one of the capitals of the
American Republic, and the sole emporium of a new world, the
awakened Pacific; when I looked across the bay to the eastward,
and beheld a beautiful town on the fertile, wooded shores of the
Contra Costa, and steamers, large and small, the ferryboats to the
Contra Costa, and capacious freighters and passenger-carriers to
all parts of the great bay and its tributaries, with lines of
their smoke in the horizon,-- when I saw all these things, and
reflected on what I once was and saw here, and what now surrounded
me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all, or the
genuineness of anything, and seemed to myself like one who had
moved in ``worlds not realized.''
I could not complain that I had not a choice of places of worship.
The Roman Catholics have an archbishop, a cathedral, and five or
six smaller churches, French, German, Spanish, and English; and
the Episcopalians a bishop, a cathedral, and three other churches;
the Methodists and Presbyterians have three or four each, and
there are Congregationalists, Baptists, a Unitarian, and other
societies. On my way to church, I met two classmates of mine at
Harvard standing in a door-way, one a lawyer and the other a
teacher, and made appointments for a future meeting. A little
farther on I came upon another Harvard man, a fine scholar and
wit, and full of cleverness and good-humor, who invited me to go
to breakfast with him at the French house,-- he was a bachelor,
and a late riser on Sundays. I asked him to show me the way to
Bishop Kip's church. He hesitated, looked a little confused, and
admitted that he was not as well up in certain classes of
knowledge as in others, but, by a desperate guess, pointed out a
wooden building at the foot of the street, which any one might
have seen could not be right, and which turned out to be an
African Baptist meeting-house. But my friend had many capital
points of character, and I owed much of the pleasure of my visit
to his attentions.
The congregation at the Bishop's church was precisely like one you
would meet in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. To be sure, the
identity of the service makes one feel at once at home, but the
people were alike, nearly all of the English race, though from all
parts of the Union. The latest French bonnets were at the head of
the chief pews, and business men at the foot. The music was
without character, but there was an instructive sermon, and the
church was full.
I found that there were no services at any of the Protestant
churches in the afternoon. They have two services on Sunday; at 11
A.M., and after dark. The afternoon is spent at home, or in
friendly visiting, or teaching of Sunday Schools, or other humane
and social duties.
This is as much the practice with what at home are called the
strictest denominations as with any others. Indeed, I found
individuals, as well as public bodies, affected in a marked degree
by a change of oceans and by California life. One Sunday afternoon
I was surprised at receiving the card of a man whom I had last
known, some fifteen years ago, as a strict and formal deacon of a
Congregational Society in New England. He was a deacon still, in
San Francisco, a leader in all pious works, devoted to his
denomination and to total abstinence,-- the same internally, but
externally-- what a change! Gone was the downcast eye, the bated
breath, the solemn, non-natural voice, the watchful gait, stepping
as if he felt responsible for the balance of the moral universe!
He walked with a stride, an uplifted open countenance, his face
covered with beard, whiskers, and mustache, his voice strong and
natural,-- and, in short, he had put off the New England deacon
and become a human being. In a visit of an hour I learned much
from him about the religious societies, the moral reforms, the
``Dashaways,''-- total abstinence societies, which had taken
strong hold on the young and wilder parts of society,-- and then
of the Vigilance Committee, of which he was a member, and of more
secular points of interest.
In one of the parlors of the hotel, I saw a man of about sixty
years of age, with his feet bandaged and resting in a chair, whom
somebody addressed by the name of Lies.[1] Lies! thought I, that
must be the man who came across the country from Kentucky to
Monterey while we lay there in the Pilgrim in 1835, and made a
passage in the Alert, when he used to shoot with his rifle bottles
hung from the top-gallant studding-sail-boom-ends. He married the
beautiful Doña Rosalía Vallejo, sister of Don Guadalupe. There
were the old high features and sandy hair. I put my chair beside
him, and began conversation, as any one may do in California. Yes,
he was the Mr. Lies; and when I gave my name he professed at once
to remember me, and spoke of my book. I found that almost-- I
might perhaps say quite-- every American in California had read
it; for when California ``broke out,'' as the phrase is, in 1848,
and so large a portion of the Anglo-Saxon race flocked to it,
there was no book upon California but mine. Many who were on the
coast at the time the book refers to, and afterwards read it, and
remembered the Pilgrim and Alert, thought they also remembered me.
But perhaps more did remember me than I was inclined at first to
believe, for the novelty of a collegian coming out before the mast
had drawn more attention to me than I was aware of at the time.
Late in the afternoon, as there were vespers at the Roman Catholic
churches, I went to that of Notre Dame des Victoires. The
congregation was French, and a sermon in French was preached by an
Abbé; the music was excellent, all things airy and tasteful, and
making one feel as if in one of the chapels in Paris. The
Cathedral of St. Mary, which I afterwards visited, where the Irish
attend, was a contrast indeed, and more like one of our stifling
Irish Catholic churches in Boston or New York, with intelligence
in so small a proportion to the number of faces. During the three
Sundays I was in San Francisco, I visited three of the Episcopal
churches, and the Congregational, a Chinese Mission Chapel, and on
the Sabbath (Saturday) a Jewish synagogue. The Jews are a wealthy
and powerful class here. The Chinese, too, are numerous, and do a
great part of the manual labor and small shop-keeping, and have
some wealthy mercantile houses.
It is noticeable that European Continental fashions prevail
generally in this city,-- French cooking, lunch at noon, and
dinner at the end of the day, with café noir after meals, and to a
great extent the European Sunday,-- to all which emigrants from
the United States and Great Britain seem to adapt themselves. Some
dinners which were given to me at French restaurants were, it
seemed to me,-- a poor judge of such matters, to be sure,-- as
sumptuous and as good, in dishes and wines, as I have found in
Paris. But I had a relish-maker which my friends at table did not
suspect,-- the remembrance of the forecastle dinners I ate here
twenty-four years before.
August 17th. The customs of California are free; and any person
who knows about my book speaks to me. The newspapers have
announced the arrival of the veteran pioneer of all. I hardly walk
out without meeting or making acquaintances. I have already been
invited to deliver the anniversary oration before the Pioneer
Society, to celebrate the settlement of San Francisco. Any man is
qualified for election into this society who came to California
before 1853. What moderns they are! I tell them of the time when
Richardson's shanty of 1835-- not his adobe house of 1836-- was
the only human habitation between the Mission and the Presidio,
and when the vast bay, with all its tributaries and recesses, was
a solitude,-- and yet I am but little past forty years of age.
They point out the place where Richardson's adobe house stood, and
tell me that the first court and first town council were convened
in it, the first Protestant worship performed in it, and in it the
first capital trial by the Vigilance Committee held. I am taken
down to the wharves, by antiquaries of a ten or twelve years'
range, to identify the two points, now known as Clark's and
Rincon, which formed the little cove of Yerba Buena, where we used
to beach our boats,-- now filled up and built upon. The island we
called ``Wood Island,'' where we spent the cold days and nights of
December, in our launch, getting wood for our year's supply, is
clean shorn of trees; and the bare rocks of Alcatraz Island, an
entire fortress. I have looked at the city from the water, and at
the water and islands from the city, but I can see nothing that
recalls the times gone by, except the venerable Mission, the
ruinous Presidio, the high hills in the rear of the town, and the
great stretches of the bay in all directions.
To-day I took a California horse of the old style,-- the run, the
loping gait,-- and visited the Presidio. The walls stand as they
did, with some changes made to accommodate a small garrison of
United States troops. It has a noble situation, and I saw from it
a clipper ship of the very largest class, coming through the Gate,
under her fore-and-aft sails. Thence I rode to the Fort, now
nearly finished, on the southern shore of the Gate, and made an
inspection of it. It is very expensive and of the latest style.
One of the engineers here is Custis Lee, who has just left West
Point at the head of his class,-- a son of Colonel Robert E. Lee,
who distinguished himself in the Mexican War.[2]
Another morning I ride to the Mission Dolores. It has a strangely
solitary aspect, enhanced by its surroundings of the most
uncongenial, rapidly growing modernisms; the hoar of ages
surrounded by the brightest, slightest, and rapidest of modern
growths. Its old belfries still clanged with the discordant bells,
and Mass was saying within, for it is used as a place of worship
for the extreme south part of the city.
In one of my walks about the wharves, I found a pile of dry hides
lying by the side of a vessel. Here was something to feelingly
persuade me what I had been, to recall a past scarce credible to
myself. I stood lost in reflection. What were these hides-- what
were they not?-- to us, to me, a boy, twenty-four years ago? These
were our constant labor, our chief object, our almost habitual
thought. They brought us out here, they kept us here, and it was
only by getting them that we could escape from the coast and
return to home and civilized life. If it had not been that I might
be seen, I should have seized one, slung it over my head, walked
off with it, and thrown it by the old toss-- I do not believe yet
a lost art-- to the ground. How they called up to my mind the
months of curing at San Diego, the year and more of beach and surf
work, and the steeving of the ship for home! I was in a dream of
San Diego, San Pedro,-- with its hill so steep for taking up
goods, and its stones so hard to our bare feet,-- and the cliffs
of San Juan! All this, too, is no more! The entire hide-business
is of the past, and to the present inhabitants of California a dim
tradition. The gold discoveries drew off all men from the
gathering or cure of hides, the inflowing population made an end
of the great droves of cattle; and now not a vessel pursues the--
I was about to say dear-- the dreary, once hated business of
gathering hides upon the coast, and the beach of San Diego is
abandoned and its hide-houses have disappeared. Meeting a
respectable-looking citizen on the wharf, I inquired of him how
the hide-trade was carried on. ``O,'' said he, ``there is very
little of it, and that is all here. The few that are brought in
are placed under sheds in winter, or left out on the wharf in
summer, and are loaded from the wharves into the vessels
alongside. They form parts of cargoes of other materials.'' I
really felt too much, at the instant, to express to him the cause
of my interest in the subject, and only added, ``Then the old
business of trading up and down the coast and curing hides for
cargoes is all over?'' ``O yes, sir,'' said he, ``those old times
of the Pilgrim and Alert and California, that we read about, are
gone by.''
Saturday, August 20th. The steamer Senator makes regular trips up
and down the coast, between San Francisco and San Diego, calling
at intermediate ports. This is my opportunity to revisit the old
scenes. She sails to-day, and I am off, steaming among the great
clippers anchored in the harbor, and gliding rapidly round the
point, past Alcatraz Island, the light-house, and through the
fortified Golden Gate, and bending to the southward,-- all done in
two or three hours, which, in the Alert, under canvas, with head
tides, variable winds, and sweeping currents to deal with, took us
full two days.
Among the passengers I noticed an elderly gentleman, thin, with
sandy hair and a face that seemed familiar. He took off his glove
and showed one shrivelled hand. It must be he! I went to him and
said, ``Captain Wilson, I believe.'' Yes, that was his name. ``I knew
you, sir, when you commanded the Ayacucho on this coast, in old
hide-droghing times, in 1835-6.'' He was quickened by this, and at
once inquiries were made on each side, and we were in full talk
about the Pilgrim and Alert, Ayacucho and Loriotte, the California
and Lagoda. I found he had been very much flattered by the praise
I had bestowed in my book on his seamanship, especially in bringing
the Pilgrim to her berth in San Diego harbor, after she had drifted
successively into the Lagoda and Loriotte, and was coming into him.
I had made a pet of his brig, the Ayacucho, which pleased him almost
as much as my remembrance of his bride and their wedding, which
I saw at Santa Barbara in 1836. Doña Ramona was now the mother of a
large family, and Wilson assured me that if I would visit him at his
rancho, near San Luis Obispo, I should find her still a handsome
woman, and very glad to see me. How we walked the deck together,
hour after hour, talking over the old times,-- the ships, the
captains, the crews, the traders on shore, the ladies, the Missions,
the southeasters! indeed, where could we stop? He had sold the
Ayacucho in Chili for a vessel of war, and had given up the sea,
and had been for years a ranchero. (I learned from others that he
had become one of the most wealthy and respectable farmers in the
State, and that his rancho was well worth visiting.) Thompson, he
said, hadn't the sailor in him; and he never could laugh enough at
his fiasco in San Diego, and his reception by Bradshaw. Faucon was
a sailor and a navigator. He did not know what had become of George
Marsh (ante, pp. 255-258), except that he left him in Callao; nor
could he tell me anything of handsome Bill Jackson (ante, p. 104),
nor of Captain Nye of the Loriotte. I told him all I then knew
of the ships, the masters, and the officers. I found he had kept
some run of my history, and needed little information. Old Señor
Noriego of Santa Barbara, he told me, was dead, and Don Carlos and
Don Santiago, but I should find their children there, now in
middle life. Doña Angustias, he said, I had made famous by my
praises of her beauty and dancing, and I should have from her a
royal reception. She had been a widow, and remarried since, and
had a daughter as handsome as herself. The descendants of Noriego
had taken the ancestral name of De la Guerra, as they were nobles
of Old Spain by birth; and the boy Pablo, who used to make
passages in the Alert, was now Don Pablo de la Guerra, a Senator
in the State Legislature for Santa Barbara County.
The points in the country, too, we noticed, as we passed them,--
Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Point Año Nuevo, the opening to
Monterey, which to my disappointment we did not visit. No;
Monterey, the prettiest town on the coast, and its capital and
seat of customs, had got no advantage from the great changes, was
out of the way of commerce and of the travel to the mines and
great rivers, and was not worth stopping at. Point Conception we
passed in the night, a cheery light gleaming over the waters from
its tall light-house, standing on its outermost peak. Point
Conception! That word was enough to recall all our experiences and
dreads of gales, swept decks, topmast carried away, and the
hardships of a coast service in the winter. But Captain Wilson
tells me that the climate has altered; that the southeasters are
no longer the bane of the coast they once were, and that vessels
now anchor inside the kelp at Santa Barbara and San Pedro all the
year round. I should have thought this owing to his spending his
winters on a rancho instead of the deck of the Ayacucho, had not
the same thing been told me by others.
Passing round Point Conception, and steering easterly, we opened
the islands that form, with the main-land, the canal of Santa
Barbara. There they are, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa; and there is
the beautiful point, Santa Buenaventura; and there lies Santa
Barbara on its plain, with its amphitheatre of high hills and
distant mountains. There is the old white Mission with its
belfries, and there the town, with its one-story adobe houses,
with here and there a two-story wooden house of later build; yet
little is it altered,-- the same repose in the golden sunlight and
glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful
than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the
same grand surf of the great Pacific as on the beautiful day when
the Pilgrim, after her five months' voyage, dropped her weary
anchors here; the same bright blue ocean, and the surf making just
the same monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town,
and gleaming white Mission, as when we beached our boats for the
first time, riding over the breakers with shouting Kanakas, the
three small hide-traders lying at anchor in the offing. But now we
are the only vessel, and that an unromantic, sail-less, spar-less,
engine-driven hulk!
I landed in the surf, in the old style, but it was not high enough
to excite us, the only change being that I was somehow
unaccountably a passenger, and did not have to jump overboard and
steady the boat, and run her up by the gunwales.
Santa Barbara has gained but little. I should not know, from
anything I saw, that she was now a seaport of the United States, a
part of the enterprising Yankee nation, and not still a lifeless
Mexican town. At the same old house, where Señor Noriego lived, on
the piazza in front of the court-yard, where was the gay scene of
the marriage of our agent, Mr. Robinson, to Doña Anita, where Don
Juan Bandini and Doña Angustias danced, Don Pablo de la Guerra
received me in a courtly fashion. I passed the day with the
family, and in walking about the place; and ate the old dinner
with its accompaniments of fríjoles, native olives and grapes, and
native wines. In due time I paid my respects to Doña Angustias,
and, notwithstanding what Wilson told me, I could hardly believe
that after twenty-four years there would still be so much of the
enchanting woman about her. She thanked me for the kind and, as
she called them, greatly exaggerated compliments I had paid her;
and her daughter told me that all travellers who came to Santa
Barbara called to see her mother, and that she herself never
expected to live long enough to be a belle.
Mr. Alfred Robinson, our agent in 1835-6, was here, with a part of
his family. I did not know how he would receive me, remembering
what I had printed to the world about him at a time when I took
little thought that the world was going to read it; but there was
no sign of offence, only a cordiality which gave him, as between
us, rather the advantage in status.
The people of this region are giving attention to sheep-raising,
wine-making, and the raising of olives, just enough to keep the
town from going backwards.
But evening is drawing on, and our boat sails to-night. So,
refusing a horse or carriage, I walk down, not unwilling to be a
little early, that I may pace up and down the beach, looking off
to the islands and the points, and watching the roaring, tumbling
billows. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us
through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the
passing away of something loved and dear,-- the boats, the
Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance,
lend them a character which makes them quite another thing from
the vulgar, wearisome toil of uninteresting, forced manual labor.
The breeze freshened as we stood out to sea, and the wild waves
rolled over the red sun, on the broad horizon of the Pacific; but
it is summer, and in summer there can be no bad weather in
California. Every day is pleasant. Nature forbids a drop of rain
to fall by day or night, or a wind to excite itself beyond a fresh
summer breeze.
The next morning we found ourselves at anchor in the Bay of San
Pedro. Here was this hated, this thoroughly detested spot.
Although we lay near, I could scarce recognize the hill up which
we rolled and dragged and pushed and carried our heavy loads, and
down which we pitched the hides, to carry them barefooted over the
rocks to the floating long-boat. It was no longer the
landing-place. One had been made at the head of the creek, and
boats discharged and took off cargoes from a mole or wharf, in a
quiet place, safe from southeasters. A tug ran to take off
passengers from the steamer to the wharf,-- for the trade of Los
Angeles is sufficient to support such a vessel. I got the captain
to land me privately, in a small boat, at the old place by the
hill. I dismissed the boat, and, alone, found my way to the high
ground. I say found my way, for neglect and weather had left but
few traces of the steep road the hide-vessels had built to the
top. The cliff off which we used to throw the hides, and where I
spent nights watching them, was more easily found. The population
was doubled, that is to say, there were two houses, instead of
one, on the hill. I stood on the brow and looked out toward the
offing, the Santa Catalina Island, and, nearer, the melancholy
Dead Man's Island, with its painful tradition, and recalled the
gloomy days that followed the flogging, and fancied the Pilgrim at
anchor in the offing. But the tug is going toward our steamer, and
I must awake and be off. I walked along the shore to the new
landing-place, where were two or three store-houses and other
buildings, forming a small depot; and a stage-coach, I found, went
daily between this place and the Pueblo. I got a seat on the top
of the coach, to which were tackled six little less than wild
California horses. Each horse had a man at his head, and when the
driver had got his reins in hand he gave the word, all the horses
were let go at once, and away they went on a spring, tearing over
the ground, the driver only keeping them from going the wrong way,
for they had a wide, level pampa to run over the whole thirty
miles to the Pueblo. This plain is almost treeless, with no grass,
at least none now in the drought of midsummer, and is filled with
squirrel-holes, and alive with squirrels. As we changed horses
twice, we did not slacken our speed until we turned into the
streets of the Pueblo.
The Pueblo de los Angeles I found a large and flourishing town of
about twenty thousand inhabitants, with brick sidewalks, and
blocks of stone or brick houses. The three principal traders when
we were here for hides in the Pilgrim and Alert are still among
the chief traders of the place,-- Stearns, Temple, and Warner, the
two former being reputed very rich. I dined with Mr. Stearns, now
a very old man, and met there Don Juan Bandini, to whom I had
given a good deal of notice in my book. From him, as indeed from
every one in this town, I met with the kindest attentions. The
wife of Don Juan, who was a beautiful young girl when we were on
the coast, Doña Refugio, daughter of Don Santiago Argüello, the
commandante of San Diego, was with him, and still handsome. This
is one of several instances I have noticed of the preserving
quality of the California climate. Here, too, was Henry Mellus,
who came out with me before the mast in the Pilgrim, and left the
brig to be agent's clerk on shore. He had experienced varying
fortunes here, and was now married to a Mexican lady, and had a
family. I dined with him, and in the afternoon he drove me round
to see the vineyards, the chief objects in this region. The
vintage of last year was estimated at half a million of gallons.
Every year new square miles of ground are laid down to vineyards,
and the Pueblo promises to be the centre of one of the largest
wine-producing regions in the world. Grapes are a drug here, and I
found a great abundance of figs, olives, peaches, pears, and
melons. The climate is well suited to these fruits, but is too hot
and dry for successful wheat crops.
Towards evening, we started off in the stage-coach, with again our
relays of six mad horses, and reached the creek before dark,
though it was late at night before we got on board the steamer,
which was slowly moving her wheels, under way for San Diego.
As we skirted along the coast, Wilson and I recognized, or thought
we did, in the clear moonlight, the rude white Mission of San Juan
Capistrano, and its cliff, from which I had swung down by a pair
of halyards to save a few hides,-- a boy who could not be
prudential, and who caught at every chance for adventure.
As we made the high point off San Diego, Point Loma, we were
greeted by the cheering presence of a light-house. As we swept
round it in the early morning, there, before us, lay the little
harbor of San Diego, its low spit of sand, where the water runs so
deep; the opposite flats, where the Alert grounded in starting for
home; the low hills, without trees, and almost without brush; the
quiet little beach;-- but the chief objects, the hide-houses, my
eye looked for in vain. They were gone, all, and left no mark
behind.
I wished to be alone, so I let the other passengers go up to the
town, and was quietly pulled ashore in a boat, and left to myself.
The recollections and the emotions all were sad, and only sad.
Fugit, interea fugit irreparabile tempus.
The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal,
unnatural, repellant. I saw the big ships lying in the stream, the
Alert, the California, the Rosa, with her Italians; then the
handsome Ayacucho, my favorite; the poor dear old Pilgrim, the
home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro;
the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the peopled
beach; the large hide-houses, with their gangs of men; and the
Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! not a vestige
to mark where one hide-house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I
searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be, a
few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was left of all, and
how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where were they all?
Why should I care for them,-- poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse
of civilization, the outlaws and beach-combers of the Pacific!
Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all
were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in
fever-climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or
dropping exhausted from the wreck,--
``When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.''
The light-hearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the
seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a
sailor's life on shore have spared them; and the then strong men
have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them.
Even the animals are gone,-- the colony of dogs, the broods of
poultry, the useful horses; but the coyotes bark still in the
woods, for they belong not to man, and are not touched by his
changes.
I walked slowly up the hill, finding my way among the few bushes,
for the path was long grown over, and sat down where we used to
rest in carrying our burdens of wood, and to look out for vessels
that might, though so seldom, be coming down from the windward.
To rally myself by calling to mind my own better fortune and
nobler lot, and cherished surroundings at home, was impossible.
Borne down by depression, the day being yet at its noon, and the
sun over the old point,-- it is four miles to the town, the
Presidio,-- I have walked it often, and can do it once more,-- I
passed the familiar objects, and it seemed to me that I remembered
them better than those of any other place I had ever been in;--
the opening to the little cave; the low hills where we cut wood
and killed rattlesnakes, and where our dogs chased the coyotes;
and the black ground where so many of the ship's crew and
beach-combers used to bring up on their return at the end of a
liberty day, and spend the night sub Jove.
The little town of San Diego has undergone no change whatever that
I can see. It certainly has not grown. It is still, like Santa
Barbara, a Mexican town. The four principal houses of the gente de
razon-- of the Bandinis, Estudillos, Argüellos, and Picos-- are
the chief houses now; but all the gentlemen-- and their families,
too, I believe-- are gone. The big vulgar shop-keeper and trader,
Fitch, is long since dead; Tom Wrightington, who kept the rival
pulpería, fell from his horse when drunk, and was found nearly
eaten up by coyotes; and I can scarce find a person whom I
remember. I went into a familiar one-story adobe house, with its
piazza and earthen floor, inhabited by a respectable lower-class
family by the name of Machado, and inquired if any of the family
remained, when a bright-eyed middle-aged woman recognized me, for
she had heard I was on board the steamer, and told me she had
married a shipmate of mine, Jack Stewart, who went out as second
mate the next voyage, but left the ship and married and settled
here. She said he wished very much to see me. In a few minutes he
came in, and his sincere pleasure in meeting me was extremely
grateful. We talked over old times as long as I could afford to. I
was glad to hear that he was sober and doing well. Doña Tomasa
Pico I found and talked with. She was the only person of the old
upper class that remained on the spot, if I rightly recollect. I
found an American family here, with whom I dined,-- Doyle and his
wife, nice young people, Doyle agent for the great line of coaches
to run to the frontier of the old States.
I must complete my acts of pious remembrance, so I take a horse and
make a run out to the old Mission, where Ben Stimson and I went the
first liberty day we had after we left Boston (ante, p. 140). All has
gone to decay. The buildings are unused and ruinous, and the large
gardens show now only wild cactuses, willows, and a few olive-trees.
A fast run brings me back in time to take leave of the few I knew
and who knew me, and to reach the steamer before she sails. A last
look-- yes, last for life-- to the beach, the hills, the low point,
the distant town, as we round Point Loma and the first beams of the
light-house strike out towards the setting sun.
Wednesday, August 24th. At anchor at San Pedro by daylight. But
instead of being roused out of the forecastle to row the long-boat
ashore and bring off a load of hides before breakfast, we were
served with breakfast in the cabin, and again took our drive with
the wild horses to the Pueblo and spent the day; seeing nearly the
same persons as before, and again getting back by dark. We steamed
again for Santa Barbara, where we only lay an hour, and passed
through its canal and round Point Conception, stopping at San Luis
Obispo to land my friend, as I may truly call him after this long
passage together, Captain Wilson, whose most earnest invitation to
stop here and visit him at his rancho I was obliged to decline.
Friday evening, 26th August, we entered the Golden Gate, passed
the light-houses and forts, and clipper ships at anchor, and came
to our dock, with this great city, on its high hills and rising
surfaces, brilliant before us, and full of eager life.
Making San Francisco my head-quarters, I paid visits to various
parts of the State,-- down the Bay to Santa Clara, with its live
oaks and sycamores, and its Jesuit College for boys; and San José,
where is the best girls' school in the State, kept by the Sisters
of Notre Dame,-- a town now famous for a year's session of ``The
legislature of a thousand drinks,''-- and thence to the rich
Almaden quicksilver mines, returning on the Contra Costa side
through the rich agricultural country, with its ranchos and the
vast grants of the Castro and Soto families, where farming and
fruit-raising are done on so large a scale. Another excursion was
up the San Joaquin to Stockton, a town of some ten thousand
inhabitants, a hundred miles from San Francisco, and crossing the
Tuolumne and Stanislaus and Merced, by the little Spanish town of
Hornitos, and Snelling's Tavern, at the ford of the Merced, where
so many fatal fights are had. Thence I went to Mariposa County,
and Colonel Fremont's mines, and made an interesting visit to
``the Colonel,'' as he is called all over the country, and Mrs.
Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons of Paris
and the drawing-rooms of New York and Washington, or the roughest
life of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa,-- with
their fine family of spirited, clever children. After a rest
there, we went on to Clark's Camp and the Big Trees, where I
measured one tree ninety-seven feet in circumference without its
bark, and the bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode
through another which lay on the ground, a shell, with all the
insides out,-- rode through it mounted, and sitting at full height
in the saddle; then to the wonderful Yo Semite Valley,-- itself a
stupendous miracle of nature, with its Dome, its Capitan, its
walls of three thousand feet of perpendicular height,-- but a
valley of streams, of waterfalls, from the torrent to the mere
shimmer of a bridal veil, only enough to reflect a rainbow, with
their plunges of twenty-five hundred feet, or their smaller falls
of eight hundred, with nothing at the base but thick mists, which
form and trickle, and then run and at last plunge into the blue
Merced that flows through the centre of the valley. Back by the
Coulterville trail, the peaks of Sierra Nevada in sight, across
the North Fork of the Merced, by Gentry's Gulch, over hills and
through cañons, to Fremont's again, and thence to Stockton and San
Francisco,-- all this at the end of August, when there has been no
rain for four months, and the air is clear and very hot, and the
ground perfectly dry; windmills, to raise water for artificial
irrigation of small patches, seen all over the landscape, while we
travel through square miles of hot dust, where they tell us, and
truly, that in winter and early spring we should be up to our
knees in flowers; a country, too, where surface gold-digging is so
common and unnoticed that the large, six-horse stage-coach, in
which I travelled from Stockton to Hornitos, turned off in the
high road for a Chinaman, who, with his pan and washer, was
working up a hole which an American had abandoned, but where the
minute and patient industry of the Chinaman averaged a few dollars
a day.
These visits were so full of interest, with grandeurs and humors
of all sorts, that I am strongly tempted to describe them. But I
remember that I am not to write a journal of a visit over the new
California, but to sketch briefly the contrasts with the old spots
of 1835-6, and I forbear.
How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this
marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board
shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a
population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town
government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking together
of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth of a
city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times
in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars,
and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and
stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the
accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now (in 1859) the most
quiet and well-governed city of its size in the United States. But
it has been through its season of Heaven-defying crime, violence,
and blood, from which it was rescued and handed back to soberness,
morality, and good government, by that peculiar invention of
Anglo-Saxon Republican America, the solemn, awe-inspiring
Vigilance Committee of the most grave and responsible citizens,
the last resort of the thinking and the good, taken to only when
vice, fraud, and ruffianism have intrenched themselves behind the
forms of law, suffrage, and ballot, and there is no hope but in
organized force, whose action must be instant and thorough, or its
state will be worse than before. A history of the passage of this
city through those ordeals, and through its almost incredible
financial extremes, should be written by a pen which not only
accuracy shall govern, but imagination shall inspire.
I cannot pause for the civility of referring to the many kind
attentions I received, and the society of educated men and women
from all parts of the Union I met with; where New England, the
Carolinas, Virginia, and the new West sat side by side with
English, French, and German civilization.
My stay in California was interrupted by an absence of nearly four
months, when I sailed for the Sandwich Islands in the noble Boston
clipper ship Mastiff, which was burned at sea to the water's edge;
we escaping in boats, and carried by a friendly British bark into
Honolulu, whence, after a deeply interesting visit of three months
in that most fascinating group of islands, with its natural and
its moral wonders, I returned to San Francisco in an American
whaler, and found myself again in my quarters on the morning of
Sunday, December 11th, 1859.
My first visit after my return was to Sacramento, a city of about
forty thousand inhabitants, more than a hundred miles inland from
San Francisco, on the Sacramento, where was the capital of the
State, and where were fleets of river steamers, and a large inland
commerce. Here I saw the inauguration of a Governor, Mr. Latham, a
young man from Massachusetts, much my junior; and met a member of
the State Senate, a man who, as a carpenter, repaired my father's
house at home some ten years before; and two more Senators from
southern California, relics of another age,-- Don Andres Pico,
from San Diego; and Don Pablo de la Guerra, whom I have mentioned
as meeting at Santa Barbara. I had a good deal of conversation
with these gentlemen, who stood alone in an assembly of Americans,
who had conquered their country, spared pillars of the past. Don
Andres had fought us at San Pazqual and Sepulveda's rancho, in
1846, and as he fought bravely, not a common thing among the
Mexicans, and, indeed, repulsed Kearney, is always treated with
respect. He had the satisfaction, dear to the proud Spanish heart,
of making a speech before a Senate of Americans, in favor of the
retention in office of an officer of our army who was wounded at
San Pazqual, and whom some wretched caucus was going to displace
to carry out a political job. Don Andres's magnanimity and
indignation carried the day.