Two Years Before the Mast
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 dear 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.
My last visit in this part of the country was to a new and rich farming
region, the Napa Valley, the United States Navy Yard at Mare Island,
the river gold workings, and the Geysers, and old Mr. John Yount's
rancho. On board the steamer, found Mr. Edward Stanley, formerly
member of Congress from North Carolina, who became my companion for the
greater part of my trip. I also met--a revival on the spot of an
acquaintance of twenty years ago--Don Guadalupe Vallejo; I may say
acquaintance, for although I was then before the mast, he knew my
story, and, as he spoke English well, used to hold many conversations
with me, when in the boat or on shore. He received me with true
earnestness, and would not hear of my passing his estate without
visiting him. He reminded me of a remark I made to him once, when
pulling him ashore in the boat, when he was commandante at the
Presidio. I learned that the two Vallejos, Guadalupe and Salvador,
owned, at an early time, nearly all Napa and Sonoma, having princely
estates. But they have not much left. They were nearly ruined by
their bargain with the State, that they would put up the public
buildings if the Capital should be placed at Vallejo, then a town of
some promise. They spent $100,000, the Capital was moved there, and in
two years removed to San José on another contract. The town fell to
pieces, and the houses, chiefly wooden, were taken down and removed. I
accepted the old gentleman's invitation so far as to stop at Vallejo to
breakfast.
The United States Navy Yard, at Mare Island, near Vallejo, is large and
well placed, with deep fresh water. The old Independence, and the
sloop Decatur, and two steamers were there, and they were experimenting
on building a despatch boat, the Saginaw, of California timber.
I have no excuse for attempting to describe my visit through the
fertile and beautiful Napa Valley, nor even, what exceeded that in
interest, my visit to old John Yount at his rancho, where I heard from
his own lips some of his most interesting stories of hunting and
trapping and Indian fighting, during an adventurous life of forty years
of such work, between our back settlements in Missouri and Arkansas,
and the mountains of California, trapping in Colorado and Gila,--and
his celebrated dream, thrice repeated, which led him to organize a
party to go out over the mountains, that did actually rescue from death
by starvation the wretched remnants of the Donner party.
I must not pause for the dreary country of the Geysers, the screaming
escapes of steam, the sulphur, the boiling caldrons of black and yellow
and green, and the region of Gehenna, through which runs a quiet stream
of pure water; nor for the park scenery, and captivating ranchos of the
Napa Valley, where farming is done on so grand a scale--where I have
seen a man plough a furrow by little red flags on sticks, to keep his
range by, until nearly out of sight, and where, the wits tell us, he
returns the next day on the back furrow; a region where, at Christmas
time, I have seen old strawberries still on the vines, by the side of
vines in full blossom for the next crop, and grapes in the same stages,
and open windows, and yet a grateful wood fire on the hearth in early
morning; nor for the titanic operations of hydraulic surface mining,