Greater Britain

CHAPTER XX.

EL DORADO

THE city of the high priest clothed in robes of gold figures largely in the story of Spanish discovery in America. The hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic in caravels and cockboats, and toiled in leathern doublets and plate armor through the jungle swamp of Panama, were lured on through years of plague and famine by the dream of a country whose rivers flowed with gold. Diego de Mendoza found the land in 1532, but it was not till January, 1848, that James Marshall washed the golden sands of El Dorado.

The Spaniards were not the first to place the earthly paradise in America. Not to speak of New Atlantis, the Canadian Indians have never ceased to hand down to their sons a legend of western abodes of bliss, to which their souls journey after death, through frightful glens and forests. In their mystic chants they describe minutely the obstacles over which the souls must toil to reach the regions of perpetual spring. These stories are no mere dreams, but records of the great Indian migration from the West: the liquid-eyed Hurons, not sprung from the Canadian snows, may be Californian if they are not Malay, the Pacific shores their happy hunting-ground, the climate of Los Angeles their never-ending spring.

The names The Golden State and El Dorado are doubly applicable to California; her light and landscape, as well as her soil, are golden. Here, on the Pacific side, nature wears a robe of deep rich yellow: even the distant hills, no longer purple, are wrapt in golden haze. No more cliffs and canyons – all is rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which faces eastward, with four thousand feet of wall-like rock, on the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the Californian vales, and trends away in spurs toward the sea. The scenery of the Nevada side was weird, but these western foot-hills are unlike anything in the world. Drake, who never left the Pacific shores, named the country New Albion, from the whiteness of a headland on the coast; but the first viceroys were less ridiculously misled by patriotic vanity when they christened it New Spain.

In the warm dry sunlight, we rolled down hills of rich red loam, and through forests of noble redwood – the Sequoia sempervirens, brother to the Sequoia gigantea, or Wellingtonia of our lawns. Dashing at full gallop through the American River, just below its falls, where, in 1848, the Mormons first dug that Californian gold which in the interests of their church they had better have let alone, we came upon great gangs of Indians working by proxy upon the Continental railroad. The Indian‘s plan for living happily is a simple one: he sits and smokes in silence while his women work, and he thus lives upon the earnings of the squaws. Unlike a Mormon patriarch, he contrives that polygamy shall pay, and says with the New Zealand Maori: “A man with one wife may starve, but a man with many wives grows fat.” These fellows were Shoshonés from the other side of the plateau; for the Pacific Indians, who are black, not red, will not even force their wives to work, which, in the opinion of the Western men, is the ultimate form of degradation in a race. Higher up the hills, Chinamen alone are employed; but their labor is too costly to be thrown away upon the easier work.

In El Dorado City we stayed not long enough for the exploration of the once famous surface gold mines, now forming one long vineyard, but, rolling on, were soon among the tents of Placerville, which had been swept with fire a few months before. All these valley diggings have been deserted for deep-sinking – not that they are exhausted yet, but that the yield has ceased to be sufficient to tempt the gambling digger. The men who lived in Placerville and made it infamous throughout the world some years ago are scattered now through Nevada, Arizona, Montana, and the Frazer country, and Chinamen and Digger Indians have the old workings to themselves, settling their rights as against each other by daily battle and perpetual feud. The Digger Indians are the most degraded of all the aborigines of North America – outcasts from the other tribes – men under a ban – “tapu,” as their Maori cousins say – weaponless, naked savages who live on roots, and pester the industrious Chinese.

It is not with all their foes that the yellow men can cope so easily. In a tiny Chinese theater in their camp near Placerville, I saw a farce which to the remainder of the audience was no doubt a very solemn drama, in which the adventures of two Celestials on the diggings were given to the world. The only scene in which the pantomime was sufficiently clear for me to read it without the possibility of error was one in which a white man – “Melican man” – came to ask for taxes. The Chinamen had paid their taxes once before, but the fellow said that didn‘t matter. The yellow men consulted together, and at last agreed that the stranger was a humbug, so the play ended with a big fight, in which they drove him off their ground. A Chinaman played the over ’cute Yankee, and did it well.

Perhaps the tax-collectors in the remoter districts of the States count on the Chinese to make up the deficiencies in their accounts caused by the non-payment of their taxes by the whites; for even in these days of comparative quiet and civilization, taxes are not gathered to their full amount in any of the Territories, and the justice of the collector is in Montana tempered by many a threat of instant lynching if he proceeds with his assessment. Even in Utah, the returns are far from satisfactory: the three great merchants of Salt Lake City should, if their incomes are correctly stated, contribute a heavier sum than that returned for the whole of the population of the Territory.

The white diggers who preceded the Chinese have left their traces in the names of lodes and places. There is no town in California with such a title as the Coloradan City of Buckskin Joe, but Yankee Jim comes near it. Placerville itself was formerly known as Hangtown, on account of its being the city in which “lynch-law was inaugurated.” Dead Shot Flat is not far from here, and within easy distance are Hell‘s Delight, Jackass Gulch, and Loafer‘s Hill. The once famous Plug-ugly Gulch has now another name; but of Chucklehead Diggings and Puppytown I could not find the whereabouts in my walks and rides. Graveyard Canyon, Gospel Gulch, and Paint-pot Hill are other Californian names. It is to be hoped that the English and Spanish names will live unmutilated in California and Nevada, to hand down in liquid syllables the history of a half-forgotten conquest, an already perished race. San Francisco has become “Frisco” in speech if not on paper, and Sacramento will hardly bear the wear and tear of Californian life; but the use of the Spanish tongue has spread among the Americans who have dealings with the Mexican country folk of California State, and, except in mining districts, the local names will stand.

It is not places only that have strange designations in America. Out of the Puritan fashion of naming children from the Old Testament patriarchs has grown, by a sort of recoil, the custom of following the heroes of the classics, and when they fail, inventing strange titles for children. Mahonri Cahoon lives in Salt Lake City; Attila Harding was secretary to one of the governors of Utah; Michigan University has for president Erastus Haven; for superintendent, Oramel Hosford; for professors, Abram Sanger, Silas Douglas, Moses Gunn, Zina Pitcher, Alonzo Pitman, De Volson Wood, Lucius Chapin, and Corydon Ford. Luman Stevens, Bolivar Barnum, Wyllys Ransom, Ozora Stearnes, and Buel Derby were Michigan officers during the war, and Epaphroditus Ransom was formerly governor of the State. Theron Rockwell, Gershon Weston, and Bela Kellogg are well-known politicians in Massachusetts, and Colonel Liberty Billings is equally prominent in Florida. In New England school-lists it is hard to pick boys from girls. Who shall tell the sex of Lois Lombard, Asahel Morton, Ginery French, Royal Miller, Thankful Poyne? A Chicago man, who was lynched in Central Illinois while I was in the neighborhood, was named Alonza Tibbets. Eliphalet Arnould and Velenus Sherman are ranchmen on the overland road; Sereno Burt is an editor in Montana; Persis Boynton a merchant in Chicago. Zelotes Terry, Datus Darner, Zeryiah Rainforth, Barzellai Stanton, Sardis Clark, Ozias Williams, Xenas Phelps, Converse Hopkins, and Hirodshai Blake are names with which I have met. Zilpah, Huldah, Nabby, Basetha, Minnesota, and Semantha are New England ladies; while one gentleman of Springfield, lately married, caught a Tartia. One of the earliest enemies of the Mormons was Palatiah Allen; one of their first converts Preserved Harris. Taking the pedigree of Joe Smith, the Mormon prophet, as that of a representative New England family, we shall find that his aunts were Lovisa and Lovina Mack, Dolly Smith, Eunice and Miranda Pearce; his uncles, Royal, Ira, and Bushrod Smith. His grandfather‘s name was Asael; of his great aunts one was Hephzibah, another Hypsebeth, and another Vasta. The prophet‘s eldest brother‘s name was Alvin; his youngest Don Carlos; his sister, Sophronia; and his sister-in-law, Jerusha Smith; while a nephew was christened Chilon. One of the nieces was Levira, and another Rizpah. The first wife of George A. Smith, the prophet‘s cousin, is Bathsheba, and his eldest daughter also bears this name.

In the smaller towns near Placerville, there is still a wide field for the discovery of character as well as gold; but eccentricity among the diggers here seems chiefly to waste itself on food. The luxury of this Pacific country is amazing. The restaurants and cafés of each petty digging-town put forth bills-of-fare which the “Trios Frères” could not equal for ingenuity; wine lists such as Delmonico‘s cannot beat. The facilities are great: except in the far interior or on the hills, one even spring reigns unchangeably – summer in all except the heat; every fruit and vegetable of the world is perpetually in season. Fruit is not named in the hotel bills-of-fare, but all the day long there are piled in strange confusion on the tables, Mission grapes, the Californian Bartlet pears, Empire apples from Oregon, melons – English, Spanish, American and Musk; peaches, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All comers may help themselves, and wash down the fruit with excellent Californian-made Sauterne. If dancing, gambling, drinking, and still shorter cuts to the devil have their votaries among the diggers, there is no employment upon which they so freely spend their cash as on dishes cunningly prepared by cooks – Chinese, Italian, Bordelais – who follow every “rush.” After the doctor and the coroner, no one makes money at the diggings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Californian soil; baked rock-cod à la Buena Vista, broiled Californian quail with Russian River bacon, Sacramento snipes on toast, Oregon ham with champagne sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things – these were the dishes on the Placerville bill-of-fare in an hotel which had escaped the fire, but whose only guests were diggers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes were down upon the list: hominy, cod chowder – hardly equal, I fear, to that of Salem – sassafras candy, and squash tart, but never a mention of pork and molasses, dear to the Massachusetts boy. All these good things the diggers, when “dirt is plenty,” moisten with Clicquot, or Heidsick cabinet; when returns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine.

Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of the cooks. The last “bad shake” was fourteen days ago, but it is forgotten in the joy called forth by the discovery of a thirteenth way to cook fresh oysters, which are brought here from the coast by train. There is still a something in Placerville that smacks of the time when tin-tacks were selling for their weight in gold.

Wandering through the only remaining street of Placerville before I left for the Southern country, I saw that grapes were marked “three cents a pound;” but as the lowest coin known on the Pacific shores is the ten-cent bit, the price exists but upon paper. Three pounds of grapes, however, for “a bit” is a practicable purchase, in which I indulged when starting on my journey South: in the towns you have always the hotel supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of the prosperity of a country, California must stand high. Not only is nothing less than the bit, or fivepence, known, but when fivepence is deducted from a “quarter,” or shilling, fivepence is all you get or give for change – a gain or loss upon which Californian shopkeepers look with profound indifference.

Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar-room than from all the other hundred whisky-shops of Placerville, I turned into it to seek the cause, and found a Vermonter lecturing on Lincoln and the war to an audience of some fifty diggers. The lecturer and bar-keeper stood together within the sacred inclosure, the one mixing his drinks, while the other rounded off his periods in the inflated Western style. The audience was critical and cold till near the close of the oration, when the “corpse revivers” they were drinking seemed to take effect, and to be at the bottom of the stentorian shout, “Thet‘s bully,” with which the peroration was rewarded. The Vermonter told me that he had come round from Panama, and was on his way to Austin, as Placerville was “played out” since its “claims” had “fizzled.”

They have no lecture-room here at present, as it seems; but that there are churches, however small, appears from a paragraph in the Placerville news-sheet of to-day, which chronicles the removal of a Methodist meeting-house from Block A to Block C, vice a Catholic chapel retired, “having obtained a superior location.”

A few days were all that I could spend in the valleys that lie between the Sierra and the Contra Costa Range, basking in a rich sunlight, and unsurpassed in the world for climate, scenery, and soil. This single State – one of forty-five – has twice the area of Great Britain, the most fertile of known soils, and the sun and sea-breeze of Greece. Western rhapsodies are the expression of the intoxication produced by such a spectacle; but they are outdone by facts.

For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the palm between the cracks and canyons of the Sierra and the softer vales of the Coast Range, where the hot sun is tempered by the cool Pacific breeze, and thunder and lightning are unknown. To one coming from the wilds of the Carson Desert and of Mirage Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells has for the eye the relief that travelers from the coast must seek in the loftier heights and precipices of the Yosémite. The oak-filled valleys of the Contra Costa Range have all the pensive repose of the sheltered vales that lie between the Apennines and the Adriatic from Rimini to Ancona; but California has the advantage in her skies. Italy has the blue, but not the golden haze.

Nothing can be more singular than the variety of beauty that lies hid in these Pacific slopes; all that is best in Canada and the Eastern States finds more than its equal here. The terrible grandeur of Cape Trinité on the Saguenay, and the panorama of loveliness from the terrace at Quebec, are alike outdone.

Americans certainly need not go to Europe to find scenery; but neither need they go to California, or even Colorado. Those who tell us that there is no such thing as natural beauty west of the Atlantic can scarcely know the Eastern, while they ignore the Western and Central States. The world can show few scenes more winning than Israel‘s River Valley in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, or North Conway in the southern slopes of the same range. Nothing can be more full of grandeur than the passage of the James at Balcony Falls, where the river rushes through a crack in the Appalachian chain; the wilderness of Northern New York is unequaled of its kind, and there are delicious landscapes in the Adirondacks. As for river scenery, the Hudson is grander than the Rhine; the Susquehanna is lovelier than the Meuse; the Schuylkill prettier than the Seine; the Mohawk more enchanting than the Dart. Of the rivers of North Europe, the Neckar alone is not beaten in the States.

Americans admit that their scenery is fine, but pretend that it is wholly wanting in the interest that historic memories bestow. So-called republicans affect to find a charm in Bishop Hatto‘s Tower which is wanting in Irving‘s “Sunnyside;” the ten thousand virgins of Cologne live in their fancy, while Constitution Island and Fort Washington are forgotten names. Americans or Britishers, we Saxons are all alike – a wandering, discontented race; we go 4000 miles to find us Sleepy Hollow, or Kilian Van Rensselaer‘s Castle, or Hiawatha‘s great red pipe-stone quarry; and the Americans, who live in the castle, picnic yearly in the Hollow, and flood the quarry for a skating-rink, come here to England to visit Burns‘s house, or to sit in Pope‘s arm-chair.

Down South I saw clearly the truth of a thought that struck me before I had been ten minutes west of the Sierra Pass. California is Saxon only in the looks and language of the people of its towns. In Pennsylvania, you may sometimes fancy yourself in Sussex; while in New England, you seem only to be in some part of Europe that you have never happened to light upon before; in California, you are at last in a new world. The hills are weirdly peaked or flattened, the skies are new, the birds and plants are new; the atmosphere, crisp though warm, is unlike any in the world but that of South Australia. It will be strange if the Pacific coast does not produce a new school of Saxon poets – painters it has already given to the world.

Returning to Placerville, after an eventless exploration of the exquisite scenery to the south, I took the railway once again, for the first time since I had left Manhattan City – 1800 miles away – and was soon in Sacramento, the State capital, now recovering slowly from the flood of 1862. Near the city I made out Oak Grove – famed for duels between well-known Californians. Here it was that General Denver, State Senator, shot Mr. Gilbert, the representative in Congress, in a duel fought with rifles. Here, too, it was that Mr. Thomas, district attorney for Placer County, killed Dr. Dickson, of the Marine Hospital, in a duel with pistols in 1854. Records of duels form a serious part of the State history. At Lone Mountain Cemetery near San Francisco, there is a great marble monument to the Hon. David Broderick, shot by Chief Justice Terry, of the Supreme Court, in 1859.

A few hours’ quiet steaming in the sunlight down the Sacramento River, past Rio Vista and Montezuma, through the gap in the Contra Costa Range, at which the grand volcanic peak of Monte Diablo stands sentinel watching over the Martinez Straits, and there opened to the south and west a vast mountain-surrounded bay. Volumes of cloud were rolling in unceasingly from the ocean, through the Golden Gate, past the fortified island of Alcatras, and spending themselves in the opposite shores of San Rafael, Benicia, and Vallejo. At last I was across the continent, and face to face with the Pacific.

CHAPTER XXI.

LYNCH LAW

“CALIFORNIANS are called the scum of the earth, yet their great city is the best policed in the world,” said a New York friend to me, when he heard that I thought of crossing the continent to San Francisco.

“Them New Yorkers is a sight too fond of looking after other people‘s morals,” replied an old “Forty-niner,” to whom I repeated this phrase, having first toned it down however. “Still,” he went on, “our history‘s baddish, but it ain‘t for us to play showman to our own worst pints: – let every man skin his own skunk!”

The story of the early days of San Francisco, as to which my curiosity was thus excited, is so curious an instance of the development of an English community under the most inauspicious circumstances, that the whole time which I spent in the city itself I devoted to hearing the tale from those who knew the actors. Not only is the history of the two Vigilance Committees in itself characteristic, but it works in with what I had gathered in Kansas, and Illinois, and Colorado as to the operation of the claim-clubs; and the stories, taken together, form a typical picture of the rise of a New English country.

The discovery of gold in 1848 brought down on luckless California the idle, the reckless, the vagabonds first of Polynesia, then of all the world. Street fighting, public gaming, masked balls given by unknown women and paid for nobody knew how, but attended by governor, supervisors, and alcalde – all these were minor matters by the side of the general undefined ruffianism of the place. Before the end of 1849, San Francisco presented on a gigantic scale much the same appearance that Helena in Montana wears in 1866.

Desperadoes poured in from all sides, the best of the bad flocking off to the mines, while the worst among the villains – those who lacked energy as well as moral sense – remained in the city, to raise by thieving or in the gambling-booth the “pile” that they were too indolent to earn by pick and pan. Hundreds of “emancipists” from Sydney, “old lags” from Norfolk Island, the pick of the criminals of England, still further trained and confirmed in vice and crime by the experiences of Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, rushed to San Francisco to continue a career which the vigilance of the police made hopeless in Tasmania and New South Wales. The floating vice of the Pacific ports of South America soon gathered to a spot where there were not only men to fleece, but men who, being fleeced, could pay. The police were necessarily few, for, appoint a man to-day, and to-morrow he was gone to the placers with some new friend; those who could be prevailed upon to remain a fortnight in the force were accessible to bribes from the men they were set to watch. They themselves admitted their inaction, but ascribed it to the continual change of place among the criminals, which prevented the slightest knowledge of their characters and haunts. The Australian jail-birds formed a quarter known as “Sydney Town,” which soon became what the Bay of Islands had been ten years before – the Alsatia of the Pacific. In spite of daily murders, not a single criminal was hanged.

The ruffians did not all agree: there were jealousies among the various bands; feuds between the Australians and Chilians; between the Mexicans and the New Yorkers. Under the various names of “Hounds,” “Regulators,” “Sydney ducks,” and “Sydney coves,” the English convict party organized themselves in opposition to the Chilenos as well as to the police and law-abiding citizens. Gangs of villains, whose sole bond of union was robbery or murder, marched, armed with bludgeons and revolvers, every Sunday afternoon, to the sound of music, unhindered through the streets, professing that they were “guardians of the community” against the Spaniards, Mexicans, and South Americans.

At last a movement took place among the merchants and reputable inhabitants which resulted in the break-up of the Australian gangs. By an uprising of the American citizens of San Francisco, in response to a proclamation by T. M. Leavenworth, the alcalde, twenty of the most notorious among the “Hounds” were seized and shipped to China: it is believed that some were taken south in irons, and landed near Cape Horn. “Anywhere so that they could not come back,” as my informant said.

For a week or two things went well, but a fresh impour of rogues and villains soon swamped the volunteer police by sheer force of numbers; and in February, 1851, occurred an instance of united action among the citizens which is noticeable as the forerunner of the Vigilance Committees. A Mr. Jansen had been stunned by a blow from a slung-shot, and his person and premises rifled by Australian thieves. During the examination of two prisoners arrested on suspicion, five thousand citizens gathered round the City Hall, and handbills were circulated in which it was proposed that the prisoners should be lynched. In the afternoon an attempt to seize the men was made, but repulsed by another section of the citizens – the Washington Guard. A meeting was held on the plaza, and a committee appointed to watch the authorities, and prevent a release. A well-known citizen, Mr. Brannan, made a speech, in which he said: “We, the people, are the mayor, the recorder, and the laws.” The alcalde addressed the crowd, and suggested, by way of compromise, that they should elect a jury, which should sit in the regular court, and try the prisoners. This was refused, and the people elected not only a jury, but three judges, a sheriff, a clerk, a public prosecutor, and two counsel for the defense. This court then tried the prisoners in their absence, and the jury failed to agree – nine were for conviction, and three were doubtful. “Hang ’em, anyhow; majority rules,” was the shout, but the popular judges stood firm, and discharged their jury, while the people acquiesced. The next day the prisoners were tried and convicted by the regular court, although they were ultimately found to be innocent men.