_Eight hundred and fifty miles of winding coast line bend in and out. So
far as the eye can reach over the wrinkling sheet of the Pacific, to
where its giant swells beat against bare, brown cliffs and break in
smothers of hissing foam, not a sail is seen, not a sign of life, save
flocks of white-winged gulls and sea-mews, or herds of barking seals
that swarm on rocky islets. Mountains spring from the sea and climb,
mount on mount, three miles into the air, or sloping sea-washed sands
stretch dry and barren and forbidding, to rise at length in verdure-clad
hills and snow-capped mountains. In the mountains are savage beasts and
more savage men. On the plains a few straggling herds of cattle, with
uncouth vaqueros, cluster around a seeping spring of bitter water. Here
and there white-washed adobe mission houses, all but hidden in a clamber
of vines and trees, mark a feeble stream that trickles from the distant
mountains. Olive-skinned signors and olive-skinned signoritas round out
the circle of their lives and there lie down and die, unknowing and
unknown; they and their fellows, undreamed of, the land of their abode a
hazy myth._
_As by the wave of a magic wand, all is changed. The ocean now is dotted
with sails from the uttermost parts of the earth. They choke the Golden
Gate with their numbers. From their crowded decks, swarms of men,
ministers of God and ministers of the devil--learned, ignorant,
murderers, thieves--women, traitors to their kind, pour forth and swarm
over the land. Mad with the lust of Gold, they burrow in the beds of
streams, tear and claw at mountain-gulch and slope. Tented towns rise
like night-grown fungi, and wither away, to spring again into existence,
lawless, in a land where law is not, in a land that no man owns. Through
days that are full of sweating toil and nights that cover vigils of lust
and death, the ferment of hell grows in the blood of human beings who
have left their God with their country._
_Another wave of the wand and God reclaims his own. The courthouse and
the gibbet, without mercy but full of stern justice, have taken the
place of the murderer's greed that sharpened the murderer's knife._
_From a thousand hills, a thousand streams have quickened the arid acres
of drifting sand into fruitful life. League on league are fields of
waving grain. League on league are green vineyards with their clustered
fruit blushing and sweetening in the sun. League on league happy homes
are all but hidden by dark-leaved trees, with fruit yellow as the golden
apples of the Hesperides._
_And this is California! For unknown ages more desolate and terrible
than Dante's wildest dream of the Inferno, in fifty years surpassing his
picture of Paradise. Barred from the world on one side by ten thousand
miles of stormy seas, on the other by tier on tier of mountains and
miles on miles of dreary desert, were the whole United States to fade as
did the cities of Nineveh and Babylon, California would still live in
song and story, more golden than the mines of Ophir, more beautiful than
the storied plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates._