PART II.

THE LOST PROVINCES.

THE LOST PROVINCES.

XXII.

_SAN FRANCISCO._

I.

It is the way of sea-coasts, as observed from the water, to maintain a close reserve. If they allow us a cliff or two, a suggestion of green forests, or a mountain in the background, it is as much as they do. All their natural projections, from a steamer’s deck, retire into a straight line. “You have chosen your element,” they seem to say, “and you shall not enjoy at once the pleasures of both. If you can do without me, so can I without you, and until you take the pains to disembark you shall know nothing of the attractions I purposely keep out of sight just over the surf-whitened margin.”

The coast of California seems of even an especial moroseness in this respect. You pass some few islands, inlets at San Diego and Wilmington, the Santa Barbara Channel, and the bays of Santa Monica, San Luis, and Monterey; but for the most part the coast of the land of gold stretches on unbroken, low, brown, and bare. Search is vain for any suggestion of orange-grove or palm. It is foreign-looking to one who arrives from the east of the United States. Lions might come prowling down such slopes. It might be Morocco, and we, on our travels, some new Crusoe escaped in the long-boat, with Xury, from the Rover of Sallee, and afraid to land for the howlings of wild creatures.

If, in our Pacific Mail steamer, we were discovering the country for the first time—as every traveller does discover a new country for the first time, no matter what accounts he may have heard of it—we should try along without finding a single good harbor for four hundred and fifty miles, from San Diego, at the Mexican frontier, to San Francisco.

Then all at once comes an opening through bold Coast Range at the water’s edge, and we are in the far-famed “Golden Gate.” It is a mere eyelet—a strait, giving access to a wide expanse of bay. So happy is the opening, and commodious the shelter afforded, that the reversal of the churlishness prevailing up to this point seems miraculous.

There is no doubt, when once the site is understood, as to why San Francisco is located just where it is. It has the only natural harbor between Astoria, Oregon, to the north, and San Diego, to the south. It bears, besides, with this advantage, such a relation to the resources of the back country, that it could not escape a destiny of greatness.

It is not simply a bay upon which we have entered, but an inland sea, with a great commerce of its own. Immediately in front rise round-backed Goat Island and Angel Island, resembling monsters asleep; and terraced Alcatraz, with its citadel, as picturesque as a bit of Malta. Vistas open beyond on many sides, with gleams of light falling on white cities under lowering atmospheres of smoke. San Francisco, close at hand, piles up impressively on steep hills, its bristling structures covering their undulations sharply from numerous hills. The water-front is full of shipping. French and Russian and British frigates, and a Mexican gun-boat, are lying at anchor. Craft of all shapes and sizes cross one another’s wakes in the harbor. The lateen-sails of Genoese and Maltese fishermen and the junks of Chinese shrimp-catchers are among them. Large ferry-boats, superior, as a rule, to those we are familiar with at the East, ply to Oakland, the Brooklyn of the scene—a city already of fifty thousand people; Alameda, with its esplanade of bathing pavilions; Berkeley, with its handsome university and institution for blind, deaf, and dumb; San Quentin, with its prison; and rustic Saucelito and San Rafael, under the dark shadow of Mount Tamalpais.

From Oakland projects an interminable pier, built by the Central Pacific Railway. A mile in length as it is, it was to have gone on to a junction with vacant Goat Island, which would then have been made a city also, and become the terminus of all transcontinental journeys. This project was stopped by violent opposition from property-holders on shore.

Patches of yellow, under the Presidio, are taken by our novices on the steamer for the “Sand-lots,” famous in the Kearneyite agitations. The Presidio is a barracks, which was a fort and mission in the time of the first settlement by the Spaniards—to what slight extent they ever settled the place—in the year 1776. The man who has “been here before” plants himself squarely on the deck, pulls down a silk cap over his eyes, and explains that the Sand-lots are not the Presidio, but nothing less than the large yard of the new, unfinished City-hall, in the centre of town. But Kearneyism is dead and buried, he says—as the case proved—and there will be no chance to see one of these traditional assemblages.

He names for us the various hills, and points out the Palace Hotel, the Market Street shot-tower, and the homes of some of the great millionnaires who have made such a stir in their day and generation. Three or four of these latter top California, or “Nob,” Hill, with a prominence in keeping with their owners’ station. They are those of the railroad kings, Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins—the mining kings having up to this time expended their principal building efforts in the country. “Nob” Hill is three hundred feet high, plebeian Telegraph Hill nearly as much, and Russian Hill, to the west—the latest precinct taken into favor for fine residences—three hundred and sixty. Murray Hill, New York, be it noted, is but seventy-eight. The riff-raff of Telegraph Hill climb, as is seen, by a multitude of wooden stairways; but how in the world do the Crœsuses get up to their habitations, which cut the sky-line so imposingly? We shall see.

The city does not begin directly at the ocean, but a mile or two within. It follows the inner shore of a long, narrow peninsula which comes from the south to meet one coming from the north, and forms with it the strait and bay.

It is, indeed, an inland sea, this bay. You go southward upon it thirty miles, northward as far, and thirty miles north-eastward to the Straits of Carquinez—which has Benicia on one side, and Martinez, the point of departure for ascent of the peak of Mount Diablo, on the other. Through these straits you pass, again, into Suisun Bay, which receives the waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and is itself some twenty miles in extent.

II.

You are struck, on coming ashore from Mexico, with the excessive thinness of everything American. Our belongings seem all of a piece with our light-running machinery, with the spider lines of yon American buggy waiting for its owner. We evade Nature by a deft trick, and do not obstinately oppose her. There the old walls were as solid yet as the everlasting hills; here we seemed to be living in flying-machines.

How strange, arriving from the other side of the world, to find people lining the dock dressed in the common way, and chattering the common speech, even to the latest bits of slang! A China steamer, however, had come in along-side just before us, and supplied a novel element of foreignness. Almond-eyed Celestials, in blue blouses, swarmed her decks and poured down her sides. Groups were loaded into express-wagons, and driven away uptown in charge of friends come down to meet them. Others trudged stoutly on foot, with their effects deposited in a pair of wicker baskets, at the ends of a long bamboo on their shoulders. This way of carrying burdens is constantly met with. The vegetable dealers hawk thus their wares from house to house, and present the aspect of the figures in cuts of the tea-fields. It is poor travelling when the curiosity alone and not the imagination is gratified, and San Francisco promises ample material for both.

Had we come in the gold days of ’49 we should have landed some half-dozen blocks farther inland than to-day. By so much has the water-front since been extended and built into a solid commercial quarter. The ’Forty-niners found but a scanty strip of sand at the base of the steep hills.

Why, then, did they stop here, and build their city at such infinite pains and expense, instead of seeking a more convenient site elsewhere? There is, or was, some even more serious objection to all other locations. At Oakland, insufficient depth of water; at Saucelito, where whalers, Russian and other, had been accustomed to refit, Tamalpais, 2700 feet high, as against Telegraph Hill, but 300. Distant Benicia and Vallejo—the latter now the naval station of the Pacific Coast, and once briefly the capital of the State—were much too far away. Steam was little in use. The greater part of the ships came under sail, and there were no tugs to pull them. They must be able to get in and out with all greatest attainable expedition.

Such ships as these were, according to the accounts we have of them! The most antiquated and dangerous hulks were furbished up once more for this last voyage. The eager humanity they carried took little heed of perils and discomforts so they were but on the way to the goal to which all adventurous spirits turned. When the port was still but a beggarly scattering of huts and tents it could muster two hundred sail, good and bad, at once. Many of them never got out again. It was not on account of nautical difficulties, but partly because they had no return cargoes, and principally because their crews ran away from them to the mines the moment foot touched shore. Certain craft were beached and converted into dwellings; others, utilized for a time as warehouses, rotted at their moorings, and to-day form “made ground.” The remarkable city to which they came, which had eight hundred and fifty souls in 1848, and twenty thousand in ’49, has now, in an existence of thirty-four years, three hundred thousand.

The buildings on the level made ground stand generally on foundations of piling. The practice prevails, too, of tying them well together with iron rods, against the jar of the occasional earthquake, which is among San Francisco’s idiosyncrasies. It is proposed to improve the water-front with a continuous, massive sea-wall, and a portion of this is already built. Extensive yards of attractive redwood lumber, which resembles cedar, and warehouses for grain, are seen. The elevator system, owing to lack of ships for properly carrying grain in bulk, is nowhere in use throughout California.

We reach next an area given up to heavy traffic in the fruits and produce of the country. Battery and Sansome streets succeeding are lined with large wholesale dry-goods houses similar to those in the greater Eastern cities. Montgomery Street shows stately office buildings, exchanges, and hotels. Kearney Street has been hitherto the chief site of the more elegant retail trade. Its prestige is passing, however, to Market Street, a wide thoroughfare which recalls State Street, Chicago. Having unlimited room for extension in the north and south direction of the peninsula, whereas the others named are contracted, Market Street is to be San Francisco’s Broadway of the future.

The financial centre is contained in the area of two blocks, between California and Bush, Sansome and Montgomery Streets. Here are those institutions whose great transactions and singular history are unknown now to but few parts of the world.

The Nevada Bank, financial lever of the Bonanza kings, and point from which has been supposed to emanate all the weightiest influences connected with mining matters, is a four-story and Mansard iron building, with the usual classic “orders.” The Bank of California, whence the brilliant Ralston rushed forth from his troubles to drown himself in the bay, is two stories, of “blue stone,” of a pleasant color, and exceedingly sharp, agreeable cutting. The Merchants’ Exchange, erected so long ago as 1867, is a very ornate, town-hall-looking building, of iron and stone, dark-colored, with a clock-tower in the centre. It is adjoined by the Safe Deposit Company, in a similar style, in the basement of which a glimpse is to be had of a splendid steel treasure-chamber, with a dozen life-size men in armor, gilded.

The large and agreeably proportioned Stock Exchange, on Pine Street, is of gray granite, with numerous polished columns. The board-room within is an amphitheatre, and a bronze railing protects the circle of seats. With its agreeable illumination and neat furniture, including Axminster rugs, it presents a much more home-like aspect than is the rule with such places. Mining stocks exclusively are dealt in.

It is quiet enough now. We have fallen upon evil days. Capitalists have withdrawn their millions to the East; ships come only in ballast, for grain, instead of with valuable exchange cargoes, and charge rates almost prohibitory; there is not one “turn-out” now on the Cliff House road where there were formerly a dozen; and real estate has shrunk fifty per cent.—if in some places it have any value at all.

This board was once the theatre of a speculative movement which took hold upon the community like madness. The aggregate value of the mining stocks on the list, at the period of highest prices, in the year 1875, was, in round numbers, $282,000,000. The aggregate value of the same stocks in the summer of 1881 was but $17,000,000. There had occurred a shrinkage of $265,000,000, or more than fifteen times the total value surviving.

What had happened? The “bottom had dropped out” of the famous “Comstocks,” perhaps the richest mines known to history. “Consolidated Virginia,” valued at $75,000,000, was now worth less than $1,000,000. “Sierra Nevada” fell from $27,000,000 to $825,000. But the greatest shrinkage of all was in “California.” This unhappy stock shrank from $84,000,000 to $351,000.

These figures explain a depression the vestiges of which, though the ruinous crisis has long passed, still remain. The stock-gambling mania possessed the community without distinction of station, and hardly of age or sex, and when the bubble broke there was reason enough for gloom with all who had laid up their treasure in such unstable form.

Some of the earlier buildings, now flat, thin, and unornamental, were obtained at expense quite out of proportion. The stone for the old City Hall was brought expressly from Australia; that of the Wells-Fargo building, and the Union Club, from China. The granite of the Branch Mint, a fine, classic design, was dressed in Oregon. The newer structures exhibit all the varieties of form and color in which the modern decorative taste delights. The material for most is procured in the State itself.

The idea of being in a remote part of the world is kept before you in many ways. Here is a sign of the “New Zealand Insurance Company.” Fancy New Zealand, where a cannibal population was lately eating missionaries, sending us over its insurance companies! Here is the Alaska Commercial Company, the Bank of British Columbia; and here, its inscription gilded in Chinese as well as English, the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Banking Company. An occasional building is without the usual entrance-doors, its staircase, in the comparative mildness of the climate, left as open as the street.

A system of alleys passes among the colossal structures, and these abound in refreshment resorts—“The Dividend Saloon,” “Our Jacob,” “The Comstock Exchange,” and “The New Idea”—to which the hastening business men repair in intervals of their labors. The San Francisco boot-blacks, a model to their class, are neatly uniformed men instead of ragged urchins. Favored by the climate, they establish their rows of easy-chairs on platforms under a canvas awning, have a newspaper and the gossip for you while you wait, and somewhat usurp the place so long sacred to the barber.

The corner of California and Montgomery Streets may be considered one of two focal points in San Francisco; the “Lotta Fountain” is the other.

The Lotta Fountain—a tawdry, little, cast-iron affair, presented to the city by the actress after whom it is named—has been given a place of distinguished honor. Five important streets radiate from it. Its pedestal is a place where the timid seek refuge when entangled in the throng of vehicles. Market Street extends to the Oakland Ferry one way, and past the Mechanics’ Institute and pleasure resort of Woodward’s Garden to the distant Mission Hills in the other. Geary Street takes you, by a “cable road,” westward to Lone Mountain, around which all the cemeteries are grouped, and Golden Gate Park, stretching to the ocean. On the top of Lone Mountain stands up to view from far and wide a dark cross, which weirdly recalls that of Calvary. Third Street, a thoroughfare of working-people, abounding in small restaurants, markets, and “tin-type” galleries, leads to the water at a different angle from Market. Finally, Kearney Street debouches also at the Lotta Fountain, and Montgomery terminates but a few steps below.

The Palace Hotel, vast, drab-colored, of iron and stuccoed brick, looms up nine stories in height on Market Street, and closes the vista from Montgomery. Studded with bay-windows, it has the air of a mammoth bird-cage. The San Franciscan, wherever met with, never fails to boast of it as the most stupendous thing of its kind in the world. With the conviction that size is not always the particular in which our hotels, like some of our communities, most need improvement, I should say that perfection had hardly yet been reached.

Within it is more satisfactory. At night an electric light strikes upon many tiers of columns, as white as paint can make them, in a large glass-roofed court, with an effect quite fairy-like and Parisian. Twice a week a band plays there, and the guests promenade up and down their galleries or look over the balustrade. In the bottom there are flowers, people sitting in chairs, and carriages stand in a circular, asphalt-paved driveway.

Though the resident of San Francisco feels called upon to complain of its present stagnation, the bare existence of such a place strikes the new-comer with amazement.

Its air is not ephemeral, but of a fine, massive gravity. Its shops are filled with costly goods, its streets with comely, beautifully dressed women. It has an art and literature. Private galleries contain foreign modern pictures of the best class. Some local artists have made for themselves a more than local reputation. There is a well-attended “School of Design,” which has already graduated several pupils whose talent has been recognized abroad. The “Mercantile Library” is the most handsome and complete in its appointments of any American city.

San Francisco “society,” though a trifle bizarre in the use of its newly acquired wealth, has an under-stratum of unexceptionable refinement. Its most bizarre side, too, is certainly approved of in Europe, where its magnates entertain kings and give their daughters in marriage to lofty titles.

The European traveller who visits “the land of Barnum” and “of Washington” with literary intent must be cruelly broken up by what he will find here. Such a place should be a vast, motley camp, as it is known to European travellers that most American cities should be. With its thirty-three years, and its heterogeneous elements, it should exhibit a combination of squalor and mushroom splendor. The wretched shanty should elbow the vulgar palace, a democratic boorishness of manners, blazing in diamonds, the faint, refined natures that by any chance have ventured into such a Babel. But, alas! we live in an age of expedition, of labor-saving inventions. With unlimited means, such as here enjoyed, the work of years is condensed into months. Camp there is none, but a luxurious city, presenting all the ordinary characteristics of civilization.

An association comprising in a genial way most of the best elements of San Francisco is the Bohemian Club. It is found taking a very creditable interest in literature and the arts—it numbering the professionals and amateurs in these branches in its membership—and entertains and welcomes distinguished strangers. A monthly entertainment of a light, composite character is held, known as a “Jinks.” The grand festival of the year, however, is a “High Jinks,” which takes the form of an excursion into the country. The principal ceremonial of the High Jinks has sometimes been held at night, in masquerade costume, among the Big Trees, the enormous redwoods of Sonoma County, to the northward. It may well be believed that the doings on these occasions are as fantastic and amusing as the merry inventions of a couple of hundred bright social spirits can make them.

III.

A population of three hundred thousand souls is not extraordinary now, as populations go, but there are certain things which make San Francisco cosmopolitan beyond its actual size. An entirely new commercial situation gives rise to a new _milieu_. San Francisco faces toward Asia, the great English-speaking colonies of Oceanica, and the islands of the sea, as New York faces Europe. It enjoys already a trade with the Orient amounting to ten millions per annum in imports and eight millions in exports. The possibilities of this trade, extended among the teeming populations in the cradle of the human race, seem almost limitless. A way will be found sooner or later out of the imbroglio into which our inexperience has plunged us on the Chinese question, and communication will flow unimpeded. In countries separated by water, and demanding each other’s productions, cities arise at the places of transfer, and proportioned to its volume; and for all this San Francisco has one of the most remarkable of situations.

The Oriental trade is but a small item in the total. It has ships, besides those bound for the Eastern and European ports, going out to the British and Russian possessions in the North, Mexico, Central and South America, Tahiti, Feejee, Manila, the Sandwich and Friendly Islands—to all those far-off points in the South Pacific which now in their turn promise to shine with the light of civilization and become powers of the earth.

Coals are burned at firesides—not of the most desirable quality, it must be confessed—which come from the coast once characterized by the poet in the line—

“The wolf’s long howl on Oonalaska’s shore.”

Seventy millions pounds of sugar a year are brought from those Sandwich Islands which slew Captain Cook, now a civilized, modern state. But it is particularly Australasia, and our coming relations with it, that awaken admiring speculations. Melbourne, Australia, has already more than 280,000 people, Sydney 225,000, while along the coasts of that once cannibal New Zealand, now sending us its insurance companies, scatter also a line of flourishing cities: Dunedin, with its 43,000 people; Auckland, with 40,000; Christchurch, 32,000; Wellington, 22,000; and I know not how many others.

Astoria and Portland, in Oregon, San Diego, and, no doubt, ports to be created in time along the Mexican shores, will receive a share of these new influences in the world, but at San Francisco they touch us first and nearest.

There is a definite fascination in coming to the “jumping-off place,” the final verge of the latest of the continents. An excellent situation in which to feel it is to lie on the brown heather at the point above the Golden Gate—though it is a raw and gusty place in which to lie too long—or to look down from the parapeted road or piazza of the Cliff House.

Here practically nothing intervenes between you and Japan, except we make mention of the clump of Seal Rocks, upon which the grouty sea-lions are floundering and roaring, down there in the surf in front.

“Ah! when a man has travelled,” says Thoreau, “when he has robbed the horizon of his native fields of its mystery, tarnished the blue of distant mountains with his feet, he may begin to think of another world.”

Very well. Perhaps it may do a man no harm to think of another world now and then, if not upon one pretext, on another. At evening the Golden Gate is the way to the sunset. The orb of day settles into the sea at the end of the gleaming strait, precisely in that East where we always figure it to ourselves as rising in the morning. The great circle is at last complete; and, as the extremes of every kind, even of love and hate, are said to be identical, the old, quiescent East has become the bound of the new, impetuous West.

“What is a world to do,” you idly ask, “when it has no longer a West? How is it to get on without that vague open region on its borders, always the safety-valve and outlet for surplus population and uneasy spirits?”

“But when the race has quite arrived at this farther shore, will it stop here? or will it possibly start round the world again? Will it go on yet many times more, always beginning with the highest perfection yet attained, weaker types dying out in front to make room, till it shall become in its march a dazzling army of light? Is a millennium, perchance, to be reached in this cumulative way, as the power of a magnet is increased by the number of turns of the helix?”

“The sentiment of gain,” I say, continuing these wise speculations, “has been the leading factor in drawing the nations around the globe. Gold has been dangled as a bait: first, the hope of it by conquest; later, in mines of the precious metals. It has danced, Ariel-like, will-o’-the-wisp-like, before them. Tantalized, disappointed, after floundering on a ways, they have paused to develop the lands upon which they found themselves.

“But now at length, when the vacant spaces are full, and the need of subterfuge exhausted, the bait is cast down, to be gorged upon by those who find it. Never before, till ’49, were its followers rewarded with such unstinted liberality. The treasure of the earth seemed piled up in the fastnesses of the far Pacific.”

I recall that their yield since the year 1848 has reached the sum of $2,100,000,000, and is still going on at $80,000,000 a year. Gold, scattered at first in the very sands, was later washed out of the gravel-banks, by the hydraulic process, and later yet got by crushing the quartz rock. When gold began to diminish it was followed by silver. The great “Bonanza” mines of Nevada were discovered. “Consolidated Virginia” alone produced $65,000,000 in seven years.

IV.

What fabulous sums besides—to go back to town—the managers made by the ingenious process of “milking the market” I do not undertake to compute. The prices of this celebrated stock at successive dates, not far apart, were: first, $17 a share; then $1; $110; $42; $700; and then, in the final collapse, in 1875, little or nothing at all.

I have seen a poor saloon called the “Auction Lunch,” on Washington Street, near the Post-office, said to have been kept by the once barkeepers, Flood and O’Brien, who attained such a splendid prosperity. There is no historic tablet over the door, but one naturally looks with reverence at the place where the beginning of such things could be. The proprietors of the “Auction Lunch” were in the habit of taking gold-dust occasionally in a friendly way from miners, for safe-keeping while the owners were enjoying themselves about town. It was from such persons that they obtained the “points” which resulted in their getting possession first of “Hale and Norcross,” and then of the greater part of the properties of the Comstock lode.

I fell in with a professed friend of theirs of early times, whose fortunes had not mended at all at the same pace. He descanted on the inequalities of fate, and what he termed “bull-dog” luck.

He could prove that Flood and O’Brien were not even good business men—“though Jimmy Flood does go about with a wise air,” he said, “and Billy O’Brien left, at his death, half a million dollars to each of eight or ten nieces.”

There is hardly a limit to the exceptional characters and exceptional doings to be heard of in San Francisco. Though the city affect—or has been driven into—a quiescent air now, it has hardly ever done anything like any other place. It began with the wild Argonauts of ’49, whom Bret Harte has so strikingly portrayed. It had had six great fires, which destroyed property to the amount of $23,000,000, when yet less than three years of age. It was ruled for months, in the year 1856, by a vigilance committee, which rid it of eight hundred evil-doers of one sort and another, the worst by summary execution, the rest by banishment.

The politics of the State before the war were Democratic, with a rather strong Southern bias. There was a long feud between the two great Senatorial paladins, Broderick and Gwin, which resulted in the death of Broderick by the duelling-pistol of one of the partisans of the latter. There was the long fight and a final deliverance from an incubus of forged Spanish land titles, the manufacture of which “had become a business and a trade,” and which covered the area of the city many times over. Then came the war, and the peculiarities growing out of the retention of a solid currency, while the rest of the country was deluged with a depreciated paper.

The brilliant period, later, when the Bonanza mines were pouring out their floods of riches, and the favorite stocks were running delightfully up and down the gamut from $1 to $700 a share, was followed, as I have said, by a depression of the deepest dye. In the unbearable disappointment of their losses, and the stagnation of trade, a part of the community snatched at a theory held out to them by demagogues, that it was their political institutions which were somehow to blame. Upon this basis a singular new party, wild and half-communistic in character, arose, and met with a brief success. The truckman, Denis Kearney, was its Caius Gracchus or Watt Tyler, and set it in motion with blasphemous mouthings from an improvised tribune in the Sand-lots. It elected a mayor who was at the same time a Baptist preacher. This mayor’s son—preacher, too—rode up one day and assassinated at his own door an editor who had passed strictures on their course. The party voted a new constitution, which was thought to be a prelude to universal confiscation, and capitalists fled before it in alarm.

And, finally, this remarkable city, having become the recipient of a Chinese immigration which has given to a part of it the aspect of a portion of the Flowery Kingdom, has been agitated by fears of complete subversion under Orientalism, and has originated new problems for political economy and international law.

After but a tithe of such violent and novel experiences any city would be glad to rest awhile. San Francisco seems entering upon a new period, and likely to do things henceforth more in the normal way. There has been a time of contemplation, and the lessons of the past have struck in. As things have slowly improved the gloom of the reaction has disappeared after the unhealthy inflation that gave it birth. The new political craze was of but short duration. I never saw anywhere so quietly conducted an election as that of the last autumn, which dismissed the Kearney-Kalloch faction from power. A special provision prevents the approach of any person but the voter immediately engaged within one hundred feet of a polling-place. I had rather expected to see dead and maimed Chinamen lying at every corner, or fleeing before infuriated crowds. But though San Franciscans entertain beliefs of their own as to the undesirability of a great Chinese immigration, during a long stay I neither saw nor heard of an attempt to molest any individual on account of it.

The new constitution itself proved a harmless bugaboo. It is a gratifying tribute, in fact, to native common-sense and Anglo-Saxon ideas that this instrument, produced in a time of great excitement, and, as was charged, with the most subversive intentions, should not only contain so little that is dangerous, but so much in a high degree commendable. It does not harm property. Frightened capital may return with entire safety. I profess myself so far a person of incendiary opinions as to hold that an honest directness of purpose in this new constitution, its effort to simplify legislation and sweep away embarrassments, often maintained much more in the interest of legislator and lawyer than the public good, is well worthy of imitation elsewhere.

Physical and commercial conditions are also changing. Life hereafter will depend less upon spasmodic “finds,” and more on the humdrum and legitimate industries. Mining, though the supply of treasure, with improved machinery, still holds out in a uniform way, takes a lesser rank. Agriculture and manufactures come every day more to the front. California produces an annual wheat crop of $50,000,000, a wool crop of $10,000,000, wines to the amount of $4,000,000, and fruits worth as much more, though these last two branches are but in their infancy. Of the greater part of all this San Francisco is the _entrepôt_.

The smoke of the soft coals of Alaska, Oregon, and Australia too may be allowed to thicken the air to some purpose, since it produces manufactures to the amount of $75,000,000 per annum.

XXIII.

_SAN FRANCISCO (Continued)._

I.

Kearney Street (sharing its distinction now with Market Street) is, in sunshiny weather, the promenade of all the leisurely and well-dressed. It abounds in jewellers, who often combine the business of pawnbroking with the other, and are fond of prefixing “Uncle” to their names. Thus, “Uncle Johnson,” “Uncle Jackson,” or “Uncle Thompson,” all along the way, make a genial proffer of their hospitable service. There are shops of Chinese and Japanese goods, though this is not the regular quarter, and “Assiamull and Wassiamull” invite us to inspect the goods of the East Indies.

Perhaps European foreigners of distinction—English lords, M.P.’s, and younger sons, German barons and Russian princes—on their way round the world, are not more numerous than in New York, but they seem more numerous in proportion. The books of the Palace Hotel are seldom free of them, and they are detected, at a glance, strolling on the streets or gazing at the large photographs of the Yosemite Valley and the Big Trees which hang at prominent corners.

There is a genial feeling about Kearney Street, which arises, I think, from its being level—at the foot of the steep hills. The temptation is to linger there as long as possible. The instant you leave it for the residence portion of town you have to begin a back-breaking climb. The ascent is like going up-stairs, and nothing less.

The San Francisco householder of means is “like the herald Mercury new-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.” How in the world, I have asked, does he get up there? Well, by the Cable road. I consider the Cable road one of the very foremost in the list of curiosities, though I have refrained from bringing it forward till now. It is a peculiar kind of tramway, useful also on a level, but invented for the purpose of overcoming steep elevations.

Two cars, coupled, are seen moving, at a high rate of speed, without jar and in perfect safety, up and down all these extraordinary undulations of ground. There is no horse, no steam, no vestige of machinery, no ostensible means of locomotion of any kind. The astonished comment of the Chinaman, observing this marvel for the first time, may be worth repeating once more, old as it is:

“Melican man’s wagon, no pushee, no pullee; go top-side hill like flashee.”

The solution of the mystery is an endless wire cable hidden in a box in the road-bed, and turning over a great wheel in an engine-house at the top of the hill. The foremost of the two cars is provided with a grip, or pincers, running underneath in a continuous crevice in the box with the cable. When the conductor wishes to go on he clutches with his grip the cable; when he wishes to stop he lets go and puts on a brake. There is no snow and ice to clog the central crevice, which, by the necessities of the case, must be open. The system has been applied, however, with emendations, in Chicago, and is about to be on the great Brooklyn Bridge, at New York.

The great houses on the hill, like almost all the residences of the city, are of wood. It seems a pity, considering the money spent, that this should be so. It is attributed to the superior warmth and dryness of wood in so moist and cool a climate, and also to its security against the shock of earthquakes. Whatever be the reason, the San Francisco Crœsuses have reared for themselves palaces which might be swept off at a breath and leave no trace of their existence. Their architecture has nothing to commend it to favor. They are large, rather over-ornate, and of no particular style.

The Hopkins residence—a costly Gothic château, carried out also in wood—may be excepted from this description. The basement stories, however, are of stone, and there is enough work in these and foundations to build many a first-class Eastern mansion. To prepare sites for habitations on the steep hills has been an enormous labor and expense. The part played by retaining-walls, terraces, and staircases is extraordinary. The merest wooden cottage is often prefaced by works which outweigh its own importance a dozen to one.

When a peerage is drawn up for San Francisco, the grader will follow in rank the railroad-builder and the miner. To hardly anybody else has such an amount of lucrative employment been open. What a cutting and filling! what gravelling and paving!

Striking freaks of surface and arrangement result. The city might have been terraced up, like Genoa, or Naples above the Chiaja. It is picturesque still, in the thin, American way, through the absolute force of circumstances. You enter the retaining-walls of stone or plank through door-ways or grated archways like the postern-gates of castles. You pass up stone steps in tunnels or vine-covered arbors within these; or zigzag from landing to landing of long, wooden stairways, without. Odd little terrace streets and “places,” as Charles Place, with bits of gardens, are found sandwiched between the regular formation. A wide thoroughfare, Second Street—cut through Rincon Hill, the Nob Hill of a former day, to afford access to water for vehicles—has been the occasion of leaving isolated, high and dry, some few old houses, with cypress-trees about them, approached by wooden staircases almost interminable. Dark at sunset against a red sky, for instance, they present effects to delight the heart of an etcher.

In this line, however, nothing is equal to Telegraph Hill, which bristles with the make-shift contrivances of a much humbler population. Bret Harte lived there at one time, and asserts that the goats used to browse on his pots of geranium in the second-story windows. They also pranced on the roof at night in such a way that a new-comer thought there had been a fine thunder-storm. Elsewhere, instead of precipices, you meet with chasms. Looking down from the roadway, you will see some poor figure of a woman sewing in a bay-window which was once filled with air and sunshine, but now commands only a patch of mildewed wall.

The views from the hills are of no common order. As you rise on the Cable road you hang in the air above the body of the city, and above the harbor and its environment. The Clay Street road, one of the steepest, passes through the Chinese quarter. Half-way up an ensign, of a blue-and-crimson dragon on an orange field, on the Chinese Consulate-general, flies, a bright bit of color in the foreground. The bay, far below the eye, has an opaque look. On some rare days it is very blue in color, but oftener it is of slate or greenish gray. Passing vessels criss-cross their wakes in white upon the green like pencils on a slate.

The atmosphere above it is rarely clear. Some lurking wisp of fog at best is generally stealing in at the Golden Gate, or under dark Tamalpais, watching to rush over and seize upon the city. An obscurity, part of fog and part of smoke, hovers in areas, now enveloping only the town, again the prospect, so that nothing can be seen, though the town itself be free. Now it lifts momentarily from the horizon for glimpses of distant islands and cities, and the peak of Mount Diablo, thirty miles away, and shuts down as suddenly as if these were but figments of a vision.

The view down upon the lights at night is particularly striking. Set in constellations, or radiating in formal lines, they are like the bivouac of a great army. It might be the hosts of Armageddon were encamped round about awaiting the dawn. For several days, from California Street Hill, there was the spectacle of a devastating fire in the woods of Mount Tamalpais. Its dark smoke rendered the sunsets lurid and ominous, and at night the burning mountain, reflected in the bay, was a more terrible Vesuvius or Hecla.

II.

One is hardly supposed to “travel” as yet in America as in Europe. We make our journeys here for definite objects, chiefly on business. No doubt, if we could bring ourselves to the same receptive frame of mind, the same readiness to be amused by odds-and-ends of experience, a good deal the same kind of pleasure could be got out of it as there. San Francisco at least appears to afford a few of exactly the same details which receive the attention of the leisurely abroad.

Italian fishermen eat macaroni, and drink red wine, and wait upon the tides, about the vicinity of Broadway and Front Streets. The Italian colony, for the rest, is pretty numerous. The part that remains on shore is chiefly composed of grocers, butchers, and restaurateurs. Chinese shrimp-catchers are found in the cove at Potrero, behind the large new manufacturing buildings of that quarter, and again at San Bruno Point, twelve miles down the bay. Their boats and junks are not on a large scale, but display the usual peculiarities of their nautical architecture.

The French colony is also numerous, and the language heard continually on the street. Taking advantage of the variety and excellence of supplies in the markets, French restaurants furnish repasts—including a half-bottle of wine of the country—of extraordinary cheapness. A considerable Mexican and Spanish contingent mingles also with the Italians, along Upper Dupont, Vallejo, and Green Streets. Shops with such titles as _La Sorpresa_ and the _Tienda Mexicana_ adjoin the _Unità d’Italia_ and the _Roma_ saloon. A Mexican militia company turns out, under the green, white, and red tricolor, on every anniversary of the national independence, the 16th of September. During the Carnival season a form of entertainment known as “Cascarone parties” prevails among the Spanish residents. The participants pelt one another with egg-shells filled with gilt and colored papers. Sometimes a canvas fort is erected in the street, and attacked and defended by means of these missiles and handfuls of flour. Such Spanish life as there is can hardly be said to have remained from the early days, since the Spanish settlement at best was infinitesimal. It has been attracted here in the mean time like other immigration. A dusky mother, smoking a cigarette, in a hammock, in a palm-thatched hut, on the Acapulco trail, told me of a son who had gone to San Francisco twenty years before and become a carpenter there. He had forgotten now, she heard, even how to speak his native language.

The Latin race seems to have been especially attracted to the country of a mild climate and original traditions like their own. But German and Scandinavian names too on the sign-boards—Russian Ivanovich and Abramovich, and Hungarian Haraszthy—show that no one blood or influence has exclusive sway. There appears to be an unusually free intermingling and giving in marriage among these various components. They are less clannish than with us. Lady Wortley Montagu remarked, at Constantinople, some hundred years ago, a similar fusion, and believed it a reason for a debased and mongrel race. But a very different class of blood mingles here from that of Orientals at Constantinople. Our much more cheerful theory is, that we are to combine the best qualities, the hardihood and good looks of all, while eliminating their defects. Certainly the bright, intelligent aspect of the children of San Francisco does nothing as yet to discredit such a theory.

Such vestiges of ’49 as yet remain are extremely few. I confess to surprise as well at the slightness of the historic records at the Pioneer Society. I make little doubt that they could be easily paralleled in many other libraries of the country. “North Beach,” under Telegraph Hill, may be visited both for its memories and present aspect of picturesque ruin. It is where the pioneer ships landed. Hence, also, the ill-fated Ralston swam out into the bay, and here are the remains of “Harry Meigs’s Wharf.” Harry Meigs was a famous prototype of Ralston’s in the Fifties. Defeated in brilliant financial schemes, and having endeavored to save his defeat by forgery, he was obliged to take flight. He chartered a schooner to take him to the South Sea Islands, which lay off the wharf for him at midnight.

“This is hell,” he is reported to have said as he stepped on board, expressing thus his Lucifer-like sense of humiliation and downfall.

He did not remain long at the South Sea Islands, but sailed for Peru. There he began the world again, built all the railways of that republic, became a great millionnaire, sent back and paid all his debts, and was divested, by act of Legislature, so far as legislation could do it, of the stigma of his crimes. His story is by no means a good one to hold up to the emulation of youth, but it is romantic, and in some sense characteristic of California.

The blackened old pier is a dumping-place for city refuse now, and swarms of _chiffoniers_ gather around it to pick out such scraps of value as they may before they are washed away by the daily tides.

The leading streets of San Francisco commemorate the pioneers of State or place. A newer series adopts the names of the States of the Union, and simple numbers, which are carried already to Forty-fifth, for avenues, and Thirtieth for streets. The fast-growing, tough, fragrant, but scrawny, eucalyptus is much in use as a shade-tree. In the door-yards grow cypresses, the Spanish-bayonet, and the ordinary flowers, needing a great deal of sprinkling to keep them in good order.

The San Francisco school of writers, developed in the successful days of the _Overland Monthly_, have not made much use of the city itself in their literature. Bret Harte confined his local range to the doings of certain small boys, some “Sidewalkings,” and the disagreeable features of the climate, in “Neighborhoods I Have Moved From.” It was from Folsom Street that the adventurous Master Charles Summerton, aged five, set out for his great expedition to Van Dieman’s Land, by way of the Second and Market Street cars. I had occasion to visit Folsom Street sometimes, and even this slight incident—such is the potency of the literary touch—has given it a genial interest which many others, as good in appearance, and even stately Van Ness Avenue, on the other side of town—very much better—by no means share.

III.

San Francisco offers, in my view, the advantage of saving a trip around the world. Whoever, having seen Europe, shrinks from farther wanderings may derive here from a compact Chinese city of 30,000 souls such an idea of the life and doings of the Celestial Empire as may appease curiosity and take the place of a voyage to the Orient.

The Chinese immigrants, it is true, rarely erect buildings of their own, but fit themselves to what they find. They fit themselves in with all their peculiar industries, their smells of tobacco and cooking-oil, their red and yellow signs and hand-bills, opium pipes, high-soled slippers, sticks of India ink, silver pins, and packets of face-powder, their fruits and fish, their curious groceries and more curious butcher’s meat—they have fitted all this into the Yankee buildings, and taken such absolute possession that we are no longer in America, but Shanghai or Hong-Kong. The restaurants make the nearest approach to the national façades, but this is brought about by adding highly-decorated balconies, lanterns, and inscriptions, and not building outright.

I had the curiosity to try one of the best of the restaurants—quite a gorgeous affair, at the head of Commercial Street—and found the fare both neatly served and palatable. There was a certain monotony in the bill, which I ascribed to a desire to give us dishes as near the American style as possible. We had chicken-soup, with flour paste resembling macaroni; a very tender chicken, sliced, through bones and all, in a bowl; a bowl of duck; a pewter chafing-dish of quail with spinach. All the food is set out in bowls, and each helps himself, with ebony chopsticks, to such morsels as he desires. The chopsticks, held in the fingers of the right hand, somewhat after the manner of castanets, are about as convenient to the novice as a pair of lead-pencils. We drank _saki_, or rice brandy, in infinitesimal cups, during the dinner, and at dessert very fine tea.

The upper story of these places is reserved for guests of the better class. Those of slender purses are accommodated below. To these is served a second drawing of the same tea which has been used, and such meats as remain in a tolerable state. The upper story is decorated with carved work, painted scarlet, and heavily gilded, and screens, lanterns, and teak-wood tables and stools; while below pine-wood tables are deemed good enough.

Dropping in late one evening for a cup of tea, I had the fortune to witness a supper-party—a novel, _genre_ picture, glowing with color. There were a dozen dignified-looking men, dressed in handsome silk clothing—black, blue, and purple. With them were as many women—young, slender, and pretty, of their type, while the women seen walking about the streets are very coarse and clumsy. Their black hair was carefully smoothed, and looped up with silver pins, and their complexions were daintily made of pink and white and vermilion, realizing exactly the heads painted on their silken fans. The most interesting girl was of Fellah or Hebrew aspect, and was probably not without an admixture of other blood in her veins. The men occupied carved teak-wood stools about a large table, spread with a white cloth, and covered with charming china. The women stood by and served them. Now and then one of the latter rested momentarily on a corner of a stool, in a laughing way, and took a morsel also. The whole was a bit of bright _Chinoiserie_ worth a long journey to witness.

They were very merry, and played, among other amusements, a game like the Italian _mora_. In this one would hold up fingers in rapid succession, while the others shouted the probable number at the tops of their voices. What with this, their laughter, drumming on the table, and general hubbub, besides an orchestra of their peculiar music adding its din from behind a screen, they were not very unlike a party of Parisian _canotiers_ and _grisettes_ supping at Bougival.

The temple and the theatre of the Chinese emigrant have an identical character wherever he goes. I found here the same scenes in both I had witnessed in Havana at the beginning of my journey. The temple, economically set up in some upper rear room, abounds in gaudy signs and some good bronzes, but is little frequented. The theatre is far more popular. The dresses used here are rich and interesting. The performers are continually marching, fighting, spinning about, pretending to be dead and jumping up again, and singing in high, cracked voices like the whine of a bagpipe. A doughty warrior, who may be Gengis Khan or Timour the Tartar, and bear himself with the “most haughty stride and withering pride,” will sing you his lines in this same puny, whining voice, and no other. The slightness of the means of illusion is a naïve feature of interest in the Chinese drama. As one of the simple rustics in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ holds up an arm to represent a wall, across which Pyramus and Thisbe are supposed to talk, so here, if it be designed, for instance, to represent the march of an army through the woods, a screen is put up at one side of the stage, bearing an inscription which no doubt says “Woods,” and around this the military betake themselves.

The cemetery is more curious even than the theatre of Chinadom in San Francisco. I came upon it in the course of a long stroll one afternoon, and was almost the only spectator of some peculiar ceremonial rites in propitiation of the dead. It is not grouped in the general Golgotha at Lone Mountain, but adjoins that devoted to the city paupers, out among the melancholy sand-dunes by the ocean. It is parcelled off by white fences into a large number of enclosures for separate burial guilds, or _tongs_. These have large signs upon them—“Fook Yam Tong,” “Tung Sen Tong,” “Ye On Tong,” etc. One has almost difficulty to persuade himself that he is awake witnessing such doings as here take place in the broad sunlight of Yankee-land.

It is the practice to convey the bones of their dead to China, but there are preliminary funerals in regular form. All the “hacks” in San Francisco are often engaged. The bones are left in the ground a year or more before removal.

Toward three in the afternoon a number of express-wagons of the common sort drove up with freights of Chinamen and Chinawomen, and curiously assorted provisions. The “hoodlum” drivers conducted themselves peaceably enough, but seemed to have a certain sardonic air at the idea of having to draw their profits from patrons of such a class. The provisions were unloaded, taken up and laid on small wooden altars, of which there is one at the front of each _tong_. Most conspicuous were whole roast pigs, decorated with ribbons and colored papers. There were next roast fowls, rice, salads, sweetmeats, fruits, cigars, and rice brandy. The participants set to work to fire revolvers, bombs, and crackers, kindle packages of colored paper, make profound genuflections before the graves, and scatter libations upon them of food and liquors. Only the roast pigs were reserved and taken home again; all the rest was scattered about. The din and smoke increased apace; the strange-garbed figures pranced about like sorcerers, and the decorated pigs loomed out with a goblin air. It seemed a veritable witches’ Sabbath. Some of the fruits and cigars were hospitably offered to me as I looked on; and I will say that parsimony does not seem a vice of the Chinaman, though he lives upon so little, and is content with moderate returns.

Coming back the same way in the evening, I noted prowling figures of white men among the graves, gathering up the fragments cast down by the improvident heathen.

I am glad, on the whole, not to have the mooted Chinese question to settle in person. On the one hand, a great law of political economy—the natural right of man to seek happiness where he will; on the other, a view that the best good of a community does not necessarily consist in mere size and value of “improvements.” The reflective mind will find it rather in the greatest average distribution of comfort. I should say that there have been no evils of consequence experienced from the presence of the Chinese population as yet. Without them the railroads could not have been built, nor the agricultural nor mining interests developed. With all the complaint, too, of competition, the wages of white labor are better here than at the East, and the cost of living is certainly not more.

A proper male costume for San Francisco is humorously said to be a linen duster with a fur collar. The variability of the climate within brief spaces of time is thus indicated. It varies largely, in fact, in different parts of the same day, though the mean for the year is remarkably even. The mean for January—the coldest month—is but fifty degrees, and for September—the warmest—fifty-eight. It is a famous climate for work, but the average temperature, as is seen, is pretty low for comfort. People go away for warmth in the summer quite as much as for coolness. The rainy season—the winter—is really the pleasantest of the year. The air is clearer then, while the prospects are verdant and best worthy to be seen. At other times fogs prevail, or bleak winds arise in the afternoon, and blow dust, in a dreary way, into the eyes of all whose misfortune calls them to be then in the streets.

We return to town from our Chinese ceremony along wide Point Lobos Avenue, the drive to the Cliff House. It is skirted on one side by the public pleasure-ground, Golden Gate Park, an area of half a mile by three miles and a half, which is being redeemed from an original condition of drifting sand in a wonderful way. All the outer tract near the ocean is as desert and yellow as Sahara. A few scattered dwellings appear in the sands, each with its water-tank and wind-mill, a yucca-plant or two, and some knots of tough grass about it. The city appears on the edge of the steep, as if it were looking over in surprise.

XXIV.

_THE VILLAS OF THE BONANZA KINGS._

I.

I had marked out as a field of travel Southern California.

It is not easy to decide on the instant just what Southern California should be deemed to comprehend. Most of the State, leaving out the mining and lumbering districts, displays some of those tropical features in which the idea of Southernness to the imagination of the temperate climates consists. You see orange, fig, and pomegranate trees surrounding pleasant homes at Sonoma, well to the north of San Francisco. One of the most important districts for raisin-culture is near Sacramento and Marysville, north-west. At the springs of Calistoga, seventy-five miles north, is found a group of the finest palm-trees in California. It is safe to assume, however, that all this will be found in the greater perfection as the low latitudes are approached.

San Francisco lies not far from midway of the State, and Southern California may conveniently be taken as all that part south of the seaport and metropolis. It was upon the area just below, around the Bay, that the Rev. Starr King lavished his most polished eulogies, describing the “flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile,” which he saw there, in the spring. To the vicinity of San José, fifty miles down, Bayard Taylor proposed (if he should live to be old, and note his faculties failing) to retire in order to renew his youth. And but seventy-five miles farther south are the summer resorts—and winter resorts as well—of Santa Cruz and Monterey.

I set out in mid-autumn, the time of the county fairs, when the products of an agricultural country should be seen to particular advantage. There was held at San José the combined fair of the counties of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, and that I made my first objective point.

There are no means of exit from San Francisco by land except to the southward, the long, narrow peninsula on which it lies being surrounded on all other sides by water. One may cross, however, by ferry to Oakland—the Jersey City and Hoboken, as well as Brooklyn, of the place—and go around the bay on that side by a road which reaches San José also. In doing so you traverse Alameda County, which raises nearly a million bushels of wheat a year from a single township, together with tons of sugar-beets, and more hay than any other county in the State. It comes third also in rank for grape-vines, and has tropical pretensions of its own, making an exhibit of orange and lemon trees in certain favored nooks. But the more direct way is the coast division of the Southern Pacific Railway, down the peninsula.

Let us glance at topography a moment. California is fenced off into valleys by two long north and south ranges—the Sierra Nevadas, immensely high, and the lower Coast Range. These meet in acute points, north at Shasta, and south at the Tejon Pass, and become one. They enclose between them the vast central space known in its upper portion as the Sacramento Valley, and its lower as the San Joaquin Valley, from the two main rivers by which it is drained. The granite Sierra Nevadas contain the peaks of from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet elevation which have obtained an extensive fame in the world. The Coast Range, of softer materials, averages only from two to six thousand feet.

The Sierra Nevadas do not greatly divide their strength, but the Coast Range throws out frequent spurs parallel to itself. These take separate names, as Sierra Morena, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz mountains, and form numerous long, narrow valleys and benches of table-land between themselves and the Pacific Ocean.

Down the large Santa Clara Valley, one of those formed in this way in the midst of a diversified region, our first excursion takes us.

By the time the files of freight-cars constituting the immediate environs of all American cities are passed we find ourselves running through a tract of small vegetable gardens and windmills. Clusters of buildings in white enclosures, that looked from town, on their hills, like Mexican haciendas, are “institutions” of various sorts. A long arm of San Francisco Bay accompanies us thirty miles south, and is seen gleaming to the left, with a wide stretch of marsh between. Ark-like structures on piles, at intervals along the water’s edge, are guard-houses, keeping watch over beds of the small California oyster, which has never yet been either coaxed or driven into a grandeur commensurate with the pretensions of everything else about it.

The conception that has gone out about Southern California is that it is an earthly Paradise. I will say at once that it is very charming, even in the dry season, but it is an earthly Paradise very different from the best idea of it one has been able to get by previous investigation. I found myself there, in short, in the dry season, and most writers have spoken of it only as viewed in the season of rains and verdure.

The guide-book promises, “after a few minutes’ ride, orchards, vineyards, elegant farm-houses, prospects to charm all who love the beauties of nature.” But, really—one rubs his eyes—where are they? The ground is mournfully bare and brown. Hardly a tree or a bush is seen; not a green blade of grass. At length some small trees, a variety of scrub-oaks, at a little distance resembling the olive! Farm-houses are few, and not at all “elegant.” The hills are of the color of camel’s hide, and not unlike the camel’s humps.

At Millbrae, finally, there is a glimpse of the wooden towers, in the American style, of a villa, and a large dairy barn. At Belmont the low hills are close at hand. At Menlo Park a charming flower-bed is cared for, by the track, as at foreign railway-stations. We are in the chosen site for villa residences of the San Francisco millionnaires. The surface is flat, and with its growth of oaks recalls the outskirts of Chicago, as at Hyde Park or Riverside.

The valley widens till the hills are distant and veiled in blue, with tawny grain-fields between; but still no verdure! And where are the wild flowers? One hardly expects them now “by the acre and by the square mile,” it is true, since it is autumn; but of all the primroses, the larkspur, the lupin, the poppies of tradition, not one! Not a narcissus! not a chrysanthemum! Oh, my predecessors! what shall I think of you?

In the spring the flowers bloom and carpet the earth as grass carpets it elsewhere. Speaking of the spring the eulogists do not say a word too much. But it is my originality to have seen Southern California in the autumn and winter—as it is for seven months of every year, and as it may be, in exceptional seasons, the whole year through.

Not to make a great deal of this bareness and dryness would be to neglect a most essential feature. The annual rains begin in December, January, or February, and continue till June, diminishing in May, which is sometimes itself a dry month. In the autumn the leaves fall—what comparatively few there are to fall—as elsewhere, and are not renewed.

“But you set up to be a land of perpetual summer, you know,” one argues with the Californian, in the first state of surprise.

“So we are,” he replies; “but that does not necessarily mean perpetual verdure. Look at the thermometer! look at the fertility of the land! You have but to run water on it by irrigation, and it will do whatever you please. Contrast this brown season with your own white one. The land is dry and easy to get about on, and the sky above is uniformly pleasant. Do you prefer your fields of sheeted snow, under the howling blasts? your quagmires of mud and slush, alternately freezing and thawing?”

“Very true,” I admit, accepting this different point of view.

Then, perhaps, by way of finishing touch, he adds, rising to a dignity well justified by the facts, “California sets up to be a land of relations, commercial, agricultural, mineral, and social, which have made it a power in the world. It has revolutionized values, struck the key-note of new social conditions, and begun a new commercial era. California has arrived at a point where she takes her place in the Union on the ordinary terms. We no longer depend upon a repute for astounding beauties and eccentricities—though of these, too, there is no lack, as you will find.”

II.

San José, a city of twenty thousand people, contests with Sacramento the honor of being third in importance in the State. You alight there at the small station. In the vicinity are a waiting horse-car, a blacksmith’s shop, and rail-fences painted with advertisements. These have a very American look, to begin with, for a place with a romantic Spanish name—a place to which you are recommended to come in search of the elixir of life. And so have the small picket-fences an American look, and the comfortable little clapboarded wooden houses behind them, with scroll-sawed ornaments in their piazzas. With the exception of an unusual number of French and Italian names on the sign-boards, and some large, clean tuns in front of the shops of dealers in native wines, it is as downright a little Yankee town as ever was. There is much shade in the streets, and in a public green, but the trees are yet too small and low.

It is a clean, prosperous city, the centre of a rich agricultural district. It has excellent schools and all the other conveniences of life. A good deal of money has been spent on the principal business buildings. As in most other provincial towns throughout the State, they are much covered with bay-windows, in what might be described as the San Francisco style of architecture. An iron trestle-work tower was going up at the intersection of the two main streets, to rise to a height of two hundred feet, to contain an electric light and illuminate the town. The white Court-house, in the classic style, though not large, is agreeably proportioned, and quite a model of its kind.

The week’s doings at the Fair Grounds resolved themselves chiefly into trotting-matches. I was told that the combined display of the two counties was poorer this year than either was in the habit of making alone. There was racing and ornamental riding, one day, by young women, and those who took premiums were girls of but fourteen and sixteen. Another popular feature of these county fairs was “firemen’s tournaments,” in which different companies held contests of speed, equipped with all their paraphernalia.

There was but a scattering display of live-stock, and little or no fruit. The two-hundred-pound squash, the twenty-six-pound turnip, the beet five feet in length and a foot through, the apples and pears commensurate with these, were not shown. I had seen them before, and did not much regret their absence. I have a lurking suspicion that there is a standard of the vegetable as of the human race, and that the Tom Thumbs and General Bateses of the one are not more fortunate in their departure from it than those of the other.

The capacity of the country to produce fruits, not simply of abnormal size, but fine quality—excepting the apple, which requires extremes of heat and cold, and remains insipid—has, perhaps, been too well tested to need competitive exhibitions. What better county fair than the daily display of fruits and vegetables in the San Francisco market? The regular season for any and all of them is twice as long as on the Atlantic coast at corresponding latitudes.

I traversed the much-eulogized “Alameda,” an avenue of willows and poplars, of three miles, set out, in 1799, by Spanish friars. These founded a mission among the Indians at Santa Clara, to which town the avenue extends. There remains at Santa Clara the chapel of the mission, with its adobe walls, five feet thick, and flat wooden ceiling, rudely painted. It is now a part of a flourishing collegiate institution. Across the way is a clump of ruinous old adobe cottages of the same date; but we are adjured to pay no great heed to these, since we are going presently to Monterey, which has, as it were, a grand specialty of all that kind of thing.

The Alameda poplars and willows make but a moderate showing for their age, and can hardly be rated equal to New Haven elms, for instance. Behind them, along both sides of the road, are houses of a _bourgeois_ comfort, as in the town. There are said to be residents of wealth and leisure who have been attracted here to pass the remainder of their days in peace. The Coast Mountains, they say, cut off the fogs and winds of the ocean, and a higher range on the other side bars out the heats of the country eastward. We endeavor to divine, in some superior refinement of taste and sentiment, the abodes of these particular ones. It is a pleasant conception, that of coming here to live for the pure physical delight in living, and highly interesting. Perhaps their daughters will stand by the gates with a certain repining mingled with their air of superior distinction, as if they, for their part, had not quite so willingly consented to abandon a world of larger opportunities. But we do not succeed. Some of these residents are simply rude mining men who have broken their constitutions in Nevada and Utah; and, after all, the desire to live a life of physical contentment does not imply taste in architecture and landscape gardening.

III.

One had expected a good deal of novelty and picturesqueness from these towns, of romantic “San” and “Santa,” and “Los” and “Del,” and feels rather aggrieved not to get so much of it. Its absence is explained in part by the fact that there were rarely original settlements corresponding to the present names. These are taken rather from ranches, springs, or mines in the neighborhood. On the arrival of the Americans in California there were but thirteen thousand Spanish, or Mexicans, all told, while the territory was as large as New York, Pennsylvania, and the six New England States put together.

Let us believe that the pleasing designations will act as a stimulus, and these communities will live up to their names in time, as they never could have done were they simply Smithville and Jonesville.

The impressions at San José, and in the country at large, resulting from a second visit a month later, were more agreeable. Something like the proper point of view had then been attained. The face of nature was to be parched, and the towns rather commonplace; but the continued cloudlessness of the sky, and quality of the air, were more, and the peculiar form of pleasure was settled where it belonged.

The district of villa residences of the millionnaires, when penetrated, gained much in attractiveness. There are white-oaks and chestnut-oaks, as well as scrub-oaks, in groups of a park-like appearance, and live-oaks, with long, gray Spanish moss depending from them. If there are no wild flowers, there are plenty of the cultivated sort, with lawns kept green by fountains and hose. Where there is water, the winter, or brown season, need never extend.

As a rule, long stretches of white picket-fence surround the places, and the houses themselves are white.

The bonanza kings have been invested with a greater air of magnificence than really belongs to them. Their places cost them immense sums, it is true, but a reduction should be made to Eastern standards. The outpouring of untold millions put up the prices of land, labor, and every commodity entering into the result, so that less was obtained for the money than an equal expenditure would have procured here. The Menlo Park district is inferior to Llewellyn Park, Englewood, Irvington, and others, in the neighborhood of New York.

The builders have struck out a kind of style of their own, perhaps in too great haste to wait for imported ideas. The houses are chiefly of wood. Flood, of Flood & O’Brien, and “Consolidated Virginia” when the great bonanza was struck, had just completed one of great size, on an estate of five hundred acres, at Menlo Park. There was a terrace, with a fine bronze fountain. The main steps were of polished marble with bronze sphinxes, and bronze dragons studded the ornate stables—the whole glaring, white, and over-gorgeous, like listening to the noise of a brass band.

There are some gentler, more home-like places, and recalling the tone of rural life at the East. Such a one is that of ex-Governor Leland Stanford, at Palo Alto. Here is a breeding farm for horses, one of the most complete of the kind in the world. Of seventeen hundred acres one hundred are occupied by stables, barns, and small paddocks, which, at the foot of a gentle rise of ground, make a small city by themselves. It is inhabited by a population of nearly five hundred animals, who return hither from business, as it were, in the pastures and race-tracks, and have two hundred persons employed in their domestic service. The spacious stables are uniformly floored and ceiled up with redwood, strewn with the freshest straw, and kept as neat as the most unexceptionable drawing-room.

Scions of the stock, representing the best thoroughbred and trotting strains in the country, are an important influence in improving the breed of horses throughout the Pacific slope. It was here that the curious experiments were conducted, at the expense of Governor Stanford, for arriving at a better understanding of the speed of horses by photographing them in motion. The photographer, Muybridge, of San Francisco, succeeded, by an ingenious arrangement of electrical wires, communicating with cameras, in securing twelve distinct views of a single stride. The attitudes are of the most unexpected sort, and some of them even comic.

From the time of foaling the colts are gently handled, and made as familiar with the touch of harness as with that of human hands. As a consequence they are tame, gentle, and even affectionate, and never need formal breaking. The effect of the system of training has been apparent in some notable records of speed. On the Bay District Association track, at San Francisco, in 1880, the two-year-old Fred Crocker lowered the record for a one-mile trot to 2′ 25¼″. Last year Bonita, a two-year-old filly, cut it down to 2′ 24½″. At the same trotting exhibition Wildflower, another two-year-old, made the mile in 2′ 21″; and Hinda Rose, a yearling filly, added to the fame of the farm by cutting down the yearling record to 2′ 36½″.

The interiors of these fine villas are, as a rule, better than the exteriors. The Mills house, at Millbrae, residence of a banking and railway magnate, now of New York, is a notable collection of _portières_ and Oriental rugs, and bed-chambers done in the finest woods, with a picture-gallery of works of Gérôme, Detaille, and Bouguereau, while from all the windows are vistas of fan-palms, flower-beds, greensward, and bronzes.

Ralston’s old house, at Belmont, now the property of Senator Sharon, is of those of the greatest interest, through interest in the remarkable man who built it. Starting from humble origin, he rose to be a great capitalist and the promoter of brilliant schemes of improvement, both public and private. He conducted to success a hundred projects which in other hands would have been folly, and arrived thus at such an unbounded confidence in his star that he thought he could not fail. He was entangled at last, however, in schemes beyond his control. Strong and athletic, and in the prime of life, he went down to “Harry Meigs’s” wharf, in San Francisco—almost the very point from which his great prototype sailed away to Peru—and swam out half a mile into the bay. It was for refreshment in his troubles, as some say, but, as the general opinion is, with the purpose of suicide. At any rate he was never seen alive again.

The house that was his is notched into the hill-side, in a rolling country, much pleasanter than the plain at Menlo Park. A pretty gorge behind it is dammed to furnish a water-supply. There are gas-works, a bowling-alley, and an elaborate Turkish bath among the out-buildings, and a grange-like barn of solid stone, ivy-grown, which cost $80,000. The immense house is wood, white, in the usual fashion, and, with its numerous stories and windows, is not unlike a large country hotel. A peculiar arrangement and great spaciousness give it a palatial air within. The principal rooms open into one another by glass partitions, which can be rolled away, so that in large gatherings there need be no crowding through door-ways. There is an arcade above, around a grand staircase, with tribunes projecting, in which young women in colors, at an evening party, for instance, would look particularly houri-like. What in another house would be the ordinary veranda is here a delightful promenade, glazed in, and provided with easy furniture and a parquetry floor. Behind a row of such main apartments as drawing-room and library comes a parallel row, of which one is a great ball-room, entirely faced with mirrors. Pianos, mantels, and stair-posts are of California laurel—a new industry encouraged by the owner among many others.

We drove from Belmont back through a succession of cup-like dells in the lower mountains, a number of them dammed to form pretty lakes, the sources of supply for the Spring Valley Water Company—a corporation of great prominence at San Francisco. The slopes at first were tawny with grain stubble; then scattered with the thick bush known as chaparral; then bare. We passed an occasional lonely farm known as a “milk ranch,” or “chicken ranch.” There are no farms in California; no matter how small the tract is, it is always a ranch.

In the strong, warm sunshine chance objects on the bare slopes cast intense, purplish shadows. That of a distant tree is as dark as if a pit had been dug under it. That of a bird, flying low, is followed as distinctly as the bird itself. You are reconciled at last to the brown tone. It is like Algeria. White stands out in brilliant relief against it. One would rather like it to be a different white, however, than that of the little wooden houses. The falconers of Fromentin might career or the rival Arab chiefs of Pasini hold conferences among such hills.

XXV.

_THE VINTAGE SEASON, AND MONTEREY._

I.

It was the pleasant vintage season at San José. Santa Clara County, of which San José is the capital, boasts of a number of acres of grape-vines under cultivation (over eleven thousand) second only to Sonoma County. Napa, however, to the north, and Los Angeles, to the south, greatly surpass it in gallons of wine and brandy produced.

I visited, among others, the Le Franc vineyard, which dates from 1851, and is the pioneer in making wine-growing a regular industry. Here are about a hundred and seventy-five thousand vines, set out a thousand, perhaps, to the acre. The large, cheerful farm buildings are upon a gentle rise of ground above the area of vines, which is nearly level. An Alsacian foreman showed us through the wine-cellars. A servant-maid bustling about the yard was a thorough French peasant, only lacking the wooden shoes. The long tables, set for the forty hands employed in the vintage-time, were spread with viands in the French fashion. Scarcely a word of English was spoken.

At other places the surroundings are as exclusively Italian or Portuguese. One feels very much abroad in such scenes on American soil. The foreigners from Southern Europe take naturally to wine-making and go into it, from the few hundred gallons of red wine made by the Portuguese and Italian laborers for their own families, to the manufacture of an American champagne on a large scale by the Hungarian, Arpad Haraszthy, at San Francisco. The Americans, who have not acquired the habit of looking upon wine as a necessity in the family, are not yet, as a rule, very active in its production.

A certain romantic interest attaches to this ancient industry. The great tuns in the wine-cellars and all the processes were very clean. It was re-assuring to see the pure juice of the grape poured out in such floods, and to feel that here was no need—founded on scarcity, at least—for adulteration.

Teeming loads of the purple fruit were driven up, and across a weighing scale. The contents are lifted to an upper story, put into a hopper, where the stems come off, and the grapes fall through to a crusher. They are lightly crushed at first. It is something of a discovery that the earliest product of grapes of every hue is white wine. The red wine gets its hue from the coloring matter in the skins, which are utilized in a subsequent ruder squeezing.

I shall not enter upon all the various processes—the racking off, clarifying, and the like—though, so much in the company of those who spoke with authority and were continually holding up little glasses to the light with a gusto, like figures in popular chromos, I consider myself to yield in knowledge of such abstruse matters to none. Immense upright casks, containing a warm, audibly fermenting mass, and others lying down, neatly varnished, with concave ends, are the most salient features in the dimly lighted wine-cellars.

They are not cellars, properly so called, either, since they are wholly above-ground. The casks rest on wooden sills upheld by short brick posts. In the cellars of General Naglee, a successful maker of brandy on a large scale, the cobwebs have been allowed to increase and hang like tattered banners. Through these the light penetrates dimly from above, or with a white glare from a latticed window, upon which the patterns of vine-leaves without are defined. The buildings are brown, gray, and vine-clad, with quaint, Dutch-pavilion-looking roofs, and dove-cotes attached. A lofty water-tank, with a wind-mill—a feature of every California rural homestead—here is more tower-like than usual.

Round about extend long avenues of eucalyptus, pine, tamarind, with its black, dry pods; the pepper-tree, with its scarlet berries; large clumps of the _nopal_ cactus, and an occasional maguey, or century-plant. All is glowing now with the tints of autumn. Poplar and cottonwood are yellow. The peach and almond, the Lawton blackberry, and the vineyards themselves, touched by frost, supply the scarlet and crimson. The country seems bathed in a fixed sunshine, or in hues of its own wines.

The vines, themselves short and stout, and needing no support, yield each an incredible number of purple clusters, all growing from the top. They quaintly suggest the uncouth little men of Hendrik Hudson who stagger up the mountain, in “Rip Van Winkle,” with kegs of spirits on their shoulders.

No especial attention is given to the frosts now, but those of the early spring are the object of many precautions. The most effectual is to kindle smudge-fires about the vineyard toward four o’clock in the morning, the smoke of which envelops it and keeps it in a warmer atmosphere of its own till the sun be well risen.

Three to four tons of grapes to the acre are counted upon; while farther south, where irrigation is used, they expect from eight to twelve. But it is claimed, in the standing controversy on the subject, that the irrigated grapes are watery, while those of lesser yield excel them in quality. The best results, we were told, are got from such vines as the Mataro, Carignane, and Grenache, imported cuttings from the French slope of the Pyrenees. There were at Le Franc’s not less than sixty varieties, under probation, many of which will, no doubt, give an excellent account of themselves. They are assembled from Greece, Italy, Palestine, and the Canary Islands, so that we have all the chances of the development of something suited to our peculiar conditions.

II.

I left San José to drive along the dry, shallow bed of the Guadalupe River to the Guadalupe Quicksilver Mine, a more remote and less visited companion of well-known New Almaden. The mine is in a lovely little vale, with a settlement of Mexican and Chinese boarding-houses clustered around it. Some bold ledges of rock jut out above, and a superintendent’s house surrounded by flowers hangs upon the hill-side. A weird-looking flume conveys the sulphurous acid from the calcining furnaces to a hill-top, upon which every trace of vegetation has been blasted by its poisonous exhalations.

Then I made a little tour by rail southward through the immense “Murphy” and “Miller and Lux” ranches, comprising a grain country as flat as a floor.

We turned west through the fertile little Pajaro Valley, the emporium of which for produce, and fine redwood lumber, cut in great quantities on the adjoining Santa Cruz Mountains, is the thriving town of Watsonville. We ran along a rugged coast, past wooded gorges and white sea-side cottages, at Aptos and Soquel, to the much-frequented resort of Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz has bold variations of level, the usual commonplace buildings, a noble drive along cliffs eaten into a hundred fantastic shapes by the waves, and shops for the sale of shells, and its summer boarders, who become, with change of seasons, winter boarders in turn. Thence finally to the long-anticipated Monterey.

Here at last was something to commend from the point of view of the picturesque without reservation. Monterey has a population which still, in considerable part, speaks Spanish only. It retains the impress of the Spanish domination, and little else. When you are told in your own country that somebody does not speak English, you naturally infer that it is brokenly, or only a little. But at Monterey it means absolutely not a word. There are Spanish signs on the shops, and even Spanish advertisements, as, for instance, the _Wheeler & Wilson Maquinas á Coser_, on the fences.

My Mexican experience was a liberal education for Monterey, and I made the most of it. I was taken to call upon an ancient _señorita_, in whose history there was some romance.

“_Las rosas son muy secas_”—(“The roses are very dry”) she said, apologetically, as we entered her little garden, laid out in regular parallelograms, behind an adobe wall topped with red tiles. Large yellow and red roses were blowing to pieces in the wind before her long, low adobe house.

_She_ was one of those who spoke no English. It seems as if there were some wilful perversity in it, after having been since 1846 a part of the most bustling State of the most active country in the world. It seems as if it must be some lingering hatred of the American. But the _señorita_ is far too gentle for that. There is, perhaps, no reason beyond a general mental inertness by virtue of which the Mexican survivors have suffered all their other interests as well as this to go by the board.

The _señorita_ is a little, thin old lady of fifty. Her romance was with an American officer, it is said, thirty years ago, and she has never since married, but has withered, like her roses, at Monterey.

As seen from a distance, scattered loosely and white on the forest-crested slope of the fine bay, the little city, which has now perhaps two thousand inhabitants, does not show its unlikeness to other places. But when entered it consists almost exclusively of whitewashed adobe houses, and the straggling, mud-colored walls of enclosures, for animals, known as “corrals.” Many of them are vacant. At frequent intervals is encountered too some abandoned old adobe barracks, or government house, or military prison of historic fame, with its whitewash gone, holes in its walls, and bits of broken grating and balcony hanging aimlessly on, waiting only the first opportunity to let go.

The travellers of my youth had a fashion of talking glibly of adobe, without explaining what adobe was. Let me not be guilty of the same error. Adobe is bricks made of about twice the usual size, and dried in the sun instead of being baked. Walls are made of great thickness, in order that, though outside and inside crumble off, there may be a good deal left. Like a number of other things, it stands very well while not assailed; and in this climate it is rarely assailed by violent extremes of temperature.

The typical adobe house of the best class is stuccoed and whitewashed. It is large on the ground, two stories in height, and has verandas. Again, it is of but one story, with an interior court-yard. It has green doors and shutters, and green, turned posts, in what we now call the “Queen Anne style,” and it is comfortable and home-like to look at.

One of them contains the first piano ever introduced into California, and the owners are people who made haste to sell out their all at San Francisco and invest it here, in order to reap the greater prosperity which was thought to be waiting upon Monterey. Two old iron guns stand planted as posts at the corners of the dwelling. In front of others are some walks neatly made of the vertebræ of whales, taken by the Monterey Whaling Company. The company is a band of hardy, weather-beaten men, chiefly Portuguese, of the Azores, who have a lookout station on the hill by the ruined fort, and a barracks lower down. They pursue their avocation from the shore in boats, with plenty of adventure and no small profit.

Monterey, which is now not even a county seat, was the Spanish capital of the province from the time it was thought necessary to have a capital. The missionary father, Junipero Serra, came here from Mexico in the year 1770. It was next a Mexican capital under eleven successive governors. Then it became the American capital, the first port of entry, the scene of the first Constitutional Convention of the State, and an outfitting point for the southern mines. Money in those early days was so plenty, I have heard tell, that store-keepers hardly stopped to count it, but threw it under the counter in bushelfuls.

A secret belief in the ultimate revival of Monterey seems always to survive in certain quarters, like that in the reappearance of Barbarossa from the Kylfhäuser Berg, or the restoration of the Jews. Breakwaters have been ambitiously talked of, and it is said that the bay could be made a harbor and shipping-point and the rival of San Francisco.

The only step toward such revival as yet is a fine hotel, built by the Southern Pacific railroad, which may make it, instead of Santa Cruz, across the Bay, the leading sea-side resort. Though not so grandiose a direction as some others, this is really the one in which the peculiar conditions of the old capital are most likely to tell. The summer boarder can get a tangible pleasure out of its historic remains and traditions of greatness, though they be good for nothing else. The Hotel del Monte is a beautiful edifice, not surpassed by that of any American watering-place, and unequalled in the charming groves of live-oak and pine and profusion of cultivated flowers by which it is surrounded, and the air of comfort combined with its elegant arrangements.

This is the way with our friends of the Pacific coast. If they do not always stop to follow Eastern ideas and patterns, when they really attempt something in the same line, they are as likely as not to do it a great deal better.

The climate at Monterey, according to statistical tables, is remarkably even. The mean temperature is 52° in January and 58° in July. This strikes one as rather cool for bathing, but the mode is to bathe in the tanks of a large bath-house, to which sea-water is introduced, artificially warmed, instead of in the sea itself.

In other respects the place seems nearly as desirable at one time of the year as another. The quaint town is always there; and the wild rocks, with their gossiping gulls and pelicans; and the drives through the extensive forests. There are varieties of pine and cypress—the latter like the Italian stone-pine—peculiar to Monterey. The more venerable trees, hoary with age and hanging moss, are contorted into all the fantastic shapes of Doré’s “Inferno.” They grow by preference on the most savage points of rock, and the wild breakers toss handfuls of spray up to them high in the air, in amity and greeting.

Along the beach on this far-away point of the Pacific Ocean we find a Chinese fishing settlement. Veritable Celestials, without a word of English among them, have pasted the usual crimson papers of hieroglyphics on shanty residences. They burn tapers before their gods on the quay, and fish for a living in just such junks and small boats as may be seen at Hong-Kong and Canton. They prepare avallonia meat and avallonia shells for their home market. One had rather thought of the Chinese element as confined to San Francisco alone, but it is a feature of quaint interest throughout all of Southern California.

At Monterey is found an old mission of the delightfully ruinous sort. It is in the little Carmel Valley, which is bare and brown again, after the green woods are passed, four miles from the town. The mission fathers once had here ninety thousand cattle, and other things to correspond. There are now only some vestiges, resembling earth-works, of their extensive adobe walls, and, on a rise overlooking the sea, the yellowish, low, _rococo_ church of San Carlos.

The Mexican traditions in design and proportion accompanied them here, but the workmanship as they went farther from home became curiously rude, and speaks of the disadvantages under which it was done. A dome of concrete on the bell-tower is unequally bulged; a star window in the front has very irregular points. The interior does not yield, as a picture of sentimental ruin, to Muckross Abbey or any broken temple of the Roman Campagna. The roof, open now to the sky, with grasses and wild mustard growing from its crevices, was of stone arches, supplemented with timber-work tied with raw-hides. The whole body of the church—pilasters, capitals, frieze, and all—is set on a curve springing from the floor—a peculiarity I have never seen elsewhere. There are grasses growing within, sculptured stones tumbled down, vestiges of a tile pavement, tombs, bits of fresco, and over all the autograph scribblings of a myriad of A. B. Smiths and J. B. Joneses, visitors here in their time like ourselves.

Once a year, on St. Charles’s-day, in early November, a memorial service is held, attended by all the shabby Spanish-Indian life remaining in the country round about. The place is unique. It seems even more lonely than ruins of the same kind in the mother country, through standing amid surroundings of such a different class. Nothing is more conducive to pensiveness of a pleasant kind than, lying within this ruined enclosure, to watch the waving in the wind of the long grasses on its walls and listen to the plash of the sea on the shore, but a few steps distant.

XXVI.

_A WONDROUS VALLEY, AND A DESERT THAT BLOSSOMS LIKE THE ROSE._

I.

The Yosemite, currently spoken of as the “Valley,” is comprised in the belt formed by drawing lines across the State from San Francisco and Monterey respectively. It is a wild, strange nook among the Sierras, one of the few places not only not disappointing, but worthy of far more praise than has ever been bestowed upon it. It is like one of those mysterious regions on the outskirts of the fairy-land of the story-books—a standing resource of adventure to all the characters who enter it, and it is proper enough that our earthly Paradise of Southern California should have such a region of enchantment also adjoining it.

I reached it by stage-ride of sixty miles, from the Southern Pacific Railroad, at Madera, to Clark’s Station, and thence by stage and horseback of twenty-five miles to the Valley. The autumn days were lovely there. The foliage, turned by a local climate quite as severe as that of New England, glowed with a vivid richness. The Merced River, a gentle stream, pursuing a devious way in the bottom, which is as level as a floor, reflected the color from many a mirror-like pool and sudden bend. Walls of rock rise on either hand to an elevation of three-quarters of a mile, varying from one-half to one-eighth of a mile in width. It is rather a chasm than a valley. At night the radiance of a full yellow moon invested all its wonders with an added enchantment. The cliffs are exactly what we think cliffs ought to be, but what they seldom are. They are of the hardest granite, pleasantly gray in color, and terminate in castle and dome like forms. The precipices are sheer and unbroken to the base, with almost none of those slopes of _débris_ that detract from precipices in general. It is a little valley suitable, without a hair’s-breadth alteration, to the purposes of any giant, enchanter, or yellow dwarf of them all. It is such scenery as Doré has imagined for the “Idyls of the King.” One half feels himself a Sir Lancelot or Sir Gawain, riding along this lovely and majestic mountain trail; and as if he should wear chain-armor, a winged helmet, and a sword upon which he had sworn to do deeds of redoubtable valor.

It was the coast valleys and some coast towns that we took on our first journey. This time we have come down the main line of the Southern Pacific Railway through the central plain of the State. The railway is traced along the great central valley known as the San Joaquin, on a line nearly midway between the Sierra Nevadas and the Coast Range.

The road is still comparatively new, and the settlements have attained no great dimensions. It did not as a rule touch at the older towns existing, but pursued a direct course through a country where all had to be opened up. As some of the places passed by were of considerable size no little dissatisfaction ensued, and the mutterings are still heard. Frequent mention of this grievance is heard by the traveller through Southern California. Some of the neglected places even maintain that they would have been better without any railroad at all. References are thrown out to former glories of a dazzling sort which it is sometimes difficult to credit, though a railroad naturally effects great innovations in trade. To the ordinary observer it would appear that the introduction of a splendidly equipped railway, even if it distribute its blessings a little unequally at first, and its tariff be high, must be a great and permanent advantage to everything remote as well as near. For the first time an adequate means has been afforded for the transport of immigrants and supplies through the whole length of the State.

The Southern Pacific Railway has completed connections which give it a transcontinental route from San Francisco, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, to New Orleans. Immigrants are to be brought in by steamer from Liverpool to New Orleans, and thence by rail at a rate not to exceed that to the central West. The fares to California heretofore have been almost prohibitive, which is one of the reasons why so rich a country contains as yet less than a million of people. The languid movement hither of the valuable class of immigration which pours into the West, though ascribed by some alarmists to the presence of the Chinese, is due to the cost of travel and the lack of cheap lands for settlement. The Chinese are certainly not rivals in the matter of land, since they acquire little or none of it.

The new opportunities opened to transportation, the depression of the mining interest, and rapid increase of the Chinese, have awakened of late an exceptional interest in white immigration. A committee of some of the most prominent persons in the State has opened an inquiry into the most effectual means of promoting it. It will no doubt set forth more clearly than has ever been done before an account of such territory as is open to settlers, whether offered by the government, the railroads, or the great ranches, its advantages and the methods of reaching it.

It seems a little singular at first that lack of suitable lands can be adduced as a reason for lack of population in so vast a region, with the climate and other natural advantages of which so much has been said. It can only be understood by taking into account the unusual atmospheric dryness, and the important part played by water, which has to be brought upon the soil by costly contrivances; The locations where there is sufficient natural moisture for the maturing of crops are of small extent. They were among the first taken up. In much of the central and southern portions of the State the annual rain-fall is almost infinitesimal in quantity. At Bakersville, the capital of Kern County—whither our journey presently leads us—it is no more than from two to four inches. Light crops of grain and pasturage for stock may occasionally be got even under these conditions, but the only certain reliance is irrigation.

The springs and small streams were early appreciated at their value, and seized upon by persons who controlled with them great tracts of surrounding country, valueless except as watered from these sources. These tributary tracts are used chiefly as cattle and sheep ranges. A person owning five thousand acres will often have for his stock the free run of twenty thousand more. Cultivation is confined to the springs and water-courses, and becomes a succession of charming oases in a desert the superficial sterility of which is phenomenal.

The tenure of land by thousands of acres under a single ownership is a tradition from the Spanish and Mexican times. It has been much decried, as a great evil, and it is said that the State would be much more prosperous in a series of small farms. This is probably true, and the system as it exists may be ascribed in part to the greed of individuals, but it arises principally out of the natural features of the country. The wealth of the large holders alone enables them to undertake works of improvement, such as canal-making, drainage, and tree-planting, on an effectual scale. Perhaps the State will have to lend its assistance, and establish a public system of irrigation and drainage, before the land can be fully prepared for the small settler.

Water! water! water! How to slake the thirst of this parched, brown country, and turn it over to honest toil and thrift, is the great problem as we go southward, and the processes of irrigation are the most distinctive marks upon the landscape wherever it is improved.

II.

It is in early November that we begin to traverse the long San Joaquin Valley from Lathrop Junction, just below Stockton, southward. The side tracks of the railroad are crowded with platform-cars laden with wheat for the sea-board. The “elevator” system is not yet in use, and the grain is contained in sacks for convenient handling.

Hereabouts are some of the most famous wheat ranches. A man will plough but a single furrow a day on his farm, but this may be twenty miles long. There is sufficient rain-fall for the cereals, but not for the more exacting crops. The land gives but few bushels to the acre under the easy system of farming, but it must be remembered that there are a great many acres. The stubble of the grain-fields is whitened with wild-fowl. At a way-station a small rustic in an immense pair of boots goes over to a pool and blazes away with a shot-gun. Presently he returns, dragging by the necks an immense pair of wild-geese, almost beyond his strength to pull. The tawny color of the fields, and the great formal stacks of straw piled up in them, recall some aspects of the central table-land of Mexico. Many or spacious buildings are not necessary in the mild, dry climate of California. The prosperous ranches have, in consequence, a somewhat thin, unfurnished appearance compared with Eastern farms.

The most prominent object at each station is a long, low warehouse of the company, for the accommodation of grain. Like the station buildings generally it is painted Indian red, in “metallic” paint. The station of Merced is one of the two principal points of departure for the Yosemite Valley, Madera the other. At Merced an immense wooden hotel, for travellers bound to the Valley, overshadows the rest of the town. It rises beside the track, and the town is scattered back on the plain.

At Madera appears the end of a V-shaped wooden aqueduct, or flume, for rafting down lumber from the mountains fifty miles away to a planing-mill. Some of the hands also occasionally come down the flume in temporary boats. As the speed is prodigious these voyages abound in excitement and peril. The structure, supported on trestles, according to the formation of the ground, stretches away in interminable perspective to the mountains, which are rose-pink and purple at sunset. The scene is suggestive of the Roman Campagna, with this slight, essentially American work as a parody of the broken aqueducts and temples of the classic ancients. The lumber flume, however, is a bold and costly enterprise, though we be prone to smile at it.

By degrees we draw away from the wheat ranches, more and more on the uncultivated plain. The town of Fresno, two hundred miles below San Francisco, and about midway between two important streams, the San Joaquin and Kings Rivers, is in the midst of a particularly desolate tract, known, up to a very recent period, as the San Joaquin Desert. One should alight here. There is no better place for examining the marvellous capabilities of a soil which appears at first sight inhospitable to the last degree. Fresno is in the hands of enterprising persons, who push and advertise it very actively. We heard at San Francisco of the Fresno Colony, the Central Colony, American Colony, Scandinavian Colony, Temperance Colony, Washington Colony, and others of similar names clustered around Fresno. It is advertised as one of those genial places, alluring to the imagination of most of us, where one can sit down under his own vine and fig-tree, secure from the vicissitudes of climate, and find a profitable occupation open to him in the cultivation of the soil, and all at a moderate cost.

The aspect of things on alighting is very different from what had been expected, but all the substantial advantages claimed seemed realized, and the process of founding a home may be witnessed in all its stages.

The town has a population of two thousand, most of which it has gained in the past five years. It is set down on the east side of the railroad highway, with a thin scattering of foliage slightly veiling the formality of its lines. It consists of a few streets of two-story wooden and brick buildings. The streets cross one another at right angles, and have planked sidewalks. A slight eminence above the general level is the site of the County Court-house, which somewhat resembles an Italian villa in design, and has Italian cypresses in front. The court-houses of half a dozen counties down the line, from Modesto, the capital of Stanislaus, to Bakersfield, capital of Kern, are identical in pattern, so that it is both typical of its kind and evidence of an economical spirit.

A sharp distinctness of outline is characteristic of these cities of the plain. Separated from the main part of Fresno by the railroad, as by a wide boulevard, is a row of low wooden houses and shops, as clearly cut out against the desert as bathing-houses on a beach. This is the Chinese quarter. It tells at a glance the story of the peculiar people who tenant it: the social ostracism on the one hand, and their own indomitable clannishness on the other.

There is now hardly any hamlet so insignificant, even in the wastes of Arizona, that the Chinese have not penetrated it, in search of labor and opportunities. Every settlement of the Pacific slope has its Chinese quarter, as mediæval towns had their Ghetto for the Jews. It is not always without the place, as at Fresno; but, wherever it be, it constitutes a close corporation and a separate unit. In dress, language, and habits of life it adheres to Oriental tradition with all the persistence the new conditions will admit.

The Celestials do not introduce their own architecture, and they build little but shanties. They adapt what they find to their own purposes, as has been said, distinguishing them with such devices that the character of the dwellers within cannot be mistaken.

A great incongruity is felt between the little Yankee wooden dwellings and the tasselled lanterns, gilded signs, and hieroglyphics upon red and yellow papers with which they are profusely overspread. Here Ah Coon and Sam Sing keep laundries like the Chinese laundry the world over. Yuen Wa advertises himself as a contractor for laborers. Hop Ling, Sing Chong, and a dozen others have miscellaneous stores. In their windows are junk-shaped slippers, opium pipes, bottles of _saki_, rice-brandy, dried fish, goose livers, gold and silver jewelry, and packets of face-powder and hair ornaments for the women. The pig-tailed merchants themselves sit within, on odd-looking chests and budgets, and gossip in animated cackle with customers, or figure up their profits gravely in brown-paper books, with a brush for a pen. Women—much more numerous in proportion to the men than is commonly supposed—occasionally waddle by. Their black hair is very smoothly greased, and kept in place by long silver pins. They wear wide jackets and pantaloons of a cheap black “paper cambric,” which increase the natural awkwardness of their short and ungainly figures.

Up-stairs, in unpainted, cobwebby, second stories, are the joss-houses. Here hideous but decorative idols grin as serenely as if in the centre of their native Tartary, and as if there were no spires of little Baptist and Methodist meeting-houses rising indignantly across the way. Pastilles burn before the idols, and crimson banners are draped about; and there are usually a few pieces of antique bronze upon which the eye of the connoisseur rests enviously.

Other interiors are cabarets, which recall those of the French working-classes. A boisterous animation reigns within. The air is thick with tobacco-smoke of the peculiar Chinese odor. Games of dominoes are played with magpie-like chatter by excited groups around long, wooden tables. Most of those present wear the customary blue cotton blouse and queer little black soft hat, and all have queues, which either dangle behind or are coiled up like the hair of women. Some, however—teamsters, perhaps here only temporarily—are dressed in the slop clothing and cowhide boots of ordinary white laborers.

The Chinamen are servants in the camps, the ranches, and the houses of the better class, track-layers and section hands on the railroad, and laborers in the factories and fields. What Southern California, or California generally, could do without them it is difficult to see. They seem, for the most part, capable, industrious, honest, and neat. One divests himself rapidly of the prejudice against them with which he may have started. Let us hope that laborers of the better class, by whom they are to be succeeded, may at least have as many praiseworthy traits.

The town of Fresno is as yet chiefly a supply and market point for the numerous colonies by which it is environed. These colonies straggle out in various directions, beginning within a mile or two of the town. The intervening land still lies in its natural condition for settlement. It is difficult to convey an idea of its seemingly hopeless barrenness. Instead of complaining of dry grass here one would be grateful for a blade of grass of any kind. The surface is as arid as that of a gravelled school-yard. It is even worse, for it is undermined with holes of gophers, owls, jack-rabbits, and squirrels. To ride at any speed is certain to bring one to grief through the entangling of his horse’s legs in these pitfalls. As the traveller passes there is a scampering on all sides. The gray squirrels speed for their holes with flying leaps, the jack-rabbits with kangaroo-like bounds. They run toward us, if they chance to have been absent from home in an opposite direction. Not one considers himself safe from our clearly malicious designs till he has dived headlong into his own proper tenement.

Here and there are tracts white with alkali. Flakes of this substance, at once bitter and salt to the taste, can be taken up in an almost pure condition. Elsewhere we pass through tracts of wild sunflower—a tall weed, charming in flower, but now thoroughly desiccated, and rattling together like dry bones.

This description applies, for the greater part of the year, not only to Fresno, but in an almost equal degree to Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and nearly the whole of Southern California. Without it the wonders which have been produced by human agency could not be understood. The face of nature in all this district was a blank sheet of paper. The cultivator had absolutely everything to do. He discovered on trial that he had a soil of remarkable capacity, and, with the aid of water and the genial climate, he could draw from it whatever he pleased.

Water is the salvation of the waste places, and makes the desert blossom like the rose. One’s respect for this pleasant element is, if possible, increased upon seeing what it is here capable of. It seems that, if used with sufficient art, it might almost draw a crop from cast-iron. The vegetation of Southern California is thoroughly artificial. It consists of a series of scattered plantations created by the use of water. In these the traveller finds his flowers, palms, vineyards, and orange groves, and, burying himself among them, like the ostrich with its head in the sand, he may refuse briefly to recognize that there is anything else; but, as a matter of fact, only a small beginning has been made. What has been done, however, is an earnest of what can be done. It is found that, as irrigation is practised, the land stores up part of the water, and less is needed each year. In wells, too, the water is found nearer the surface, proving that the soil acts as a natural reservoir. As time goes on, and canals and vegetation increase, no doubt important climatic changes may be looked for. In the end Southern California may be as different from what it is at present as can be imagined.

The several Fresno colonies for the most part join one another, and form a continuous belt of cultivation. On entering their confines the change is most agreeable. Close along-side the desert, the home of the gopher and jack-rabbit, only separated from it by a narrow ditch of running water, are lovely vineyards, orchards of choice fruits, ornamental flowers and shrubs, avenues of shade-trees, fields of corn, and green pastures of the alfalfa, a tall and strong clover, which gives half a dozen crops a year. Embowered among these are the homes of happy families, larger establishments for the drying of fruits and converting the munificent crops of grapes into wine. Many of the homes are as yet but modest wooden cottages. Others, of a better class, are of adobe, treated in an ornamental way, with piazzas and Gothic gables.

The most important residence is that of a late member of the San Francisco Stock Board, who has gone into the cultivation of grapes here on a large scale. It is a handsome villa that would do credit to any town. The improvements of the Barton place were in but an incipient state at the time of our visit. A great array of young vines brightened the recently sterile soil, but timidly and as if not quite certain of approval. Young orange and lemon trees in the door-yard were muffled in straw till they should have gained a greater hardihood to withstand the frosts. Elsewhere water was being run out from irrigating ditches over fields in preparation for the first time. It is the custom to soak them, in order that they may be perfectly levelled. Knolls or any other inequalities must not be left to hinder the equal distribution of water to the crop. A wide canal stretched back from the numerous out-buildings toward the horizon. On the verge of the wide plain showed the blue Sierras, veiled by a slight chronic dustiness of the atmosphere.

In the more established portions of the colonies some charming bits of landscape are found. The Chinese farm-hand wears a blue blouse and a wide basket-hat which he calls _mow_. He pronounces this hat “heap good” if complimented upon it. He prunes the vines or collects the generous clusters of grapes; or else he digs a vegetable garden by the side of a canal, in which himself, his vegetables, his cabin, a row of poplar-trees, and the blue sky overhead are all reflected together. Poplars, willows, and cottonwoods are planted along the canals to strengthen their banks. At Eisen’s wine-making place, for a considerable distance, oleanders in flower are seen spaced between the trees. The water runs clear and swift. At Eisen’s it turns a mill. No doubt devices for bathing in it might also be contrived if desired.

The long, symmetrical lines of trees have a foreign, or at least un-American, air. It is not difficult to recall to mind the mulberries and elms that bend over the irrigating canals of Northern Italy and drop their yellow leaves upon them in autumn like these. It might be Lombardy again, and the glimpses of distant blue the Alps instead of the Sierras. The locks and gates for the water are of an ephemeral structure as yet, made of planking instead of substantial brick and stone. The smaller ditches are often stopped with mere bits of board let down into grooves, instead of gates with handles. It is urged, however, that handles offer inducement to idlers to lift them up out of pure mischief, and waste the water.

The colonies are not quite colonies in the usual sense; that is to say, they were not founded by persons who combined together and came at one and the same time. The lands they occupy were distributed into parcels by an original owner, and, after being provided with water facilities by an irrigation company, put upon the market at the disposal of whoever would buy. No doubt a certain general consistency rules them in keeping with the names respectively set up, but it is not rigorous. Probably nothing need prevent a native American from joining the Scandinavian Colony, or a Scandinavian the American Colony, should he desire to do so.

As to the Temperance Colony, it must be sorely tried in a locality the most liberal and profitable yield of which is the wine grape. It seems hardly a propitious place to have chosen. Scoffers say that in some instances while settlers will not make wine themselves they will sell their grapes to the wine-making establishments. This I merely note as “important, if true.”

The standard twenty-acre lot, as prepared for market at Fresno, has its main irrigating ditch, of perhaps four feet in width, connecting with the general irrigating system. For twelve and a half dollars a year it receives a water-right entitling it to the use of whatever water it may need. The buyer must make his own minor ditches, and prepare his ground from this point. He usually aims to establish in his fields a number of slightly differing levels, that the water may be led to one after the other. For ground in the preliminary condition described about fifty dollars per acre is demanded. Most of the earlier settlers bought for less, and the price named strikes one as high, considering the newness of the country, and the excellent farming land to be had in the older parts of the country for less. Prices are less here, however, than at Los Angeles, Riverside, or San Diego, farther south.

It is argued in answer to objectors that though land be not nominally it is really cheap, in consideration of its extraordinary productiveness. It is held that an investment here gives better returns than anywhere, and at the same time that the climate and other conditions promise a more pleasurable existence than could be enjoyed elsewhere. This Fresno land, for instance, yields four and five crops of alfalfa a year. Vineyards planted but two and a half years are shown which produce five tons of grapes to the acre. Five years is the period required for the vines to come into full bearing. It is estimated that an acre of vines in that condition will have cost one hundred and twenty-five dollars, allowing fifty dollars as the price of the ground, and it is then counted upon for an annual yield of ten tons of grapes, at twenty dollars a ton. The rate of growth in vegetation is one of the things to note. Fruit-trees are said to advance as far in three years as in seven on the Eastern sea-board.

The personal stories of the colonists are often interesting. They have generally had some previous hard experience of the world. Such a man, working sturdily in the field preparing the ground around a new cottage of his own, lost a fortune in the San Francisco Stock Board. The funds for his present enterprise were provided by his wife, who had turned to keeping boarders, and sent him her small profits monthly until he should have made ready a place for their joint occupancy. Instances were heard of where nice properties had been secured with no other original capital than a pair of brawny hands. These, however, were exceptional. The country appears to be one where it is most desirable for the new-comer to have a small capital.

In the Central Colony a comfortable estate was owned by four spinster school-teachers of San Francisco. They had combined to purchase eighty acres. One of them lived on the place and managed it. The others contributed from their earnings until it had reached a paying basis, passed only their vacations there at present, but looked forward to making it their ultimate retreat.

The idea seems both a praiseworthy new departure in the direction of female emancipation and charming in itself. I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the resident manager of the experiment. Her experiences, written out, would, I think, be interesting and instructive. There was an open piano in the pleasant cottage interior, and late books and magazines were scattered about. It was a bit of refined civilization dropped down in the midst of the desert.

This lady had come, she said, for rest. She took pleasure, too, in the country, and in seeing things grow. She had made mistakes in her management at first, mainly through trusting too much to others, but now had things in good control. Four farm-hands—Chinamen—were employed. The eighty acres were distributed into vineyard, orchard, and alfalfa, about one-half devoted to the vineyard. Its product was turned, not into wine, but raisins. Apricots and nectarines had been found up to this time the most profitable orchard fruits. Almonds were less so, owing to the loss of time in husking them for market. There was among other crops a field of Egyptian corn, a variety which grows tall and slender, and runs up to a bushy head instead of forming ears. The sight of it carried one back to the Biblical story of Joseph and his brethren, and the picture-writing in the Pyramids.

The grapes for raisin-making are of the sweet Muscat variety. There was a “raisin-house” piled full of the flat boxes in which raisins are traditionally packed. The process of raisin-making is very simple. The bunches of grapes are cut from the vines, and laid in trays in the open fields. They are left there, properly turned at intervals, for a matter of a fortnight. There are neither rains nor dews to dampen them and delay the curing. Then they are removed to an airy building known as a “sweat-house,” where they remain possibly a month, till the last vestiges of moisture are gone. Hence they go to be packed and shipped to market.

One must walk rather gingerly at present not to discern through the young and scattering plantations the bareness beyond, but in another ten years the scene can hardly fail to be one of rich luxuriance. The site is flat and prairie-like, and I should prefer, for my part, to locate my earthly Paradise nearer the hills. Still, the taste of the time runs to earthly Paradises which are at the same time shrewd commercial ventures, and the cultivation of the plain is much easier than that of the slopes.

XXVII.

_VISALIA, BAKERSFIELD, AND LIFE ON A SPACIOUS RANCH._

I.

Visalia, capital of Tulare County, thirty-four miles south of Fresno, is one of the older towns left aside by the railroad. I put it in the most obvious way, but a patriotic Visalian, on the other hand, said to me with warmth, “Left by the railroad! Visalia left by the railroad! I guess not. It is the railroad that is left by Visalia, as it will find out.”

Visalia is reached, from the junction of Goshen, by a short branch-road of its own. It is larger than Fresno, but less animated. It has perhaps twenty-five hundred people, a court-house of the pattern described, and a United States land-office.

When the epithet “old” is used of any California town not of Spanish origin it simply means an approximation to the year 1849. The building of most hoary antiquity in Visalia dates only from the year 1852. It has been government-house, jail, and store in turn, and is now decorated with the legend “Mooney’s Brewery.” The town was founded by one Vise, an erratic person, who came across the plains from Texas, and had followed in his life such various professions, besides that of pioneer, as preacher, trader, gambler, foot-racer, and jockey. It happened that the quarter section of land upon which he settled was at the time unsurveyed, and not legally open to pre-emption. This irregularity was not discovered till years later, when the town had grown up on the site. It was brought to light by an employé of the land-office, who thereupon ingeniously undertook to pre-empt the ground for himself.

“And what came of this bold attempt upon vested interests?”

“The party was promptly fired out of town,” was the reply.

Visalia is rather prolific in stories, if an “old-timer” of the right sort can be happened up to tell them. Cattle kings, whose herds once filled the San Joaquin Valley, have retired hither. You may hear how Cattle King “Pat Murray” won his wife. She was a fascinating person in her youth, the daughter of a landlady with whom Pat Murray, then struggling and impecunious, boarded, in company with numerous mates. There was great aspiration and rivalry for her hand. Pat Murray stole a march in this wise. As they were setting off in company on an expedition he said, “The trip is a rough and dangerous one, boys. I propose that we leave our money and valuables with the old lady for safe-keeping.” The rest agreed, and handed over to him their property to deliver to her. The shrewd Pat Murray represented it all as his own, and obtained in this way such consideration in her eyes—as a person exceptionally well-to-do in the world—that she advised her daughter to “set her cap” at him, and all was happily accomplished before the _ruse_ was discovered.

On another occasion—whether in this same courtship or not the chronicles do not say—Pat Murray disposed of rivals, who visited in the evenings a comely damsel of the general acquaintance, by soft-soaping the log serving as approach to her cabin across a small stream. Having thus arranged, he sat calmly enjoying the fair one’s society, and listening with appreciative ear to the splash of the successive victims as they slid off into the water.

Stories are told of Spanish bandits and treasure of precious metals in the mountains, and of the wild administration of justice in early times, when offenders were occasionally executed first and sentenced afterward.

The first treasurer of the county is said to have carried the records of his office in his hat, and, being a person given to travel and of an absent mind, he scattered these documents far and wide behind him, even to the confines of Utah and Arizona.

At Visalia I first observed “Spanishtown,” a community which begins to appear regularly along-side of “Chinatown” as we go southward. It is composed of persons of Mexican blood, poor, shiftless, and not always of the most reputable character.

Charming views of the high Sierras, now powdered with the first snows of winter, are had. The surface is more rolling than at Fresno, and strewn with fine clumps of chestnut-oaks. There are big trees back in the great mountains equalling in size those of the Yosemite. Lumbermen at work there cut down numbers which, though insignificant as compared to the very largest, are monstrous in themselves.

The water for the irrigation of this district is drawn out of Kings, Tule, and Kaweah rivers by companies, who give to their principal canals such names as the People’s Ditch, the Last Chance Ditch, the Mussel Slough Ditch, and the Lower Kings River Ditch. The main ditches or canals range from twelve to forty feet in width. Wing dams confine and direct into them such portions as are desired of the wide, meandering rivers.

A California river of the south is something of a curiosity. Extravagantly wide, it is in compensation preposterously shallow. Only a few last over the dry season at all; the most evaporate and wholly disappear. Their dry beds, variegated by a few islets studded with sycamores, are more like wagon-roads than the beds of rivers. Sometimes these exhausted water-courses differ in color from the surrounding soil, and are seen stretching as rivers of gray or silvery sand through the general yellow of the desert.

Though irrigation be yet in its infancy its belongings have attained great dimensions. There are three hundred miles of canals of the requisite size in Tulare County, and more than three thousand miles in California all together. One main canal, that of the San Joaquin and Kings River, has a length of seventy-four miles and a width of nearly seventy feet.

II.

A branch-road westward from Goshen, a continuation of that from Visalia, conveys the traveller to the bustling, fast-growing little towns of Hanford and Lemoore, in the Mussel Slough country. This district, adjoining Tulare Lake, was recently part desert and part swamp. It has been redeemed so as to rank now among the best farming land in California. Its chief product is wheat. The inhabitants raise hardly the vegetables needed for their own use. Malaria is rather prevalent, but it is said to arise, as in many other irrigated districts, from the careless use of water rather than the fundamental situation. The water, instead of being carefully drained off, is too often allowed to lie in stagnant pools.

The Mussel Slough was the scene, in the month of May, 1880, of a bloody conflict between the settlers and railroad authorities which has become celebrated. Officers of the law, acting for new claimants, attempted to take possession of the land under a railroad title. Legally in the wrong, though perhaps morally in the right, the settlers organized to resist, put out stirring manifestoes, which read like the declarations of oppressed people struggling for their liberty, and called on gods and men to witness the justice of their cause. In the fight that ensued five settlers lost their lives, all at the hands of a single man—one Crowe, a United States marshal, who displayed a prowess and coolness under fire never surpassed in any of the narratives of sensational literature. Crowe himself was despatched. A number of the survivors were tried for their part in the affair, condemned to eight months’ imprisonment, and served out their term in Santa Clara jail. They had but just been released, say a month before our arrival. Their brethren and well-wishers had received them on their return with an ovation, the noise of which hardly yet ceased to ring in the air.

III.

Bakersfield, capital of Kern County, seventy-five miles farther south, somewhat smaller than Visalia, boasted at one time the distinction of a malady peculiar to itself. The Bakersfield form of malarial fever, whatever the fine difference that distinguished it from others, had a position apart in the medical works. The sanitary condition of the place, however, has been greatly improved by the extension of drainage and irrigation works, and can, no doubt, be made all that could be desired.

Of the three lakes, Tulare, Buena Vista, and Kern, which make so large a showing on the map, the latter two, with their surrounding marshes, have been dried up, and the former is on its way to extinction also. These lakes had for me, on the map, a mysterious and important air. I seized the first opportunity to penetrate their mystery, by riding down to Tulare Lake on horseback. You cannot reach the margin, for fear of miring. Nor is the approach on foot much easier. The tules, or rushes, rise high above your head, and are infested with a dangerous breed of wild hogs, descended from vagrant deserters from the ranches. In such fragmentary glimpses as are had between and over the tules an expanse of dreary surface appears which may be either water or the alkali-whitened bed from which the water has receded. The vicinity swarms with wild fowl. Their multitudinous chatter has a kind of metallic clang in it. Now white, now dark, as they are before or against the sunlight, they flutter above the reeds and stubble-fields like autumn leaves blown by the wind.

The drying up of the lakes is occasioned by the diversion of the surplus waters of the Kern River for the redemption of desert lands. This gave rise to a controversy, lately settled by a legal decision which is a step in the crystallization into shape of a system of water jurisdiction for California. The great firm of real-estate men and ranchmen, Miller & Lux, owned the lands below; the almost equally great firm of Haggin, Carr & Tevis, those, for the improvement of which the water was taken out, above. The first-named complained of the diversion of the waters as a detriment to them, and an infringement of their riparian rights. Riparian right, it will be remembered, in the English common law, gives to the resident on a stream the right to have it flow as it was wont through his grounds without diminution or alteration.

The contest at first promised to be one of physical force. Miller & Lux endeavored to close the sluices at which the water was taken out. Just, as in Scripture, the herdsmen of Gerara strove against the herdsmen of Isaac, saying, “It is our water,” the hardy _vaqueros_ of Haggin, Carr & Tevis were mustered in opposition to them, with orders to lasso and throw into the canal anybody who should interfere with the sluices. This determined show of resistance prevented a conflict, and the case went to the civil courts.

The decision spoken of holds that the doctrine which prevails in California is not that of riparian right, but that of “prior appropriation for beneficial uses.”

That is to say, the greatest good of the greatest number is consulted. The point had been raised before in controversies about the diversion of water for mining purposes. In these cases the ruling was, that the doctrine of riparian right is “inapplicable, or applicable only in a very limited extent, to the necessity of miners, and inadequate for their protection.” It was farthermore held that all of the English common law is not in force in California, but only such portions of it as are adapted to the peculiar conditions of the State. The agricultural and mining interests, therefore, are now put, in this respect, on the same footing.

Bakersfield takes its tone essentially from live stock. It has special resorts for drovers and sheep-herders. Its streets are generally full of horses, caparisoned in the Spanish style, tied to hitching-posts and awaiting their owners before the stores and taverns. The sheep-herders, a lonely race, become morose and melancholy in their long wanderings with their flocks apart from the habitations of men and human speech. They are far removed from the shepherds of Boucher and Watteau. Some are said to go insane through the monotony of their lives; and it is an occupation taken up only as a last resort, and unfitting him who pursues it for any other. Strangely enough, there is a rather English tone among them. Young prodigals of good family are found who, after trying their fortunes in Australia, India, and elsewhere, are eating the husks of repentance here in true Scriptural fashion.

The shops in Bakersfield, as throughout our travels, are kept principally by the Jews, who are great pioneers. No people are growing up more ardently with the new West; and where they are found business is pretty sure to be good.

The Chinatown is a district of compact little streets, of an extent that indicates a population almost equal to that of the rest of the place. An irrigating ditch surrounds it like a moat. The cabins along this, picturesquely reflected in it, are gray and weather-beaten, varied with patches of bright Orientalism, and shaded by a line of tall poplar-trees. The Spanishtown, close by, is a cluster of dance-houses and corrals, between which swarthy Josés and Juanitas are seen passing.

As if this were not foreignness enough already, we stumble upon a camp of strolling gypsies, their tents pitched on the borders of Spanishtown. They are English, and have come from Australia, dropping their “h’s” all along the way, no doubt, as liberally as here. They are like types of Cruikshank and Dickens. An apple-faced Mrs. Jarley appears in a large velvet bonnet with plumes. A very tightly-dressed, slender individual, with a weed on his hat, might pass for Sam Weller. He is a horse-tamer and jockey. At his heels follows a belligerent bull-dog. Behind one of the tents a child of nine, Cassie by name, with fine, dark eyes, is making a toilet before a bit of cracked mirror. She pastes down her wet hair into a semblance of the “water-waves” of fashionable society. When interrupted with a compliment on the arrangement she affects displeasure, and tosses it all abroad again with a native coquetry.

The Mrs.-Jarley-looking woman is the fortune-teller. She declares that there are persons whose fortunes she would not tell for twenty—no, not for fifty dollars.

Mine, however, through an especial liking she affects to have taken to me, and the dulness of trade, she promises to tell, in the most effective manner, for two dollars only.

IV.

The possessions of some of the great land-owners are prodigious. It is a favorite story that certain ones can drive a herd of cattle from the northern counties of the State to San Diego, its southern limit, and quarter them every night on their own ground. Haggin, Carr & Tevis, whose property I was privileged to examine in detail, have at Bakersfield four hundred thousand acres nearly in one body. Much of this was secured for a trifle in the condition of desert land, and has been redeemed.

One ranchman who had acquired a great estate of this kind chiefly while surveyor-general of the United States was the occasion of drawing forth one of the best _bon mots_ of Lincoln.

“I congratulate you,” said our martyred President. “You have become monarch of about all you have surveyed.”

The owners do not often live upon their estates; they leave them in the hands of managers, and draw the revenues. The Haggin, Carr & Tevis property is divided into a number of separate ranches, each with its resident superintendent. The “Bellevue Ranch” is the centre and focus of authority. Here are the residence and office of the general manager, and a force of book-keepers, engineers, and mechanics, who keep the accounts, map, plan, supervise, construct, repair, and give to the whole the clock-work regularity of a great commercial enterprise. The numerous buildings constitute a considerable settlement. There is a “store” of general merchandise and supplies. A dormitory and a dining-hall have been erected for the laboring hands. A tower-like water-tank, surmounted by a wind-mill, and accommodating a milk-room below, rises at one side. There are shops for the mechanics, capacious barns, and long sheds filled with an interminable array of agricultural implements. It is worth while to take a walk past this collection of reapers, threshers, sulky-ploughs, and rakes, and study out their uses. The immense “header and separator” rises from the rest like a leviathan. A whole department is devoted to “road-scrapers,” “buck-scrapers,” and ploughs of various sorts used in the construction and dredging of the irrigating ditches. The soil is, fortunately, free from stones, and the work, for the most part, easy. One enormous plough is seen which was designed to be drawn by sixty yoke of oxen, and to cut at once a furrow five feet wide by four deep. Like the famous _Great Eastern_, it has defeated itself by its own mass, and its use has been abandoned.

More than $500,000 has been expended in the item of fencing alone. An average of four hundred laborers is employed, and, in the harvest season, seven hundred. The rate of wages is from two and a half to three dollars per day for mechanics, and a dollar per day for common hands. This seems low as compared with information from other sources, and the chronic complaints of the scarcity of farm labor, in the California papers.

No great portion of this domain appears to be in the market for settlers of small means, though the intention is avowed of offering some of it in this way when thoroughly reclaimed. Tracts, however, are occupied on favorable terms by “renters,” who take from 120 to 600 acres. Very many of these are Portuguese and Italians. They are usually unmarried, and work in companies of from six to fifteen persons. You see them, dark and swarthy, going about in the traditional Garibaldi shirt, with hardly a word of English among them.

The renter is provided with a house, artesian well, credit to a moderate amount at the store, and the use of some cows. He has the milk of these, but must give their increase to the estate. His lease runs three years, and he pays in rent one-third of his crop. Instances of large profits are frequent among these persons, and the same opportunities are open to others who wish to follow their example.

The superintendents and upper employés on the place are largely Southern men. California, was a favorite point for Southern immigration at one time, so much that the course of the State in the war, influenced by the historic Judge Terry and Senator Gwin, was considered problematical. These that I speak of, however, are gentlemen who have come here to repair their fortunes at a later period. They have for the most part titles from the service of the extinct Confederacy, and the gentle voices and friendly courtesy characteristic of the Southern type.

A typical ranch-house, that, for instance, of our hospitable friend Major McClung, on his section of the subdivided property, is a long, two-story dwelling, painted in the Indian-red so popular throughout the country. It is raised on posts considerably above the ground, to allow of a free circulation of air underneath. There is an open hall through the centre for the same purpose. An irrigating ditch resembling a moat passes in front, crossed by a little rustic bridge.

Traces of alkali yet show white in the soil of orchard and garden, but do not prevent a plentiful growth of oleanders, roses, pear, peach, cherry, almond, and apricot trees. The young orange-trees were, as at Fresno, put up in mufflings of straw for the winter. The weather is very hot at noon-day, but so cool at morning and evening that wood-fires are burned. The chill in the air is of a penetrating kind, felt the more by contrast with the heat of the day, and fire is a necessity. The house-servants were clean, white-aproned Chinamen; those out-of-doors, Mexicans. One of these latter had trained a goose, “Dick,” to follow him like a pet dog, and nothing was more curious than to see the pride of both master and biped in this ridiculous relation.

Cattle-raising is the leading industry; alfalfa, for carrying the stock over periods of scarcity, is the leading crop. Stacks of alfalfa of great size, one containing seven hundred tons, were seen. It is the ordinary color of hay externally, but when cut into is green.

A successful experiment has also been made in the raising of cotton. The hands were in the field going about among the white pods for the second picking.

Though out of season, a _rodeo_ was organized for our benefit, to show the method of handling the roving cattle on a large scale. A number of _vaqueros_ rode out in various directions till lost to sight. Presently traces of dust arose on the several horizons. The plain, on which a few cows had been peacefully feeding, was filled with stamping and lowing herds, driven toward the centre by the careering _vaqueros_. When gathered in sufficient numbers feats of lassoing the animals, by either leg or horn, separating special animals or classes, and the like, were undertaken, and carried through with marvellous dexterity. As a culmination, hats and ropes were picked up from the ground, the rider going at full speed. A silver half-dollar, placed on edge in the dust of the roadway, was seized after several attempts by a swarthy Aztec.

The herders are usually Mexicans, equipped in the Mexican style, but with the greater part of the finery left out. The bosses, who often even excel them in pure horsemanship, are generally Americans.

The ranch known as the Livermore borders Kern and Buena Vista Lakes, and is the southernmost in the tier. The herds are gathered there in the early spring, and driven to the ranch of San Emidio, in the mountains. They pick up their subsistence at San Emidio till the middle of September, when they are conducted back again. Such migrations from plain to mountain pasture, and back again, recall some features of the Norwegian pastoral life of Boyesen’s charming romance, “Gunnar.”

At the Livermore Ranch you are at the apex of the San Joaquin Valley. Here the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range effect a junction, and oppose a natural barrier to farther progress. The railroad has to cross this barrier by a wonderful piece of engineering, the Tehachapi (Te-_hatch_-a-pe) Pass. At one place five different lengths of track pass and repass at different levels. By the singular “Loop” the road enters a tunnel, emerges, twists spirally round the mountain, and reappears directly above itself.

At San Emidio we are on the boundary-line of San Luis Obispo County, and could make our way directly, no doubt, to its pretty, mountain-encompassed capital. This is more easily reached, however, with attractive Santa Barbara below, by steamer, or stage-road along the coast.

Returning to Bakersfield, you may ride west to the wild cañon of the Kern River, and the mining towns of Kernville and Havilah. The mining industry has never taken the same development south of the San Joaquin River as north. It is probable both that there is less ore and that the ventures have been managed with less skill. At Kernville is a quartz-mill, with a hundred stamps, which after many vicissitudes has fallen into the hands of its former workmen for debt, and is now run by them on the co-operative principle.

The rolling country by which the Kern River Cañon is approached is, if possible, even more desolate than the plain. There is almost a necessary connection in our usual impressions between hills and trees, and when foliage is missing from hills its lack is doubly notable. An utterly parched, verdureless surface, with a texture like that of gravel, here follows all the inequalities of the ground, up hill and down dale, to the savage and splintered granite gorge.

We fell in with an isolated sheep ranchman, “Captain Jack Barker,” an enterprising man, who had created a garden spot in the waste, and showed what even this is capable of. He was engaged on a project for leading the water, by means of a flume and ditches, from the river at the cañon’s mouth down upon several thousand acres of land under cultivation. In the spring-time, he told us, all this bareness is hidden by a perfect carpet of flowers, chiefly a small orange-scarlet poppy. His sheep at present seemed living on air. He had among them some Angora goats, a hardy animal, once very profitable, but now, since the decline in alpaca-goods, being used by him for food.

The Kern River tumbles down a gorge four miles in length, between granite walls six hundred feet high. Its water is translucent green in deep, untroubled pools, again churned into milk-white floods, with black bowlders among them. The cañon is all but impassable. It acts like a funnel, and produces a local disturbance of its own on the atmosphere. While all around is still, a column of air will blow out of it, and, striking the table-land a quarter of a mile away, raise a chronic dust at the point of contact, like a cannon-shot.

Driving across the front of it we were nearly blown out of our wagon. We descended into it, nevertheless, and upon this experience returned to dine on ribs of Captain Jack Barker’s Angora goats, and then take the railway and cross the Tehachapi Pass.

XXVIII.

_LOS ANGELES._

I.

Over the Tehachapi Pass, we are in Southern California proper. We have met already, it is true, with pretty Spanish names, old missions, leather breeches, jingling spurs, vineyards, raisin-making, and occasional orange and palm trees. But when the dividing mountain-range, four thousand feet above the sea at Tehachapi, is passed, all these are found in their greatest development. The country is older, the Spanish names are more musical; orange and lemon are not grown for ornament, but as a principal crop; and the climate is of that genial mildness which is most to the taste of seekers for health.

Famed Los Angeles, City of the Angels, is the terminus of the first day’s journey which brings us into it. The watering-place of Santa Monica and the important points of San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara are not far distant to the west, while San Diego lies at a moderate remove to the southward, near the Mexican frontier. In the intervals scatter colonies of vine and orange growers, the numbers and dimensions of which are rapidly increasing.

The mountain barrier across the State is deemed by some to be of such importance that it should be a political as well as a natural division. They call for the construction of a distinct new State, to be called South California, its capital at Los Angeles.

“We are different peoples,” writes one of them in the _Californian_. “We are different in pursuits, in tastes, manner of thought, and manner of life; ... our hopes and aspirations for the future are different. The restless, uneasy population of the North, ever drifting, without local attachments, has no counterpart in Southern California; neither has the wild spirit of mining speculation ever flourished here. With this peaceable life, possibly in part as a result of it, there has grown up in the people an intense love of their land.

“And it is for their own section of the State,” he goes on, “that this love exists. They call themselves, not Californians, but Southern Californians. The feeling is intense. I can only liken it to the overmastering love of the old Greek for the sunny shores that lay around the Ægean.

“For myself, I feel more and more each time that I visit the upper portion of the State that I am going into a strange land. And the impression never leaves me till upon my return I look down from the crest of the Tehachapi over the warm South-land.”

I have thought it worth while to quote these passages, partly because they are amusing, partly because they accentuate the topographical situation, and also because they attribute a character almost the opposite of that which exists. Everywhere is bustle, push, and enterprise. This people will sell you a corner lot or quarter-section of land with as great a gusto as any other, and at its full value. Whatever effect lapse of time may have upon them, the present inhabitants, few of whom are born here or even drafted from indolent climes, if lotus-eaters, are of a very wide-awake sort.

II.

The City of the Angels is, in general, only another San José, upon a more hilly site. Its population must be about fourteen thousand. The long thoroughfare of Main Street proceeds, from the depot, at first through a shabby Spanish quarter, locally known as “Sonora,” consisting of one-story, whitewashed, adobe houses. Passing a small Spanish plaza, set with pointed cypresses, and the principal hotel, the Pico House, it becomes lined with excellent buildings of the modern pattern. Of these the handsome “Baker Block” is most notable. Continuing to the ornate “Los Angeles Bank,” Spring Street diverges at a small angle, and contributes, with Main Street, to give the commercial skeleton of the town the shape of a Y with a very long stem.

On Spring Street you find a common little post-office, the municipal offices, and a brown, Dutch-looking, brick building, standing free, originally constructed for a market, and now the Court-house. If you look into the lobby of the small adobe jail you will find that some leisurely prisoner of the frescoer’s trade has converted it into a resemblance to a dungeon scene at the theatre. These two streets, with a shorter one, Los Angeles Street, parallel to Main, containing fruit and produce commission houses, comprise the commercial portion of the city.

New buildings are seen going up; the shops are large and well-appointed, and placards offer, in the usual shibboleth of trade, “To Reduce Stock!” “At Wholesale Slaughter,” and “For the Next Sixty Days.”

A serious depression afflicted Los Angeles in 1875, at the time of the general depression throughout the State, but that has been succeeded by a new reign of activity. Trim, large residences of the more prosperous merchants are seen in the outskirts of the town. Farther out yet these become villas, in the midst of plantations of orange and lemon, ruled off into formal plots by ditches for irrigation. The class of modest means abide in the side streets, in frame cottages. The German Turn-hall serves also the purpose of theatre for such companies as come this way.

It is held that Los Angeles, with its port of Wilmington, thirty miles away, should be now, upon the completion of the Southern Pacific railroad, the _entrepôt_ and Pacific terminus of a new commercial departure. San Francisco, it is said, has too long sat at the Golden Gate “levying toll on every pound of freight that passes through,” and this selfish greed is to be properly rebuked by the diversion of a part of its trade. Enthusiastic San Diego expects also to have its share. The wickedness of the proceeding would seem to depend largely upon who it is that takes the toll. Los Angeles, it is held, is to be the Lyons, and San Diego the Marseilles, of the State, San Francisco still remaining its Paris.

The pepper-tree, with its scarlet berries and fern-like leaves, forms the leading shade and ornament of Los Angeles streets. Apart from these a clump of palms grows on San Pedro Street, and, before an odd, octagon-shaped house on Main Street, a Mexican nopal of the size of an apple-tree. In the court-yard of the principal hotel droops a single ragged banana. Tropical features in the vegetation are scarce, but it is evident that this is not the fault of the climate, but of failure to encourage them. In the door-yards are the Mexican aloe and the Spanish bayonet, from the adjacent deserts of Mohave and Arizona. The castor-oil plant grows a tall weed in neglected places. The extraction of castor-oil was at one time an industry of the place, but is now abandoned.

III.

The Mexican element must be something like one-third of the entire population of the place. In the Spanish town, “Sonora,” the recollection of Mexico is revived, but a very shabby, provincial Mexico. You find _mescal_ and _tequila_, the two varieties of intoxicating liquor distilled from the _maguey_, or aloe. The dingy little adobe shops contain samples of dingy little stocks of goods in their shuttered loop-holes of windows. A few swarthy, lantern-jawed old-timers hang about the corners, and gossip in _patois_, and women with black shawls over their heads pass by. Much of the quarter is in a ruinous condition. There remain vestiges of the arcade system of the kind known in some form to all tropical or semi-tropical climates. The arcades of Sonora are not of massive brick and stone, but are wooden roofs, such as are put out by our corner grocers, on light wooden posts. Here and there only the battered skeletons remain, attached to ruinous houses. Most California municipalities have borrowed something of this Spanish idea. At Sacramento the thriving but flat and not attractive capital of the State, you can walk nearly all over the business part of town under cover.

There is a very respectable-looking restaurant—a vine-embowered cottage—opposite the Pico House, where the familiar _tortillas_, or pancakes, and _frijoles_, or stewed beans, may be had. Along-side is an adobe church, quaint in pattern, but modern and devoid of farther interest. From its belfry the chimes jangle loudly several times a day in familiar Mexican fashion. Out of Sonora emerges, on the 16th of September, the Juarez Guard, which escorts a triumphal car bearing the national colors of red, white, and green, and, aided by a _cortége_ of dark little maidens, in white muslin and slippers, proceeds to celebrate with appropriate ardor the anniversary of Mexican independence.

This people, who have gone so much to the wall, wear no very pathetic aspect in their adversity. They are for the most part engaged in coarse labor, are improvident, and apparently contented. It is only rarely that a Spanish name—a Pacheco, a Sepulveda, or Estudillo—rises into prominence in the public affairs of the State of which they were once owners. Old Don Pio Pico, the last of the Spanish Governors, resides here, impoverished, in a little cottage, in sight of property of great value which was formerly his, and of the plaza once the centre of his authority.

Don Pio is one of the picturesque features of Los Angeles, and with his history would be esteemed interesting anywhere. Above eighty years of age, with stocky figure, square head, and bright eyes, contrasting with his bronzed skin and close-cropped white hair and beard, he has a certain resemblance to Victor Hugo. He has a rather florid taste for jewelry. He carries himself about town, in his short overcoat with velvet collar and cuffs, with a bearing still erect and stately. It is strange to tell, but true, and it is evidence of the conservatism and lack of adaptability of his race, that the old gentleman, though once Governor of the State, and a continuous resident of it, as an American citizen, since he surrendered it to Fremont and Stockton in 1847, does not yet speak a word of any other language than Spanish. The talk of this historic personage gave but a rude picture of the state of society in his youth. Was there anything in the world so remote as the California of the years 1810 to 1848?

“I am but a plain and unassuming person,” he said to me. “My father did not leave me a mule nor a vara of ground. I worked for the padres at the San Gabriel Mission when I was a boy, and I had little opportunity to learn book knowledge.”

He disclaimed being an authority even on the events of his own fall and the encroachments of the Americans. “There are many,” he said, “who have a better head for those things than I, and who will tell you better than I.”... “I was a just man, however. I treated the rich no better than the poor. Hence when they asked who was _lo mas justo y honrado_—the most just and honest man—for Governor, it was answered with one accord, ‘Don Pio Pico.’”

There are differences of opinion about those ancient officials. Some of them have been charged with a wholesale issue of land-patents after the American occupation, which patents ostensibly belonged to their respective administrations. Edwin M. Stanton, sent out to look into these matters by the Attorney-general of the United States, reported at the time that “the making of false grants, with the subornation of false witnesses to prove them, has become a trade and a business.”

The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1847, by which the war with Mexico was concluded, made valid and of full force whatever had been done before the American occupation. Spanish governors were numerous in those last days, and went in and out of office with extraordinary frequency, by reason of plots, counterplots, and the inability of the home government to enforce its own will. Alvarado, Carillo, Micheltorena, and Pio Pico reigned separately, or together, or by turns, in a revolutionary, confused, and overlapping way, which furnished excellent opportunity for fraud. One prefers, however, not to linger upon unpleasant suspicions, but rather to esteem these fallen dignitaries, few of whom now survive after their misfortunes and romantic histories.

Even the Chinese, singularly enough, show greater enterprise than the Spanish. Perhaps they may have a somewhat better warrant for coming in here than elsewhere, since a Chinaman is found in the list of the twelve original settlers of the town, in 1781. They have pushed into the best of the old Spanish adobe houses, once the best of their kind in the State. They occupy all those which flank the little plaza with an entire street, others debouching from it.

The populace, however, have not always been the better reconciled to the hapless Mongolians. In an outburst of deadly prejudice, in the year 1871, they were dragged out of their Spanish houses and hung to lamp-posts, wagon-tongues, and their own door-ways, to the number of eighteen, of all ages and sizes. The riot was occasioned by their resistance to some process of a deputy-sheriff. My informant described them to me as hanging like bunches of carrots.

At present they were putting up, near the site of these sanguinary scenes, an ornate open-air theatre or temple, for a triennial religious festival, to last a week or more.

IV.

One of my pleasantest days at Los Angeles was that which I spent in a drive with the Zanjero.

The Zanjero, indeed! who or what is a Zanjero?

His title is derived from the Spanish _zanja_—ditch—continued down from the times of the original settlement, and he is the official overseer of water and irrigation. He took me about with him to observe this important and entertaining part of the economy of civilization in these thirsty regions. Not that Los Angeles is so dry in comparison, for it has thirteen inches of rain against two at Bakersfield, but it is in abundant need of irrigation.

The Zanjero is elected by the City Council annually. Six deputies aid him in the summer, reduced to three in the winter, when the rains render irrigation hardly necessary. All are invested with the authority and badges of policemen.

The city, the Zanjero tells us, as we ride along, controls in its corporate capacity all the waters of the Los Angeles River. The Los Angeles River is a Southern California stream of the typical sort. It has a wide, shallow bed, almost dry at the moment, but in spring and winter it brawls in dangerous fashion, and often carries away its bridges. We ride up to the point near a certain railroad bridge where the water is first diverted. It is taken out by two small canals, one for the city proper, one for the thriving suburb of East Los Angeles. We find that the dam by which the river is checked for this purpose is constructed of earth, with a facing of stout posts and planking. At the beginning of winter the planking is removed, and the stream allowed to sweep away the rampart of earth, which is replaced by a new one, the succeeding spring. Chain-gangs of convicts from the prison are set upon this labor.

A canal is taken out of the same river twelve miles above, which supplies water for drinking and irrigating the higher levels. There are two very different levels in the configuration of the city, one rising from the other with great abruptness, as at Santa Cruz.

Upon the height are remains of the fort built by Fremont when he entered the city. Directly at its foot is the cottage of Pio Pico; the big hotel, still bearing his name, in which he sunk a handsome share of his fortune; the little cypress-studded plaza; and the shabby white quarter of Sonora. The mass of the city lies to the right, without striking features. Beyond it, toward the river, stretch breadths of a russet bloom which we know to be vineyards, together with lines and parallelograms of orange and eucalyptus, as formal as the conventional trees in boxes of German toys. Across the river, “Brooklyn Heights” and “Boyle Heights” rise to a wide, rolling table-land (_mesa_), which extends back to the blue Sierra Madre Mountains. Toward most of the horizon stretch expanses of a garden-like vegetation of a mysterious quality—the dreamed-of orange-groves in mass.

The city has created a considerable part of its debt by its water system, in which it has spent probably $200,000. The works are of an ephemeral character, which will in time be replaced by something more substantial. The simple trenches and wooden flumes permit of wasted water, and are costly to keep in repair. One of the principal ditches, however, is carried through a hill some three-quarters of a mile in a tunnel of six feet in section. There have been formed also numbers of durable reservoirs or artificial lakes for the storage of additional water in winter to supplement the river at its lowest.

We rode out among the villas and gardens and observed the practical application of the water. The main ditches are three feet by two, the lesser about two by one. The “head” is the nominal standard of measurement of the babbling fluid. The head should be a section of one hundred square inches, delivered under a certain uniform pressure, but it is in practice loosely administered.

“The irrigators want their work _done_” says the Zanjero; “that is the main point. Some lands take more, others less, according as they are sandy or hold water. A head of fifty inches on the east side will do as much as one hundred and twenty around the city.”

Fan-palms, India-rubber-trees, and tall bananas grow freely on the lawns where a little pains is taken. You stop now to exclaim at a comfortable home embowered in myrtle, orange, and vines, the dark, glossy foliage starred with golden fruit and red roses, a spot for any romance. Again, it is a long arcade or temple of arborvitæ, extending across the whole front of a garden, and framing in its arches delicious views of distant blue mountains, their tops now powdered with snow.

This land of running brooks should be a famous place for the children to sail their boats, though as a matter of fact we do not see them doing it. Perhaps there is a law against it. There are laws, at any rate, against stealing the water, wantonly raising the gates to waste it, or transferring it to irrigators outside the city limits. These latter are entitled to it only upon an extra payment and after those within the city have been supplied.

As all irrigators cannot be supplied at once, the manner of serving it out is as follows: Applications have to be made in the last week of each month. The Zanjero then apportions the supply so that it may go round among the applicants in the most convenient way. The complete circuit takes about twenty days. The applicant receives a ticket, on the payment of a fee, entitling him to receive the water on such a day at such an hour. The right for that time is exclusively his. The rates are so fixed as to reimburse the public treasury, and are not intended as a source of profit. The average charge for water is about fifty cents an hour, two dollars a day, and a dollar and twenty-five cents a night.

The subscriber has the water delivered to him by the deputy at his connecting-gate. At all other times the gate must be kept fastened with a padlock. The wooden gate, sliding smoothly in its grooves, is like a little guillotine.

Chop! goes the guillotine, when it has been raised long enough, and off goes the head, as it were, of the little stream. Thus surprised on its way among the orchards and gardens, it writhes and twists a while, rises again in its confining box, and is soon ready to begin life again on a new basis.

V.

Los Angeles is the metropolis of the orange trade, but the greater part of the culture itself is in tracts of the surrounding country, each with a thriving settlement as its nucleus. The lands are usually laid out and subdivided by capitalists, under the “colony” system, as described. Ten or even five acres in a crop of such value are a comfortable property. On Lake Guarda half an acre in lemons is sufficient for the support of a family. It is in evidence here that returns of from $500 to $1000 an acre are had from orange, lemon, and lime, after the trees have arrived at full bearing.

The piazzas of the orange-planters command attractive views; rose and heliotrope bloom round them; and specimens of all the fruits are offered for our tasting with lavish hospitality and honest pride in their perfection.

We begin with Pasadena, which is reached by a drive of ten miles from Los Angeles. Pasadena, the Indiana Colony, San Gabriel, the Lake Vineyard tract, the Alhambra, Santa Anita, and Sierra Madre tracts, and others, all of the same general character, adjoin one another. The dwellings in them are those of people of means and a certain taste. Even the least show ambition. There are pretty chapels in the Gothic style, and neat schoolhouses. Well-dressed children of a city air are met with on the roads. The roads are excellent. No violent storms or thawing snows in this climate tear them up, and they are kept in order with little trouble.

The door-yards are enclosed with hedges of lime, arborvitæ, or rose-bushes. Curious small circles from time to time attract attention, either filled with water, or dry, like the rings of a departed circus. These are reservoirs, supplementing the irrigation system. They are usually filled by artesian wells, which flow from iron pipes a few feet above the ground, the water overspreading the top in a thin film, like a globe of glass, reflecting neighboring objects. Such globe-like films, sparkling from a distance, are a frequent item in the prospect. As there has never been any forest, no unsightly stumps indicate recent clearings. The country, in consequence, does not look new. Where settled at all, it has a surprisingly old and civilized air.

The temperature, this late November day—on which there are telegrams in the papers of snow-storms at the North and East—is perfection. It is neither hot nor cold. A sybarite would not alter it. Bees hum in the profuse clusters of heliotrope about the porches. A single Jacqueminot rose on a tall stem, a beauty whose sway will not be gainsaid, makes its vivid crimson felt from the greensward a long way off. Among the older estates this is pointed out as the home of “Don Benito,” that of “Don Tomas,” so and so, the family name being usually American. Audacious in love as in other things, enterprising Americans have married into the Spanish families, both before and since the conquest, and succeeded to their acres. Very few of Spanish stock still retain any property of note.

If there be or ever existed any real earthly Paradise, I think it might bear some such complexion as that of the Sierra Madre Villa, on the first bold rise of the mountains at San Gabriel. I cannot vouch for it as a hotel, for hotel it is, but I vouch for it as a situation.

The air was heavy with the fragrance of extensive avenues of limes as I came up to it. The orange-trees were propped up, to prevent their breaking under their weight of fruit. Forty oranges on a single bough! I saw it with my own eyes. Some of the trees, by the freak of a recent gale, had been denuded of their leaves, which left only the globes of golden fruit, a lovely decorative effect, on their bare stems. A view of thirty miles is had across the garden-like San Gabriel Valley, to a strip of blue sea on the horizon. On the strip of blue sea rests a slight brown spot, the jewel of Santa Catalina Island.

Flowering vines clustered along a piazza, part enclosed in glass. In a warm nook a couple reclined in steamer-chairs, one reading aloud a novel in a gentle murmur. They were a couple of recent date, and as the place for a honey-moon it was ideal. The orange bears a close resemblance to the formal tree which the mediæval painters used to represent as the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” of Genesis. It is appropriately placed, therefore, in our earthly Paradise.

Hist! The young woman who had been reading takes her stand archly at one side of such a tree. The man who had been listening rises also, and, with a slight yawn, places himself on the other. Oh, what is this? Is she a new Eve? She plucks a fruit, and hands it to him. Oh, this is terrible! Is there to be a fall again in Eden, and all its direful consequences? There should be some Cranach or Dürer here to take down once more the particulars of the distressing scene. What does Eve wish Adam to do? Perhaps she wishes him to buy lands—above their value—and go into orange-planting himself. Alas! he will be lost forever to the higher financial life. Perhaps Satan is the invidious real-estate man.

But really there is no pressing need of such a display of fancy because a young matron offers her husband a fresh orange before dinner.

Certain drawbacks—drawbacks attending upon an injudicious entering into this apparently fascinating kind of life—should not be overlooked. The orange-tree grows all the time, and calls for incessant care, winter as in summer. Not a few invalids who had looked to its culture as a pastime have broken down through this cause, and through having taken up more land than they could manage. The lesson of such cases is, not to attempt too much, but to keep to the five, or ten, acres, as the case may be, within one’s capacity. Nor has it been politic to put everything into the single crop of oranges. The smaller fruits—peaches, plums, and especially apricots—for canning, which come into bearing quickly, are useful in tiding over the tedious period of waiting for the orange-trees to mature, and are always in profitable demand. To start existence comfortable here the new-comer should have a capital of from five to ten thousand dollars, though peculiar energy may do with less.

It requires about nine years to bring an orange-tree from the seed into full bearing. On the other hand, it is found that by deftly inserting an orange-bud into the bark of a lemon-shoot slitted in an X, and setting this in the ground, a tree can be obtained which bears marketable fruit after the second year. The controversy rages as to whether it is worth while to do this, since the product is dwarf, like the dwarf pear-tree. Though it yield early it will never yield much, and its fruit does not stand shipment as well as that of the seedling. Against this it is maintained that it lives longer than the seedling, and yields choicer varieties of fruit, and that the fruit is more uniform in size and quality, and not subject to a singular form of destruction which sometimes overtakes that of the seedling—being dashed upon its own thorns.

In the same way conflicting theories of irrigation prevail. A person who bought grapes in large quantities for the purpose of making them into wine told me that over-irrigation was rendering them watery and insipid. He proposed to meet this by establishing a standard. He would pay twenty dollars a ton for grapes containing twenty-three per cent. of sugar, and for those below standard less. Plentiful irrigation, however, is relied upon to counteract that fatal pest of the vine, the phylloxera. Some advocate the theory of irrigation in the winter or rainy season only. All the water possible is to be conducted upon the land at the time it naturally falls, leaving the soil to act as its own reservoir, and store up a portion for the dry season ahead. Others even deny the need of irrigation altogether. They write to the papers that it is only necessary to keep the surface well scratched with a cultivator, and a supply of moisture will always be found a few inches below it. It is certain that crops both of grapes and the cereals have been produced from unirrigated ground, even for a series of years. But then comes a dry year, in which everything, animals as well as plants, is scorched from off the face of the earth.

“Certainty is what is wanted,” says a lively informant. “You may not need water, as you may not a revolver, all the time; but when you do, you need it awful bad.”

VI.

In the plain, just under the mountains, lies the old village and mission church of San Gabriel. The mission dates from 1761. It was founded, like the other missions of California, by friars sent out from the college of San Fernando, in the city of Mexico. I recollect well the original San Fernando. It stands on the street which was the scene of Cortez’s disastrous retreat from the city, and is marked with an inscription commemorating the famous Leap of Alvarado.

The Mission of San Gabriel is worthy of its picturesque origin. It has the same massiveness, color, and quaint rococo details, including the peculiar battlement, or Spanish horn of dominion. Six old green bronze bells hang in as many niches together. The fern-like shadows of a line of pepper-trees print themselves in the sunshine against the time-stained wall. No more than the church edifice now remains. Great agricultural establishments connected with all these missions were swept away, years before the American occupation, by edict of the Mexican government. Some bits of broken aqueduct, and a few orange-trees, above a hundred years old, in what was once the mission garden, are the only vestiges of former prosperity. The interior of the church contains a few battered old religious paintings, the worst of their kind. It is doubtful if the luxury of really good pictures was ever superadded to the excellent architecture, for which there was a natural instinct. It is a commentary on the popular estimate in which the poor old masters are held, I fear, that I was told by the neighborhood:

“You _must_ see them. They are all Raphaels and Michael Angelos.”

The village is piquantly foreign. Its single street is composed entirely of white adobe houses. One of them, with a tumbling, red-tiled roof, is so full of holes that it looks as if it had been shelled. All the signs are in Spanish. Here is the _zapatero_, or shoemaker, and here the _panaderia_, or bakery. The south walls are hung with a drapery of red peppers drying in the sun to prepare the favorite condiment. The population are a humble class, who gain their livelihood for the most part by day-labor on the surrounding estates. They are not too poor, however, to retain their taste for festivity still. On the occasion of some notable wedding among them they will manage to mount on horseback, and, surrounding a bridal carriage, driven postilion-fashion, return from the ceremony, at the old mission, whooping and firing pistols in the air, in the most gallant and hilarious fashion.

Near by is the large estate of Sunny Slope, known as one of the most successful instances of the putting in practice of the sanguine theories about the country. It has been acquired, and developed, from very small beginnings. It consists of some nineteen hundred acres of land, most of it in vines and oranges. There is a large wine and brandy making establishment. Eight thousand boxes of oranges and lemons, four hundred thousand gallons of wine and one hundred thousand of brandy, have been produced in a year.

The dwelling-house was approached by a stately avenue of orange-trees, in double lines, three-quarters of a mile in length. The road to the large, substantial buildings of the winery was bordered by an orchard of orange on one side and olive on the other. The vineyards stretched out in distant effect like vast reddish-tawny meadows. At the winery, blacksmithing and cooperage were going on on a large scale, and a deft Chinaman was constructing the orange-boxes. The rich juice of the grape poured in floods, and its more concentrated form as brandy came from its still as clear as water. All distilled spirit is naturally colorless, and the hues it obtains for market are given by burned sugar, to gratify an artificial taste.

The hands are Chinamen and Mexicans. The superintendent tells us that the former do the most work and get less pay, but that there are certain things which they cannot do. They cannot plough, nor prune the vines, and they are awkward in the management of animals. Indeed, a Chinaman on horseback, or even in a wagon, seems almost as incongruous as Jack Tar.

We visited, one evening, the Chinese quarters, and it would have been hard to find a more clean, domestic-looking interior among men of any other nationality in the same circumstances of life. They seemed much more orderly in their arrangements than the Mexicans, either those from the village or those who had a settlement on a bold slope of the estate above.

There is much native Indian blood among these latter, and their dwellings were half wigwams, patched up of rubbish. Mongrel dogs, a donkey, and a foundered horse wandered at ease among them. A reddish-brown urchin, with large, liquid eyes, coming out, paused to gaze at us.

“_Cor-r-re, demonio de muchacho!_” (R-r-run, demon of a boy!) cried a slatternly mother, who appeared behind, endeavoring to urge him upon some errand of peculiar expedition.

But the demon of a boy, exemplifying the traits of his race, had no idea whatever of being in a hurry. On the contrary, having removed to a safe distance, he dawdled in the most exasperating way, and continued to stare round-eyed during all of our critical tour of inspection.

The work of the year was now the pruning of the vines. Stripped of every superfluity, the rugged little stocks, regimented veterans, were to stand bare till the exuberance of a new spring should again break forth in leaves. Faustino, Gaetano, Incarnacion, and the rest, for so they are called, appear to picturesque advantage in this work. Their swarthy faces are framed in slouch sombreros. They wear red-and-blue shirts, and bright handkerchiefs about their necks. They move forward in a line, pruning-knife in hand, and a small saw at the belt for the tougher knots. The spots of color twinkle upon the russet of the vineyard; the pruning-knives flash as they turn to the sun; the ground has a gentle, agreeable fall; and splintered granite mountains, with deep cañons among them for exploration, softened by a veil of atmosphere, back up the whole.

The orange-tree, even at a great age, is not as large as one may have expected. Even those of a hundred years in the mission garden are not above two feet in diameter. It is gratifying to be at full liberty to examine this attractive vegetation, known heretofore only in its tub in the conservatory, or on the staircase at a ball. There seems but one drawback to an orange-grove, and that is that it cannot have greensward below to lie upon. It is very exacting—requires all the nourishment the soil can give, and the soil must be kept loose and open around the roots. It is irrigated about once a month, and the surface gone over with a cultivator afterward, to prevent baking up in the sun.

The orange-grove is lovely at all times, mysterious when the long alleys are dark against the red sunset, the fruit glimmering like a feast of lanterns at twilight; and in the pleasant mornings sparkling among the glossy leaves like little suns newly risen; while we catch the perfume of blossoms heralding in a new crop, though the last still hangs upon the bough. Here and there is an example of the enormous shaddock, which resembles the orange in appearance but the lemon in character. The lemon is less hardy to rear than the orange, and is not cultivated on as large a scale. Chinamen, with ladders and baskets, gather the fruit, and chatter to one another from the trees like magpies. It is irrigation-day, and all at once the water is let on. Twisting and turning this way and that, it runs out upon the thirsty soil, as if with an eager curiosity in the embrace. Chinamen with hoes follow it, here throwing up little dams, which it tries to evade; there, when it runs sluggishly, opening little channels, and leading it where it should go. The whole orchard is soon babbling musically with running water, and in process of being thoroughly soaked.

XXIX.

_TO SAN DIEGO, AND THE MEXICAN FRONTIER._

I.

These and kindred scenes are to be met with in fifty, I know not how many more, localities of a similar sort. San Fernando, Florence, Compton, Downey City, Westminster, Orange, Tustin City, Centralia, Pomona, and Artesia may be mentioned as leading examples. The “colony” government is of a simple sort, and consists of a justice of the peace, constable, water overseer, and school trustees. Anaheim, settled by Germans, was one of the first established colonies, and has become a town of importance. Santa Ana had a special bustle at present, as the terminus, for the time being, of the railroad in process of building from Los Angeles to San Diego.

Perhaps, however, the greatest general air of distinction is worn by Riverside. This colony seems to have been sought to an exceptional degree by persons in good circumstances. It is fifty-seven miles lower down than Los Angeles, and reached by a drive of seven miles southward from the Southern Pacific Railroad at Colton. Four miles north of Colton, on the other hand, takes you to San Bernardino, an important place of six thousand people, originally settled by Mormons. The regular Mormons withdrew to Utah by order of Brigham Young on the threat of the coercive war there in 1857, and only a few “Josephites” now remain, whose practices do not differ greatly from those of other people.

At Riverside is found a continuous belt of settlement and cultivation twelve miles long, by two miles in average width. It will be twenty long when all complete. The population is not large, but revels in a great deal of room. The general situation is a valley of about forty miles square, at an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the sea. The access to this valley is by four several passes, one each on the north, south, east, and west, as if so many doors had been providentially left open in the encompassing mountain ranges. The settlement forms an oasis in the midst of the desert, after the general plan. Its fresh greenness, and canals of clear water, along which sylvan glimpses, almost English, are met with, derive added charm and interest from the desert. The rest of the high, quadrangular valley, capable, no doubt, of as great development, if water can be brought upon it, remains in its natural condition.

A lovely drive, called Magnolia Avenue, planted with double rows of pepper and eucalyptus trees, extends through the length of the place from north to south. It is bordered with homes, making pretensions to much more than comfort. The best of these are at the division called Arlington, four miles below the post-office of Riverside proper. The native adobe, or sun-dried brick, supplemented with ornamental wood-work, has been used as material with excellent effect. In the interiors are found rugs, _portières_, Morris’s wall-papers, and all the paraphernalia of the latest Eastern civilization; and there is an archery club and a “German.”

Invalidism is heard of with considerable frequency as an excuse for the migration hither. Certainly many advantages offer to the invalid. The climate permits him to be almost constantly out-of-doors. The sky is blue, the sun unclouded, nearly every day in the year, and he can go into his orchard and concern himself about his Navel or Brazilian oranges, his paper-rind St. Michaels, and his Tahiti seedlings, with little let or hinderance. Orange culture affords him both a career and a revenue. If the unchanging blue of the sky grow sometimes monotonous, there are other distractions in the noble mountain ranges. Riverside has in this resource a touch of the charm of Switzerland. Your entertainer points out to you from his piazza the great peaks of Greylock, San Bernardino, and San Jacinto, from ten to twelve thousand feet in height, and crowned with snow for a considerable part of the year, just as the Jungfrau is pointed out from Interlaken and Mont Blanc from Geneva.

It is a description that applies to all of Southern California, that, however great the heat by day—in midsummer often a hundred and five in the shade—the nights are always cool and refreshing. Sunstroke is not known. Nor are the violent thunder-storms with which Nature, with us, endeavors to restore equilibrium after having exhausted its most oppressive warmth. The great drawback here, as there must always be some drawback, consists in occasional heavy “northers,” which gather up the dust from the dry surface and produce painful dust-storms of two or three days’ duration.

In autumn and winter the temperature is chilly enough to make fires a necessity morning and evening, and even all day long in apartments shut off from the influence of the sun. I was astonished to find the air so keen at these times, and a scum of ice forming upon water in the mornings even as far down as San Diego. The cold has a penetrating quality beyond its register by the thermometer. This, though usually overlooked, is important, since fuel is very scarce and correspondingly dear. Fagots of the prunings of the cottonwoods, sycamores, and mesquit-trees along the beds of the streams are the principal resource. Such coal as can be obtained is both costly and of poor quality.

The water for the irrigation of Riverside is taken from the swift little stream of the Santa Ana River, which falls so rapidly within a short compass that it is feasible to take out two separate canals with a difference of thirty-five feet in their levels. On all sides lands are held at $200 and $300 per acre, and when the orange-trees have come into good bearing, at $1000, which but a few years ago were purchased at a dollar and a quarter an acre.

All these places have their local rivalries, though Southern California as a whole is ready to unite in vindicating its peculiar claims, against the outside world. All have their pamphlets to distribute, containing their tables of mean temperatures, altitudes, analyses of soils, and claims to regard, as based upon nearness to, or absence from, some particular natural feature. Thus the coast counties take leave to pride themselves upon a genial average of temperature, owing to their proximity to the sea. They are free, they say, from the extremes of heat and cold afflicting those which are shut in behind the mountain barriers. The inland counties, on the other hand, congratulate themselves that their lot is cast where the mountains form an efficient defence against the raw fogs and gusts which must necessarily afflict those directly exposed to the chilly ocean.

These petty rivalries are a part of the history of all new countries, and pass away with the development of population and trade. There seems no need of jealousies, since there is encouragement enough for all in their several ways. The Territories of Arizona and New Mexico have just been opened to transportation by rail from this quarter. The lands suitable for the cultivation of the “citrus fruits” are limited in extent. The market is much more likely to improve than decline, even when production shall have largely increased beyond its present rate. High railroad freights were at one time a cause of alarm. The making of an “orange wine” was proposed as a resource for using up the surplus crop of this kind. The experiment was not a success, but it is not likely to be needed. Freights have declined, and will decline more with the building of projected new roads. Shipments of oranges have been successfully made from this section as far away as Denver, Chicago, and St. Louis.

II.

Great things are predicted for Wilmington, a little port twenty-two miles to the south-west of Los Angeles. The extensive works undertaken here by the railroad and the United States government are still incomplete, and it is but a dreary little place in its present condition. However, great ports have never been selected primarily for picturesqueness, but in accordance with such commercial necessities as short lines of transit, easy grades, and convenience for shipping. Wilmington had few natural conveniences to offer. There were originally but eighteen inches of water on its bar. This has been increased to ten feet. An enormous jetty, 6700 feet long, extending out to what is called Dead Man’s Island, is under construction. It is to force the tide itself to do the duty of scouring out the bottom, so that a ship channel several miles long will eventually be secured.

Santa Monica is another small port at the end of a branch railroad from Los Angeles, sixteen miles directly west, and somewhat famed as a sea-side resort. It has a hotel of considerable size, and a bold situation on a pretty horseshoe bay. The beach is of fine, hard sand; and the temperature admits of bathing, if one be inclined for it, all the year round. The hopes which were at one time entertained by capitalists, like Senator Jones, of Nevada, of making the place a great shipping point, have been for the present abandoned. It was to have been the Pacific terminus of a new through line from the East, coming by way of the Cajon Pass. A wharf 1500 feet long was built, and a breakwater proposed.

From here, or from Wilmington, you sail up the coast to San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara—favored by invalids. These places have as yet no railroad, but must before long come into the general system. Both are on that sheltered stretch of the coast which, from Point Conception, makes a sharp turn to the eastward, and has direct southern exposure and a view of the islands of Santa Barbara Channel. Santa Barbara, on its practical side, has devoted more attention than most places to the culture of the olive—an industry still much in its infancy. Some of the cultivators have provided themselves with a machinery, which costs about a thousand dollars, for expressing the oil. As a condiment the fruit is not pickled green here, like the Spanish olive, but ripe and black. It may be that a special education is needed for liking each variety of olives, as it is for acquiring the taste in the beginning. Those here are of a small variety, descending from the old mission times, and it is hard not to find them either insipid or bitter. The leading shipment from San Buenaventura is honey. A million pounds per annum from Ventura County, of which it is the capital, is not an unusual product.

III.

I sailed from Wilmington to San Diego. I embarked in the evening in a small tug, which steamed down the tortuous windings of the channel, past black lighters that Whistler would have liked to etch, and past Dead Man’s Island, and transferred us on board a coast steamer waiting without. Next morning we were at our destination, a hundred miles below. San Diego, rising on a gentle slope, makes a pretty appearance from the water. A United States barracks (yellow), with a flag-staff rising in the centre, is the most prominent object in front. You round an immensely long, narrow sand-spit of a peninsula, which contributes to form the excellent small harbor, and make fast to an immensely long mooring wharf. It is a feature of all California ports to have immensely long wharves. To the left is “Old Town,” its beach where Dana once loaded hides in his famous “Two Years Before the Mast,” now the site of a Chinese fishing village. To the right is brand-new “National City,” the location of the shops and extensive depot grounds for the new railway. In the centre, at about four miles from either, lies “New Town,” San Diego proper. All together have a population of about five thousand.

As we came up to the wharf a locomotive, starting from National City on the new track, made the circuit of the water-front, with one long, shrill scream, which was taken up by the hills and echoed back. Gods and men were no longer to remain ignorant that San Diego had at last caught up with its future and had its railroad.

It was cruelly disappointed when it was to be the terminus of the Texas Pacific, transcontinental, road. The panic of ’73 prevented the capitalist “Tom Scott” from negotiating the foreign loan which was needed for its completion. That enterprise was abandoned, and a half-mile of graded road-bed alone remains as a sort of tumulus to the blighted hopes and bitter memories of the time. The name of the unfortunate “Tom Scott”—since defunct—remains also a byword and a reproach. Now, however, the “California Southern” is actually at work, and under contract to complete the one hundred and sixteen miles necessary to meet the Southern Pacific, at a point near San Bernardino, within a short time. It is to be a link in the new “Atlantic and Pacific,” which is to follow the thirty-fifth parallel, and become a transcontinental road by means of connection with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé.

The capital and management of the California Southern are largely supplied by the same Boston company directing the Mexican Central, the line to Guaymas from the Arizona frontier, and others. A farther road is projected by them eastward from San Diego to Calabasas, passing through Port Ysabel, at the head of the Gulf of California. This can be more cheaply built below the Mexican frontier than on this side, owing to special exemptions there to be had from taxation, and the lower rates of labor. It is thought that the Southern Pacific will also be compelled by competition to build across from Yuma. Hopes are still entertained also of the derelict Texas Pacific. With all this in prospect, it will be seen that San Diego has justification for making a good deal of stir. It claims to be hundreds of miles nearer, than San Francisco, to New Orleans and New York, on the one hand, and the Orient on the other, and is correspondingly cheerful.

A hand-car on the long wharf conveyed our baggage into the town while we walked beside it. The town, being reached, is found a place of loose texture. It has a disproportionately large hotel, the Horton House, built in anticipation of the rapid arrival of its future greatness, and a loss to its original proprietor. The blue shades were down and the plate-glass windows dusty also, with an expectant look, in much of the “Horton Block,” opposite. After ’73 half the shutters in San Diego were put up. They have come down now, however, and probably to stay.

There is a charming view of the harbor and blue ocean from the upper slopes of the town. Part of the view is a group of bold Mexican islands, the boldest of these, Coronado, a solid mass of red sandstone, which Americans have tried to get for a quarry, without success. Yes, here is Old Mexico once more; we have come back to it. The high, flat-topped peak of Table Mountain marks it unmistakably. It is customary to drive down to “the Monument,” set up on the dividing line of Baja (Lower) California, but the excursion is without special interest.

The chronic condition of shutters in San Diego “Old Town” is to be “up,” that is, so far as it can be said to have any shutters yet remaining. It dates from 1769. Disadvantageously situated in regard to the bay, it began to be deserted in favor of the newer site about ten years ago. Nothing could seem more desolate than it is now. The usual old mission, with a few palms and olives about it, stands in a valley, up the pretty San Diego River, and the earth-works of Commodore Stockton, who threw them up one night before the enemy knew he was ashore, are seen on a hill. Rents should be cheap in Old Town, but, according to the gossips who still sit around the decayed old plaza, they are not. The owners hold them stiffly yet, on what theory Heaven only knows. The plaza has a toppling flag-staff, a decayed music-stand, and vestiges of a number of burned edifices, which have never been worth anybody’s while to build up again. The “Merchants’ Exchange” will never supply cocktails to thirsty soul again; the Cosmopolitan Hotel is without a guest; whole rows of weather-beaten adobes—whole quarters—stand vacant. It should be a great place for ghosts. But perhaps they do not care for one another’s society. The children, coming from school—for there is, it seems, a school—amuse themselves with knocking at and rattling the vacant doors; then they peer in at the broken window-panes and shout, and run laughing away.

IV.

In leaving San Diego I traversed the surveyed line of the new railroad almost due northward. A thirty-mile section of the railroad was already built. The rest of the journey was made by wagon, with an occasional half-day’s pedestrianism, for which the dry, smooth surface of the ground is well adapted. It afforded opportunity of making the acquaintance in a leisurely way of some of the ranchmen, small and great, of the old school. The principal one of these was Don Juan Forster (deceased since this visit), well known in his section. He was English by birth, but sailed with his father in a trading vessel, and became a Mexican subject and resident of California long before the American conquest. It was so long before that he had well-nigh forgotten his English, and had to learn it over again when the Americans arrived. The Señora, a sister of Governor Pio Pico, never learned it at all, any more than her conservative brother.

Don Juan’s estate, the Santa Margarita Ranch, comprised an area of twenty-seven miles by fourteen, or one hundred and forty-five thousand acres of land. There was one fence seventeen miles in length, and another ten. The owner had made two distinct efforts to colonize a portion of his land, without great success. He had offered in London to give forty acres and the use of three cows and two horses to whoever would put upon the land improvements, in the shape of houses, vineyards, etc., to the amount of $1000.

The Santa Margarita ranch-house is of adobe, very thick-walled, with a terrace in front, and an interior court. The waiting at table was by a broad-faced Indian woman in calico. All the domestic service was performed by mission Indians, except the cooking, for which a Chinaman had lately been secured, with the view of having meals on time. The manner of living on these great places was found comfortable, but without the “princely” features attributed to it in some of the highly colored narratives of former travellers.

The greater part of the available land in the section was devoted to pasture. The cereals were cultivated, but not much fruit. Barley is the favorite cereal, as less liable to “rust” and spoil than wheat. Hay is made, not of grass, but of wheat and barley straw, cut green, with the milk still in it. Bee-culture is an important industry. A number of varieties of wild sage, wild buckwheat and sumac, furnish the bees exceptionally good provender. Rows of the square hives, painted in colors, were often seen districted into little streets on the hill-side, or at the mouth of some small cañon, like a miniature city.

Before reaching Don Juan Forster’s the old mission of San Luis Rey is encountered, in the hamlet of the same name. It is almost Venetian in aspect. The whole exterior was at one time faced with a diagonal pattern recalling that of the Ducal Palace. The pile was ruined by a Mormon contingent of the American forces engaged in the conquest of the State. Parts of the heavy adobe walls and buttresses have fallen in, and resolved themselves back into their original element as mere earth-heaps. The images have been shot and hacked down, and a yawning cavern was excavated behind the main altar in search of fancied treasure. Upon a floor strewn with such _débris_ and with fragments of red tiles the daylight falls curiously, through holes in the broken roof and dome.

The railroad traverses some striking natural scenery. Most notable is the Temecula Cañon, a gorge of a wild and grand description, ten miles in length, through the Coast Range. A brawling stream runs down its centre. The gorge was filled with a busy force, as we passed, terracing up the track along its sides, sometimes on the natural rock, sometimes on a cyclopean retaining-wall of immense bowlders. Toward evening every day the firing of heavy blasts reverberated up the defile like a cannonade. The main part of the laboring force consisted of Chinamen. They had utilized the shelving ledges and random nooks by the stream for their tents and cooking-ovens with great ingenuity. The Mexicans and Indians, who formed the contingent next in importance, were in every way less provident. The surveyors were found pleasant and hospitable fellows, as surveyors at the scene of their labors are apt to be. Compactness and convenience had been reduced to the lowest terms, but a pleasant existence seemed possible in their small tents. A Chinese cook was attached to each camp, and the provisions and fare were excellent.

While coming up in the construction-train over the section of already completed road we had the distinction of being waited on by a servant of rather uncommon pretensions. This was a certain “Charley,” a shock-headed boy of fourteen, son of a later Tichborne claimant, who had strangely arisen at San Diego just then, and announced his purpose of again contesting the title. Though serving in a menial capacity—while his father, who claimed to have good and sufficient reason for having kept quiet till now, was taking the necessary steps to secure the long-lost title and fortune—“Charley” was deaf to all banter on the subject. He was supercilious and firm in the faith that he too was a Tichborne.

“And don’t you forget it,” he threw out to us by way of a parting injunction.

Out of the cañon, at the van of the construction work, we were on the Temecula Plains, a part of the Upper Santa Ana Valley. The course of the road was marked henceforth only by an occasional surveyor’s stake. We rode over fifty miles of absolutely treeless, verdureless desert. It was desert, however, with a certain fascination in its sterility. It had a distinct beauty of coloring. The brown, drab, and blackish waste, catching sparkles of light on its flinty surface, shimmered in the sunshine. The heat was tempered by a gentle breeze. Crags of black, water-worn rock, which had once been reefs in an inland sea, rose in bold, fantastic shapes, and noble mountain ranges stood up along the distant horizons, their rugged harshness softened into blues and purples by a delicious veiling atmosphere.

Half-way across we fell in with a single sign of human life, in the shape of an abandoned pine shanty. On going around to the rear the boards were found to have been knocked off, probably to be used for fuel. Some former travellers, halting here like ourselves, had occupied a part of their leisure with writing inscriptions in lead-pencil. One had written a direction about drinkable water in the neighborhood. Another, apparently finding this erroneous, had inscribed below it, with much more vigor than regard for adopted usages in spelling, “Lyor!!”

The sole piece of furniture remaining was a rusted cooking-stove, standing on three legs. It had a certain almost diabolic, knowing air. You suspected it of having lost its other leg in waltzing about and holding high carnival, as no doubt it did, with the coyotes, gophers, tarantulas, and lizards who dropped in to pay it visits.

XXX.

_ACROSS ARIZONA._

I.

If there be anything politically disrupting in mere topography, the section cut off by the range below the Los Angeles and Riverside country should also be made a separate State. It should clamor at any rate to be joined to Arizona, since it is Arizona that it follows in climate, and not California. South-east of the low San Gorgonio Pass the seasons are the same as those of Mexico; that is to say, the rains fall in summer, while northward they fall in the winter and spring. Thunder-storms on each side of the mountains may be plainly visible from the other, but do not pass the limit.

I myself saw, from the Arizona side, in December, in hot, clear sunshine at the time, murky clouds billowing above the range, and the lightnings playing in them, and, on returning to Los Angeles, found it drenched in its first showers of the season.

There is one excellent reason why the inhabitants of the section do not raise such a clamor, which is, that there are no inhabitants worth mentioning. For a hundred and fifty miles, from the pass, to the Arizona frontier at Yuma, the railroad hardly knows any local traffic. Its route is over the celebrated “Colorado Desert,” in comparison with which previous deserts are of small importance. There are various stopping-places, with designations on the map, but these are rarely more than signal-stations where the locomotive, like the passengers, stops to slake its thirst at a series of artesian wells.

The plain is not of great extent laterally. Black and purplish mountains are always in sight, and spurs cross the track. Bowlders and pebbles are scattered thickly on the surface at first, among patches of bunch-grass. Then, near Seven Palms, the jaws of the black and purple mountains open and receive us into the genuine desert. It is strewn with bowlders still, but is itself a waste of drifting white sand, with large dunes and hills of sand. One might be riding on the shores of Coney Island or Long Branch.

A singular depression below the level of the sea for a hundred miles, and at its lowest point nearly three hundred feet, is traversed. At Dos Palmas, in the very bottom of it, a board shanty, covered with signs in amateurish lettering, indicating that it is a saloon, stands entirely alone. Surely the bar-keeper must consume his own drinks, and lead an existence unprecedented among his kind. No; a horseman in Mexican accoutrements dashes across the plain—though where he should dash from, and how he should ride anything, here in the bottom of the sea, but the skeleton, say, of a dolphin or a sea-horse, is a mystery—pulls up, and enters.

And it appears, on a better acquaintance with Dos Palmas, that a stage starts every other day for points on the Colorado River, and Prescott, the capital of Arizona Territory, and that this is but a faint survival of bustle which once reigned here before the advent of the railroad. The route of the Southern Overland Mail then came this way, and long trains of immigrant and freight wagons, carrying water in casks for two and three days’ supply, were passing continually over these wastes.

Nothing, on general principles, would appear more depressing than such a country, but as a matter-of-fact it is a stimulus to the curiosity, and furnishes real entertainment. One would not wish to be abandoned there without resources, it is true, but he does not tire of looking at it from the car-window. Its blazing dryness is disinfectant and preservative. There can never exist the last extreme of sadness where the element of decay by damp and mould is not present. Chemical processes are those which are principally going on. Wonders of almost any sort may be expected, and you almost look for phantoms not of earth among the shifting mirages.

A considerable part of Arizona, as well, is of the same character, but it is estimated by competent authority that with irrigation thirty-seven per cent. of that Territory can be redeemed for agriculture, and sixty per cent. as pasturage. It will be called to mind that even the apparently hopeless Colorado Desert, which is below the level of the sea, is also below the level of the Colorado River, from which water might perhaps be spread over it with comparative ease.

The truly patriotic Arizonian in their neighborhood is not ashamed of his encompassing deserts, but rather proud of them, and with a certain reason. The desert is in reality a laboratory of useful products. Paper is made from the yucca, or Spanish-bayonet, which abounds in parts of it. There are tracts of salt, borax, gypsum, sulphur, asbestos, and kaolin, and quarries of pumice-stone, only waiting shipment. It is maintained, also, that it has deposits of the same precious metals which, mined in places where water is more accessible, have given the Territory most of its present fame.

Our train runs out upon a long wooden drawbridge, across the Colorado River, and we arrive at Yuma. The company has placed here the first of its series of hotels of uniform pattern. It is both station and hotel. Such provision on an equal scale of comfort would hardly have been judicious yet as an investment for private persons. These structures therefore become not only a typical feature of the scenery, but an indication of the extent to which the railroad has had to, and has been able to, by reason of its ample resources, take this bare new country into its own hands. They are of the usual reddish-brown, two stories in height, and surrounded by piazzas of generous width—an indispensable adjunct under the dazzling light and heat of the country.

II.

The heat of Yuma is proverbial. The thermometer ranges up to 127° in the shade. There is an old story of a soldier who died at the fort and went to the place which Bob Ingersoll says does not exist, and, finding it chilly there by comparison, sent back after his blankets.

Great heat, nevertheless, is not equally formidable everywhere. It is well attested that there is no sunstroke here, and no such suffering as from a much lower temperature in moister climates. Distinct sanitary properties are even claimed for this well-baked air. So near the sea-level, it is said to be less rarefied, and to comprise, therefore, a greater quantity of oxygen to a given bulk, than that of mountain districts, which, in purity and dryness, it resembles. It is thought to be beneficial in lung troubles. Yuma, among its arid sand-hills, has aspirations to be a sanitarium. Civilized people also may yet resort there to engage in a sensible sun-worship, basking in the genial heat, and then plunging into the river, after the fashion of the resident Indians, who make of it in this way a kind of natural Turkish bath.

A transition state may have disadvantages, even when a step toward something better. Yuma has now its railroad, and is to have a shipping-port of its own, by the construction of another to Port Ysabel, on the Gulf of California. Still, it laments a greater activity it once enjoyed, as chief distributing point for the mines and upper river towns. It expects the Port Ysabel Railroad to have the effect of doubling its population in two years. It will not be a very stupendous population even then, as it is but fifteen hundred at present.

The town is a collection of inferior adobe houses, a few of the very best being altered from the natural mud-color by a coating of whitewash. The ordinary part of it resembles more the poor tropical hamlets on the trail to Acapulco than even the ordinary villages of Mexico. The houses consist of a framework of cottonwood or ocotilla wattles, plastered with mud inside and out, making a wall two or three inches thick. The roof is thatched, the floor is the bare ground. Around them are generally high palisades of ocotilla sticks, and corrals of the same adjoining.

The waiters in a Yuma hotel are of a highly miscellaneous character. You are served, in the same dining-room, by Mexicans, Chinamen, Irish, Americans, and a tame Apache Indian. One and all had a certain astounded air, ending in something like confirmed depression, on finding that we were to remain, would dine at our leisure, and did not wish to have the dishes shot at us as if out of a catapult, after the practice with the ordinary traveller pausing here his allotted half-hour. One does not expect too much of his waiter in Arizona, however. There are reported instances in which he makes you eat your steak with his hand on his pistol-pocket, and the threat of wearing it out on you if you object.

The Colorado at Yuma makes about the same impression as to width as the Sacramento at Sacramento, the Ohio at Pittsburg, or the Connecticut at Hartford. It is a turbulent yellow stream. It cuts into high sand bluffs on the Arizona side, and spreads out their contents in wide bars on the California side. It is without wharves. The light-draught, high-decked steamboats, or barges, that ply up and down its interminable reaches tie up when necessary to the banks.

Mountains of a jagged, eccentric formation follow its general course northward. Peaks impressively counterfeiting human work, Castle Dome, Chimney Peaks, Picacho, and Cargo Muchacho, loom up along the horizon, a fitting prelude to the marvels of Arizona.

It was at the close of an Indian war that this visit was made. It had been said, in rumors much exaggerated, that the whole white civilization of the Territory was in danger by the outbreak, and troops—but now on their return—had been hurried thither from all sides. The first view of Indians, therefore, at Yuma was of a double interest. They were not Apaches, it is true, but a subsequent acquaintance with the general field proved them to be even more picturesque. They are of that highly satisfactory style of savages who wear but little clothing, and none of it European. They are to be seen in numbers about the railway-station by the most casual passenger. The railroad is still new to them, and they have not satiated their curiosity. They bring friends from a distance to see it, and are observed describing to these visitors how the drawbridge swings, and how the cars are switched from one track to another.

They are met with coming across this bridge from the patch of river-bottom near the fort on the California side, where their principal settlement is. The young men run or stride at great speed, so as to throw out behind them a long red sash or band, depending from the breech-cloth, which is, in summer, the principal part of their attire. To this is added, in winter, a close-fitting gray or crimson under-shirt. They wear their thick, coal-black hair “banged” low on their foreheads, and bushy about their necks. The effect at a little distance is not unlike that of the Florentine period, when the young gallants wore jerkins and trunk hose fitting them like their skins, and just such bushy locks, which they crowned, however, instead of going bare-headed, with jaunty velvet caps.

The fort is without guns, other than a howitzer for firing salutes, and has no strength, as it no longer needs to have, except from its position on a commanding bluff. The military policy of the government now is to station its troops along a railroad or other easy line of communication, where they can be quickly massed for mutual support. All the Arizona posts, such as Camp Lowell, with its grassy parade and fine avenue of cottonwoods; Camp Grant, on its table-land; and Camp Apache, at the junction of two charming trout streams, in the White River Cañon; and the others, have only this strategic importance, and no intrinsic strength. The barracks at Yuma consist of a series of comfortable, large, adobe houses, plastered, and painted green, around an oblong plaza. They have in front a peculiar screen-work of green blinds, which shuts out the glare arising from the yellow ground, and makes both a cool promenade and comfortable sleeping apartments for the summer.

The chief of the Yumas, on whose settlement the fort looks down, chooses his sub-chiefs, but is himself appointed by the military commandant. The last investiture was made as long ago as 1852, by General, then Major, Heintzelman. He conferred it upon the now wrinkled and decrepit Pasqual, described at the time as “a tall, fine-looking man, of an agreeable disposition.”

Pasqual’s people cultivate little patches of vegetables and hay in the river-bottom, fertilized by the annual overflow. Their principal sustenance, however, is the sweet bean of the mesquit-tree. This they pound, in mortars, into a kind of flour. Sometimes, when on the move, the Indians float their hay across the river on rafts, which they push before them, swimming. They propel the small children in the same way, placing them in their large, Egyptian-looking _ollas_, or water-jars.

The crop of mesquit beans was so large one year as to be beyond their unaided capacity to consume, and they hospitably invited in their friends, the Pimas, to aid them. Old Pasqual describes with graphic gestures how haggard and lank were these visitors on their arrival, and what an unctuous corpulence they had attained in the end, when, after nearly eating their hosts out of house and home, they were only got rid of at last by force.

III.

Few things are more curious at this time of day than to look back at the old maps of our Western possessions previous to the annexation of Texas. Texas was not then ours; nor were a considerable part of Indian Territory, Kansas, half of Colorado, all of Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. All of this belonged to our sister republic of Mexico, which, as I have said, was within an ace as large as ourselves, and, except for its internal dissensions, could by no means be considered a puny antagonist.

An impressive vagueness attended the delineation of most things west of the Mississippi. There were great tracts hardly more known than the centre of Africa. The upper regions of Mexico were distinguished as Interna; New Mexico and Arizona were simply Apacheria—Apache Land. Our frontier ran along the line of the Sabine River to the Red, from the Red to the Arkansas, and from the Arkansas, on the 42d Parallel of latitude, straight west to the Pacific Ocean. By the peace of Guadalupe Hidalgo our frontier became the Rio Grande and Gila instead, and the line had dropped from Parallel 40° to Parallel 32°.

I have called this territory heretofore, by way of figure of speech, an Alsace-Lorraine of Mexico, though it is not probable, vacant as it was, and Americanized as it now is, that a serious grudge is still borne us for it, or that there will ever be momentous wars for its recovery. However this may be, it has been the making of us. We should be in but sorry shape indeed had we to go back to the limits of the thirteen original British Colonies, or even to these with Florida, purchased from the Spaniards, and Louisiana, purchased from the French, added. The Mexican acquisition gave us one-third of our domain—that which is now most open to the teeming millions of Europe and that which avails us our repute for essential Americanism abroad. It gave us the field of the Bret Harte school in literature, our chief marvels and wonders, our mines of the precious metals, and the command of the Pacific Ocean.

The lower belt of Arizona was not even comprised in this. An area of 460 miles by 130, below the Gila River, was not obtained till “the Gadsden Purchase,” in 1853. By the payment of the sum of $10,000,000 under this treaty we obtained a number of decided advantages. We rectified our boundary line, confused through the inaccuracy of the map of one Dwinelle, on which it was based. We got rid of an embarrassing engagement, of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, to protect the Mexican frontier from Apaches—leaving them to regulate this service for themselves. We secured the right of way for a railroad across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which was thought desirable for speedier communication with our new possessions of California.

But above all we acquired, in the easy levels below the Gila, the natural route for a Southern Pacific transcontinental railway. The files of the Congressional _Globe_ of that date are full of the necessity of binding our Pacific acquisitions securely to the rest of the country, and the most effectual of all the means proposed was considered to be a transcontinental railway.

Well, we are bowling at last along that now actually constructed Southern Pacific Railroad, once discussed in musty debates of the Congressional _Globe_. It increases our respect for predecessors to whom we may not have given any great consideration heretofore to find how sagacious they were. We reach Stanwix, with its lava beds; Painted Rock, named from huge, mysteriously-decorated bowlders; Casa Grande, from its architectural ruins of the Toltecs; and Tucson.

Adopting the policy of leaving Tucson to be examined on the return, let us push on to the extreme end of the Territory—to the eccentrically-named Tombstone. Benson, the point of departure, from the railroad, for Tombstone, is 1024 miles from San Francisco, and probably 2500 from New York.

XXXI.

_TOMBSTONE._

I.

Tombstone is the very latest and liveliest of those mushroom civilizations which so often gather around a “find” of the precious metals. They live at a headlong pace; draw to them wild and lawless spirits; confer great fortunes here, the grave of the drunkard, the suicide, or the victim of violence elsewhere. A school of literature, with Bret Harte as its exponent, has arisen to celebrate their doings. At the present rate of advance of population and conventional usages westward they must shortly disappear as effectually as the dodo of tradition. While things go well with them the prices of commodities are hardly considered. Nobody haggles. The most expensive of everything is what is most wanted.

“Diamonds—two-hundred-dollar watches and chains—Lord! we couldn’t hand ’em out fast enough,” says an ex-jeweller, describing his experience at one of the camps in its palmy days. “Champagne wasn’t good enough for me then,” says a seedy customer, recalling his doings after the discovery and sale of a rich mine. He sighed for a repetition of the event, not to make provision for his old age, which sadly needed it, but that he might have “one more glorious spree” before he died.

Oftentimes this rush of life departs as quickly as it came. Some fine day the “lead” is exhausted, there is found to be no more treasure in the mines. The heterogeneous elements scatter, and the town, be it never so well built, is left as desolate as Tadmor of the Wilderness. In a certain Nevada mining town, which once numbered some thousands of inhabitants, Indians are living in rows of good brick houses, having adapted them to their peculiar conditions by taking out doors and windows and knocking holes in the roof.

A six-horse Concord coach carried us, not too speedily, over the twenty-five miles of dusty road to Tombstone. It was called the “Grand Central,” after one of the prosperous silver mines of the place. A rival line was named the “Sandy Bob,” from its proprietor; who preferred to be himself thus known, instead of by a conventional family appellation such as anybody might have. We should certainly have taken the “Sandy Bob Line” for its greater suggestiveness, except that it seemed to be coming down when we wanted to go up, and always coming up when we wanted to go down.

Our own proved to have plenty of suggestiveness too. A guard got up with a Winchester rifle, and posted himself by the Wells-Fargo Express box, and the driver began almost at once to relate robber stories. His stage had been stopped and “gone through” twice within the past six months. The affair had been enlivened on the one occasion by a runaway and turnover, and on the other by the shooting and killing of the driver. Of this last item his successor spoke with a natural disgust. If the line could not be drawn at drivers, he said, things had indeed come to a pretty pass. He respected a man who took to the road and robbed those who could afford it. At least, he considered it more honorable than borrowing money of a friend which you knew you could never repay, or than gobbling up the earnings of the poor, like a large firm lately suspended in Pima County. But as to shooting a driver, even in mistake for somebody else, he had no words to express his sense of its meanness.

He threw stones at his horses, as in Mexico, that is, at the leaders, beyond the reach of his long lash. The same stone was made to “carom” from one to the other, such was his skill, and startle them both. Long string-teams of mules or Texas steers, sixteen to a team, with ore-wagons, were met with along the road. Mexican-looking drivers trudged beside them in the deep, yellow dust, cracking their animals lustily with huge “black-snakes.” Mesquit-bushes, and long grass dried to hay—not as good as it looked—covered portions of the surface; the rest was bare and stony.

We rode for a certain distance beside the branch railroad in course of construction between Benson and Tombstone. A series of lateral valleys along the tributaries of the Gila, north and south, as the Santa Cruz, Salt River, San Carlos, San Pedro, and San Simon Valleys, afford excellent stock ranges, promise of a flourishing agriculture, and easy routes for tributary railways. They have already begun to be utilized. The San Pedro has the Southern Pacific branch above mentioned, and the Santa Cruz will have the Arizona Southern, connecting the centre of the Territory at Florence, on the Atlantic and Pacific, with Mexico at Calabasas. The transcontinental road—or roads, when the Atlantic and Pacific shall have been built—will draw through these tributary valleys, as the Gila draws its waters, a trade from Northern Mexico, where mining enterprises in particular, in the hands of Americans, are making great headway.

The route began to be very much up-hill. We changed horses and lunched at Contention City. One naturally expected a certain belligerency in such a place, but none appeared on the surface during our stay. There were plenty of saloons—the “Dew-drop,” the “Head-light,” and others—and at the door of one of them a Spanish señorita smoked a cigarette and showed her white teeth.

Contention City is the seat of stamp-mills for crushing ore, which is brought to it from Tombstone. The latter place is without an efficient water-power. The stamps are rows of heavy beams, which drop upon the mineral, on the mortar and pestle plan, with a continuous dull roar, by night as well as day.

“That’s the music I like to hear,” said our driver, gathering up his reins, “poundin’ out the gold and silver. There ain’t no brass bands ekils it.”

The route grew steeper yet. On the few wayside fences that exist were painted flaring announcements, as “Go To Bangley and Schlagenstein’s At Tombstone. They Are The Bosses, You Bet.”

Then over the edge of bare hills appeared Tombstone itself, a large, circular water-tank, big enough for a fort, painted with advertisements, the most conspicuous object in the foreground.

II.

At the beginning of the year 1878 there was not so much as a tent at Tombstone. One “Ed” Schieffelin and his brother started thither prospecting. It was supposed to be an adventure full of dangers. At the Santa Rita silver mines, in the Santa Cruz Valley, for instance, nothing like so far away, three superintendents had been murdered by Indians in rapid succession.

His friends therefore said to Ed, “Better take your coffin with you; you will find your tombstone there, and nothing else.”

But Ed Schieffelin—a young man yet, who has not discarded a picturesque way of dressing of which he was fond, nor greatly altered his habits otherwise—found instead the Tough Nut and Contention Mines. He made a great fortune out of them, and was so pleased at the difference between the prediction and the result that he gave the name of Tombstone to the town itself.

One of two well-printed daily papers has assumed the corresponding title of the _Epitaph_. The unreliability of epitaphs—if the remark may be safely ventured even at this distance—is proverbial. Nevertheless, they may occasionally tell the truth. From appearances it would seem that this was one of the occasions. Almost any eulogy of its subject by the _Epitaph_ would seem justified. The city, but two years old at this date, had attained to a population of 2000, and a property valuation, apart from that of the mines, of $1,050,980. A desirable lot of 30 by 80 feet, on Allen Street, between Fourth and Sixth—such was the business-like nomenclature used already in this settlement of yesterday—was worth $6000. A shanty that cost $50 to build rented for $15 a month. A nucleus of many blocks at the centre consisted of substantial, large-sized buildings, hotels, banks—Schieffelin Hall, for meetings and amusements—and stores stocked with goods of more than the average excellence in many older and larger towns.

The mining claims run under the city itself. From the roof of the Grand Hotel you look down at the shafts, hoist-works, and heaps of extracted ore of the Vizina, the Gilded Age (close to the Palace Lodging-house), the Mountain Maid, and other mines, opening strangely in the very midst of the buildings. This circumstance has given rise to disputes of ownership, so that whoever would be safe purchases all the conflicting titles, both above ground and below. On a commanding hill close by, to the southward, are the Tough Nut and Contention, and above them many others later discovered. The larger mines had extensive buildings, of wood, and in handsome draughting and assay rooms within were regularly educated scientists, ex-college professors and the like, in charge. The lesser mines put up in the beginning with commoner sheds and poorer appliances of every kind. About them all lie heaps of a blackish material, resembling inferior coal and slate, the silver ore in its native condition. A laborer above-ground earned $3.50, and below-ground $4, for a “shift” of eight hours, and the work went on night and day, Sundays and all.

I leave to others to estimate the bulk of treasure in the place. I was told that it was “the biggest thing since the Comstock,” and there were forty million dollars in sight. I was offered, daily, fractional interests in mines, now by a young surveyor who was going to be married and needed money for his wedding outfit; now by new friends who were straitened for assessment funds to carry out the provisions of the law; and again by others who would kindly make any sacrifice for the pleasure of associating a traveller from a distance with the interests of the place; and yet it will be well for the novice to be wary of these seductive openings at Tombstone, as elsewhere.

This I know, however, that I descended four hundred feet or so into the Contention Mine, and found great chambers hollowed out, from which mineral had been taken, showing a generous width in the vein. The yield, from its discovery up to March, 1881, had been $2,000,000. The Tough Nut, with the Lucky Cuss, Good Enough, Owl’s Nest, and Owl’s Last Hoot—the racy vernacular of their names will be observed—had yielded $1,000,000.

The outskirts of Tombstone consisted still of huts and tents. A burly miner could be seen stretched upon his cot in a windowless cabin, barely large enough to contain him. There were some tents provided with wooden doors and adobe chimneys. New as it was, the business portion of the place had been once swept out of existence by a devastating fire, which originated from a characteristic incident—the explosion of a whiskey-barrel in the Oriental Saloon. Within fourteen days all was rebuilt far better than before.

I took the pains to count the number of establishments in a single short block of Allen Street at which intoxicating liquors were sold. There were the bar-rooms of two hotels, the Eagle Brewery, the Cancan Chop-house, the French Rôtisserie, the Alhambra, Maison Doré, City of Paris, Brown’s Saloon, Fashion Saloon, Miners’ Home, Kelly’s Wine-house, the Grotto, the Tivoli, and two saloons apparently unnamed. At these places gambling also went on without let or hinderance. The absence of savings-banks or other opportunity for depositing money, in these wild communities, and the temptation arising from having it always under the eye, no doubt has something to do with the general passion for gambling. Whiskey and cold lead are named as the leading diseases at Tombstone. What with the leisure that seems to prevail, the constant drinking and gambling at the saloons, and the universal practice of carrying deadly weapons, there is but one source of astonishment, and that is that the cold-lead disease should claim so few victims. Casualties are, after all, infrequent, considering the amount of vaporish talk indulged in, and the imminent risks that are run. The small cemetery, over toward Contention Hill, so far from being glutted with the slaughtered, is still comparatively virgin ground.

III.

A farther element in addition to that of the miners is to be cited as having a good deal to do with the exceptional liveliness of Tombstone—the “Cow-boys.”

The term cow-boy, once applied to all those in the cattle business indiscriminately, while still including some honest persons, has been narrowed down to be chiefly a term of reproach for a class of stealers of cattle, over the Mexican frontier, and elsewhere, who are a terror in their day and generation. Exceptional desperadoes of this class, such as “Billy the Kid,” “Curly Bill,” and “Russian George,” have been the scourges of whole districts in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and have had their memories embalmed in yellow-covered literature.

I bought on the train, on leaving, a pamphlet purporting to be an account of the exploits of Billy the Kid. He had committed, it appeared, at least a score of horrid murders, but “so many cities have claimed the honor of giving him birth,” said my pamphlet, “that it is difficult to locate with any accuracy the locality where he passed his youth.” It was finally determined, however, in favor of New York. “It was on the Bowery,” said the author, whose ideas of morality were peculiar even for a sensationalist, “that his mates learned to love him for his daring and prowess, and delighted to refer to him as Billy the Kid.”

This promising life was cut off at the early age of twenty-two. “Curly Bill,” also died young, and so did “Man-killer Johnson.” I remarked upon this peculiarity, of their youth, to a philosopher of the region itself.

“Yes,” he said, “they _don’t_ seem to live to be very old; that’s so.”

The recipe for a long life in this country was described as being very quick and getting “the drop” on an antagonist; that is to say, being ready to shoot first. Unless this can be done, it is the custom even to put up with some ignominious abuse at the time, and await a more favorable opportunity.

The cow-boys frequenting Tombstone were generally from the ranches in the San Pedro and San Simon valleys. There were said to be strongholds in the San Simon Valley where they concealed stolen cattle until re-branded and sent to market, and where no officer of the law ever dared to venture. They looked upon the running off of stock from Mexico, as far as that was concerned, only as a more dashing form of smuggling, though it was marked by frequent bloody tragedies on both sides.

Not to fix upon all the misdeeds of but a few, no doubt there were on the streets of Tombstone plenty of cow-boys of a legitimate sort, whose only faults were occasional boisterousness and too free lavishing of their money. There appeared to be something of a standing feud between the miners and the cow-boys, and there was besides a faction of “town cow-boys” organized against the “country cow-boys.”

The leading cattle-men had a Southern cut and accent, and hailed originally from Missouri or Texas. Some appeared in full black broadcloth, accompanied by the usual wide sombrero. The landlord of our hotel described them as “perfect gentlemen,” some of them good at the bar for as high as $20 or $25 a day.

The great object in life of the various factions, or of individuals who arose from time to time in search of notoriety, was to “run the town.” This consisted largely in the privilege of blustering in the saloons, whooping and firing occasional pistol-shots, if thought good, in the streets, and having a moderate security from arrest, inspired by dread of their prowess.

This was necessarily a very insecure preëminence. New aspirants and rebels were continually piqued into appearing against it whenever it seemed fairly attained. Our visit happened upon the heels of a conflict making the most tragic page yet written in the annals of Tombstone. Opinions seemed divided about it—even official opinions. The sheriff extended his sympathy to one side, the city marshal, who was, in fact, its leader, to the other.

City Marshal Earp, with his two brothers, and one “Doc Holliday,” a gambler, had come down the street, armed with rifles, and opened fire on two Clanton brothers and two McLowry brothers. The latter party had been practically first disarmed by the sheriff, who feared such a meeting, and meant to disarm the others as well. Three of the assailed men fell, and died. “Ike” Clanton alone escaped.

The slayers were imprisoned, but released on bail. The Grand Jury was now in session, hearing evidence in the case. It was rumored that the town party—the Earps—would command a sufficient personal influence to go free of indictment. The cow-boys were flocking into town to await the result, and on a certain quiet Sunday wore an ominous look. It was said that, should justice fail to be done them, the resolute-looking men conferring together darkly at the edges of the sidewalk would take the matter into their own hands. The jury, I have since learned, did not find an indictment, and the remaining parties to the affair, with many others, I believe, have since died with their boots on in the same cause. If anything could reconcile us to the untimely taking-off of these paladins, it would be partly their own contemptuous indifference to it.

It would seem that we ought to have at least half a dozen lives apiece, to account for such an indifference, but to be ready to toss away the only one on any and every pretext or no pretext is not at all so intelligible. It is certainly not the desperation of poverty by which it is occasioned. Many of them are in very good circumstances. The younger McLowry, a boy under twenty, had $3000 in his pocket, the proceeds of a sale of cattle, the day he fell.

The elder Clanton had played cards most of the night before with two of his deadly enemies, both parties keeping a hand on their pistols meanwhile. When “Billy” Clanton, a boy, like McLowry, lay prone on the ground in the fight, dying of his mortal wound, he still managed to get out a pistol, steadied it on a shattered arm, and fired once more at “Doc Holliday,” saying,

“I’ll get one of you, any way.”

“You are a daisy if you do,” replied Doc Holliday, continuing to advance as coolly as if at target practice, and emptying another barrel of his own into him.

And the last words of Billy Clanton, in the Nibelungen-like contest—which I am quite aware will not be quoted, in school-readers, with those of Lawrence, Nelson, and Montcalm, since there was no sense at all in this frenzied display of pluck and tenacity—were: “For God’s sake more cartridges!”

Meantime the whistles of the mining works were shrieking notes of alarm, the miners pouring forth from underground, and the reputable citizens, who might have exclaimed, “A plague o’ both your houses!” arming themselves in hot haste, and coming to their doors, to prevent the spread of general anarchy.

There is a grimly humorous element in it all. It seems such an excellent joke to idly snuff out the most precious of human possessions. A cow-boy shoots a tumbler from the hand of another, just raised to his lips, saying, “When you drink with me I will teach you to take whiskey plain, and no mixtures.”

A group of others sit around in a saloon where lies a fresh-made corpse. An officer of the law enters, and says, “Who claims this man?” whereupon all jump to their feet to dispute the honor.

There is a large supply of these amusing stories. To kill your man seems a way of winning your spurs, as it were, and establishing yourself on a proper footing in the community. Even the defunct, in various cases, could he be heard from, would probably find no great fault with the manner of his taking off, but only with the “luck” of it which had gone against him.

XXXII.

_CAMP LOWELL, TUCSON, AND SAN XAVIER DEL BAC._

I.

The night journey returning by stage to Benson was enlivened by more shooting stories. I heard, among others, of the doings of the late Brazelton of Tucson, and at Tucson I bought his photograph, taken, after death, in his mask and other paraphernalia of his craft. He robbed stages for years while apparently working quietly as a hostler in a corral. He was finally tracked to his fate through some peculiar marks of the horse he rode.

One of our passengers had just recovered from wounds received in a fight over cards with a Mexican, whom he had killed, and was now able, with the aid of morphine, to pursue his journey toward his home in New Mexico. The train men at Benson were chary of carrying their lanterns about the depot yard, a habit having arisen, it seemed, among the cow-boys of trying to snuff out these moving targets with revolvers from a distance.

There seemed a certain tameness even in the Apaches after this wild product of the higher civilization of the whites. The principal group of prisoners taken after the attempted massacre of General Carr’s command was found in confinement at Camp Lowell, nine miles north of Tucson. There were forty-two of them, with Sanchez, their chief. They were of fairly regular features, and their expression, with the war-paint washed off, not unamiable. They were handcuffed together in couples, their legs also manacled, and now wore gray army under-shirts and cotton drawers, the rags in which they had come having been taken from them. Their long black hair hung about their ears, not frowzy, like that of the Yumas, but smoothly parted in the middle, and brushed back. A number wore red bands or kerchiefs around their heads.

Seen obscurely in the chief prison-room by side-light from a grated window, they had a certain resemblance to Greek insurgents, or the _sans culottes_ of 1793, or, again, the wild Vendean peasants who fought with Rochejaquelein and Jean Chouan for religion and the king.

They were taken out for an airing in the mornings, and allowed to squat in the sun at the edge of the pleasant parade-ground, flanked by its well-shaded row of officers’ dwellings. The recent rising had been the result of a fanatical delusion. A medicine-man persuaded them that he had received a revelation to drive all the whites from the land. As soon as the corn was ripe, he said, their dead brethren would arise and take arms to aid them in carrying out the decree of Heaven. He had, as many prophets have not, the courage of his convictions. Though taken in charge himself by the troops, he gave a signal agreed upon for the massacre of these to begin, calling to his people not to be concerned about his fate, as he would come to life and join them again in three days.

The bluff Arizonians are apt to indulge in a derisive way of talking of the army and its relation to the savages. They would make but short work of these latter, they say, if they took the matter into their own hands. They imply that the army does not wish to kill off, or even wholly put down, the Indians, but rather to preserve them, as a gentle stimulus to public dread, to hasten promotions, and also to furnish occasion for profitable supply-contracts. However this may be, it would seem that after the repression of this revolt, and the rapid penetration of railroads into the Territory, Indians need no longer be a deterring influence of great moment with the intending settler. This old historic source of apprehension seems as good as abolished from its last stronghold.

Eight miles to the north brings us to a ranch called Fuller’s Hot Springs. This is one of the few places where a beginning of systematic cultivation has been made, and interesting besides as a typical Arizona summer resort. There was a young orchard of twenty-five acres, sheltered by a wind-break of three rows of ash-trees, doing very well in an alkali soil. The buildings consisted of a number of unpainted adobe houses, each of a single large, comfortable room, roofed with strips of cactus.

There was a “summer dining-room” made of ocotilla sticks, the intervals open; and a “winter dining-room,” with tight walls, and a fireplace, in which a wood-fire was burned mornings and evenings. The hot spring, a clear, pleasant water, said to resemble English Harrogate, ran out from below a bath-house, consisting of a patched canvas tent. It became, below, a pretty brook, a pond for the cattle, and source of supply for irrigating the orchard. The mountains behind the place, the Santa Catalinas, are like the Sierra Madres behind Los Angeles. They are of the same sharp fracture, but higher and grander, jutting up here and there into as perfect castles as those of Harlech, the Trostberg, or Rheinstein. Forests of pine of large dimensions crown a part of their summits. South and south-west, across the wide plain, appear the Rincons and silver-bearing Santa Ritas.

There was a fascination in being able to examine at leisure the strange growths of the plain, and not merely to know them in glimpses from the car-windows. I made haste especially to cut down for inspection an example of the enormous saguara, the organ-cactus. Taller than that on the hill-sides of Guerrero along the Acapulco trail, it often rises to a height of sixty feet, bristles over the landscape like masts or columns, or, again, like the seven-branched candlestick of the Mosaic law. Inside it consists of a white, juicy pulp, imbedding a bundle of fibres in the form of long wands, which, when dried, serve a number of useful purposes. It has a palatable fruit, which the Indians collect from its top in August with forked sticks.

The ocotilla is simply a shrub growing as a wattle of sticks, fifteen or twenty together, only waiting to be cut down and turned into palings. The bisnaga is a thorny cactus like an immense watermelon growing on end. One need never die of thirst where it is found. The cholla is a mass of spines, which are even barbed, on the fish-hook principle. It is considered funny to hear of somebody’s falling into a cholla, and nothing could better represent the traditional “bramble-bush” in which the man who was so wondrous wise met with the famous adventure of scratching out his eyes. The “deer-brush” somewhat resembles the horns of the animal. The palo verde—green stick—grows as large as an apple-tree, with the texture of a mammoth sea-weed. The “grease-wood” is a large bush, said to burn just as well when green as dry. Most of this vegetation is leafless, or rather the plant seems a leaf itself, since coarse bark is lacking, and the green of chlorophyll and the tenderness of structure seem equally distributed throughout.

There are homely legends and superstitions about these plants of the desert. A certain one, for instance, poisons any white spot on a horse, but not one of any other color. Another, eaten by horses, makes them lazy and imbecile. The loco, or rattle-weed, on the other hand, drives them raving crazy, and they try to run themselves to death. I do not know whether this last be wholly a superstition, for I rode in California a horse whose eccentric proceedings could hardly be accounted for on any other basis.

Tucson, from a distance, in early morning or late afternoon, is level, low, square, and brown, with a mellow light upon it and the castellated mountains behind it. In the foreground you see lazy ox-wains, a prospector, perhaps, with his pots and kettles, and a mounted Mexican towing by a lariat a bull, which ducks its head in vain resistance. From a distance it is thoroughly foreign, and of attractive promise. There is something of the Dead Sea apple in the realization of this promise. If Ruskin be right in holding that a house should be of the general color of the soil on which it stands, Tucson may lay claim to great artistic merit. It is entirely of adobe brick of the natural mud-color. Violent rainstorms occur, to the detriment of paint and kalsomine, on such a friable surface, and their use becomes a serious question of economy.

Tucson has great antiquity as a mere corporate existence. It was founded by one of the early Spanish expeditions that came up the Santa Cruz Valley in quest of the reputed treasure of the Aztecs in the fabled “land of Cibola,” but retains no visible trace of age. If there were ever any monuments of importance, they have effectually vanished. Even the church is new. Such foreignness as there is consists of a very provincial Mexican squalor.

The considerations of interest about it are of a purely utilitarian character, as: how it is to be paved, drained, lighted, provided with an adequate water supply, so as not to have to pay four cents a bucket for it, as at present; and how it is to get rid of its malarial fevers and shabby rookeries.

A writer in one of the papers one day paid a glowing eulogy to its peculiar situation, in the desert. He held that this was a matter not only of those material products which I have mentioned, but also of the highest moral and intellectual advantages. It was apropos of the establishment of a public library. No great idea has ever been evolved in the usual scenes of human habitation (so the argument ran), and that there is no place for study and contemplation like the desert. Christ, Mahomet, Zoroaster, and Confucius all formulated their creeds in the desert. I gathered that we are to expect from Arizona, at the proper time, some new prophet or sage, to sway again the destinies of men in the same way.

The correspondent was satisfied, at any rate, that, with a public library, Tucson could shortly become another Alexandria of the desert, “a seat of learning and fountain-head of ideas, to be sought by students from Mexico, from the Pacific Islands, from China and Japan, and the mountains and valleys of the Rio Grande,” and I for one shall be very glad to see it so.

It is the commercial centre of the important Southern mining district, and has an eligible situation for future development. It has derived in its time considerable profit from furnishing supplies to the army, and from a smuggling trade with Mexico. The goods for this latter were taken out in teams, then “packed” over the mountain passes, on donkeys, to the objective points of Altar and Magdalena, in cactus-grown, arid Sonora.

The traders at Tucson, again, are largely Jewish. A certain kind of “life” prevails freely, as at Tombstone. Roulette, faro, and other games of chance are played in a large way in the leading saloons, while the poor Mexicans gamble for small stakes at _fondas_ of their own, where some wretched lithograph of Hidalgo or Zaragoza looks down on them from the walls. There is lacking, however, the choleric and dangerous air of Tombstone. People make way for you to pass if you wish, and do not seem exclusively occupied with looking about for somebody to tread on the tails of their coats.

If Tucson be without historic remains of its own, it has one of the loveliest possible in its vicinity, the old mission church of San Xavier del Bac.

San Xavier is on the reservation of the Christianized Papago Indians, in the Santa Cruz Valley, ten miles to the southward. It is a new sensation even for one from Mexico who may have flattered himself that he knew the style completely. This ancient landmark of a frontier civilization which, since its destruction, has not been even faintly approached in its kind, is not surpassed either in Mexico or out of it for the quaintness, the qualities of form and color, and the gentle sentiment of melancholy that appeal to the artistic sense. Old Father Time has trodden with heavy step on green wooden balconies in its front, broken out their floors, and left parts of them dangling free. The original sweet-toned bronze bells still hang in one of the towers. The space, terminating in a scrolled gable, between the towers is enriched with escutcheons and rampant lions, wreathed in foliage. Niches hold grotesque broken statues, and complicated pilasters flank the entrance door-way, the whole formed in stucco upon a basis of moulded bricks. Where a portion has fallen away it can be seen that the pilasters are constructed upon or held together by a centre consisting of a stick of timber.

The designer, whoever he may have been, was inspired by Venetian-Byzantine traditions. It is roofed with numerous simple domes and half-domes. The interior of these, frescoed with angels and evangelists, the chancel walls, almost covered with gilding, but stained and battered, and the painted and gilded lions on the chancel rails, recall to the least observant Saint Mark’s at Venice. The style is not quite consistently carried out, however. A later rococo decoration, as exuberant as the vagaries of East Indian work, mingles with and at places overrides it. A Henri II. candlestick will give a certain idea of the pattern of the columns.

The date has disappeared from the façade, but it is believed to be about 1768, and the present edifice was built on the ruins of a former one, going back much nearer to 1654, when the mission to the Papagos was first begun. Large angels, with bannerets, their draperies formed of _papier-maché_ or gummed muslin, are attached to the main chancel piers; and a painted and gilded Virgin, with a long face, and hair brushed up from a high forehead, as in the sculptures of Jean Goujon, looks down from a high altar niche.

All within is of a mediæval richness and obscurity. All without is broad sunshine falling upon the peaceful Papago village. A few old men trudge about, concerning themselves with their bake-ovens and some water-jars and strings of dried squashes, and women pass by with tall loads of hay and other produce carried in the _kijo_, a singular hamper of sticks and netting, on their backs. Nobody concerns himself about visitors, except a foolishly smiling boy, one Domingo, who has brought us the key.

To have come from that spasm of aggressive modernism, Tombstone, and to be at ancient San Xavier del Bac—it seemed to me that contrast could little farther go.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Detailed figures of our trade with Mexico, and other useful matters, will be found in the “Border States of Mexico,” by Leonidas Hamilton. Chicago, 1882.

[2] Brocklehurst’s “Mexico To-day.” John Murray: London, 1883.

[3]

“Si á lo lid contra hueste enemiga Nos convoca la trompa guerrera, De Iturbide la sacra bandera, Mexicanos valientes, seguid!”

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JOHNSON. By L. Stephen.—GIBBON. By J. C. Morison.—SCOTT. By R. H. Hutton.—SHELLEY. By J. A. Symonds.—GOLDSMITH. By W. Black.—HUME. By Professor Huxley.—DEFOE. By W. Minto.—BURNS. By Principal Shairp.—SPENSER. By R. W. Church.—THACKERAY. By A. Trollope.—BURKE. By J. Morley.—MILTON. By M. Pattison.—SOUTHEY. By E. Dowden.—CHAUCER. By A. W. Ward.—BUNYAN. By J.A. Froude.—COWPER. By G. Smith.—POPE. By L. Stephen.—BYRON. By J. Nichols.—LOCKE. By T. Fowler.—WORDSWORTH. By F. W. H. Myers.—HAWTHORNE. By Henry James, Jr.—DRYDEN. By G. Saintsbury.—LANDOR. By S. Colvin.—DE QUINCEY. By D. Masson.—LAMB. By A. Ainger.—BENTLEY. By R. C. Jebb.—DICKENS. By A. W. Ward.—GRAY. By E. W. Gosse.—SWIFT. By L. Stephen.—STERNE. By H. D. Traill.—MACAULAY. By J. C. Morison.—FIELDING. By Austin Dobson. 12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.

NEWCOMB’S ASTRONOMY. Popular Astronomy. By SIMON NEWCOMB, LL.D. With One Hundred and Twelve Engravings, and five Maps of the Stars. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50; School Edition, 12mo, Cloth, $1 30.

PRIME’S POTTERY AND PORCELAIN. Pottery and Porcelain of All Times and Nations. With Tables of Factory and Artists’ Marks, for the Use of Collectors. By WILLIAM C. PRIME, LL.D. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $7 00; Half Calf, $9 25. (In a Box.)

CESNOLA’S CYPRUS. Cyprus: its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples. A Narrative of Researches and Excavations during Ten Years’ Residence in that Island. By L. P. DI CESNOLA. With Portrait, Maps, and 400 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, Extra, Gilt Tops and Uncut Edges, $7 50.

TENNYSON’S COMPLETE POEMS. The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson. With numerous Illustrations by Eminent Artists, and Three Characteristic Portraits. 8vo, Paper, $1 00; Cloth, $1 50.

VAN-LENNEP’S BIBLE LANDS. Bible Lands: their Modern Customs and Manners Illustrative of Scripture. By HENRY J. VAN-LENNEP, D.D. 350 Engravings and 2 Colored Maps. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00; Sheep, $6 00; Half Morocco or Half Calf, $8 00.

GROTE’S HISTORY OF GREECE. 12 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $18 00; Sheep, $22 80; Half Calf, $39 00.