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Twenty-Four Years After: Part II
Twenty-Four Years After: Part II
The Bay of San Pedro - Pueblo De Los Angeles
The next morning we found ourselves at anchor in the Bay of San Pedro.
Here was this hated, this thoroughly detested spot. Although we lay near, I
could scarce recognize the hill up which we rolled and dragged and pushed and
carried our heavy loads, and down which we pitched the hides, to carry them
barefooted over the rocks to the floating long-boat. It was no longer the
landing-place. One had been made at the head of the creek, and boats
discharged and took off cargoes from a mole or wharf, in a quiet place, safe
from southeasters. A tug ran to take off passengers from the steamer to the
wharf, - for the trade of Los Angeles is sufficient to support such a vessel.
I got the captain to land me privately, in a small boat, at the old place by
the hill. I dismissed the boat, and, alone, found my way to the high ground. I
say found my way, for neglect and weather had left but few traces of the steep
road the hide-vessels had built to the top. The cliff off which we used to
throw the hides, and where I spent nights watching them, was more easily
found. The population was doubled, that is to say, there were two houses,
instead of one, on the hill. I stood on the brow and looked out toward the
offing, the Santa Catalina Island, and, nearer, the melancholy Dead Man`s
Island, with its painful tradition, and recalled the gloomy days that followed
the flogging, and fancied the Pilgrim at anchor in the offing. But the tug is
going toward our steamer, and I must awake and be off. I walked along the
shore to the new landing-place, where were two or three store-houses and
other buildings, forming a small depot; and a stage-coach, I found, went
daily between this place and the Pueblo. I got a seat on the top of the coach,
to which were tackled six little less than wild California horses. Each horse
had a man at his head, and when the driver had got his reins in hand he gave
the word, all the horses were let go at once, and away they went on a spring,
tearing over the ground, the driver only keeping them from going the wrong
way, for they had a wide, level pampa to run over the whole thirty miles to
the Pueblo. This plain is almost treeless, with no grass, at least none now in
the drought of mid-summer, and is filled with squirrel-holes, and alive
with squirrels. As we changed horses twice, we did not slacken our speed until
we turned into the streets of the Pueblo.
The Pueblo de los Angeles I found a large and flourishing town of about
twenty thousand inhabitants, with brick sidewalks, and blocks of stone or
brick houses. The three principal traders when we were here for hides in the
Pilgrim and Alert are still among the chief traders of the place, - Stearns,
Temple, and Warner, the two former being reputed very rich. I dined with Mr.
Stearns, now a very old man, and met there Don Juan Bandini, to whom I had
given a good deal of notice in my book. From him, as indeed from every one in
this town, I met with the kindest attentions. The wife of Don Juan, who was a
beautiful young girl when we were on the coast, Dona Refugio, daughter of Don
Santiago Arguello, the commandante of San Diego, was with him, and still
handsome. This is one of several instances I have noticed of the preserving
quality of the California climate. Here, too, was Henry Mellus, who came out
with me before the mast in the Pilgrim, and left the brig to be agent`s clerk
on shore. He had experienced varying fortunes here, and was now married to a
Mexican lady, and had a family. I dined with him, and in the afternoon he
drove me round to see the vineyards, the chief objects in this region. The
vintage of last year was estimated at half a million of gallons. Every year
new square miles of ground are laid down to vineyards, and the Pueblo promises
to be the centre of one of the largest wine-producing regions in the world.
Grapes are a drug here, and I found a great abundance of figs, olives,
peaches, pears, and melons. The climate is well suited to these fruits, but is
too hot and dry for successful wheat crops.
Towards evening, we started off in the stage coach, with again our relays
of six mad horses, and reached the creek before dark, though it was late at
night before we got on board the steamer, which was slowly moving her wheels,
under way for San Diego.
As we skirted along the coast, Wilson and I recognized, or thought we
did, in the clear moonlight, the rude white Mission of San Juan Capistrano,
and its cliff, from which I had swung down by a pair of halyards to save a few
hides, - a boy who could not be prudential, and who caught at every chance for
adventure.
As we made the high point off San Diego, Point Loma, we were greeted by
the cheering presence of a light-house. As we swept round it in the early
morning, there, before us, lay the little harbor of San Diego, its low spit of
sand, where the water runs so deep; the opposite flats, where the Alert
grounded in starting for home; the low hills, without trees, and almost
without brush; the quiet little beach; - but the chief objects, the
hide-houses, my eye looked for in vain. They were gone, all, and left no mark
behind.
I wished to be alone, so I let the other passengers go up to the town,
and was quietly pulled ashore in a boat, and left to myself. The recollections
and the emotions all were sad, and only sad.
Fugit, interea fugit irreparabile tempus.
The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural,
repellant. I saw the big ships lying in the stream, the Alert, the California,
the Rosa, with her Italians; then the handsome Ayacucho, my favorite; the
poor, dear old Pilgrim, the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats
passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the
peopled beach; the large hide-houses with their gangs of men; and the
Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! not a vestige to mark
where one hide-house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its
site, and found, where I thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of
mortar. I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to
me! Where were they all? Why should I care for them, - poor Kanakas and
sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and beach-combers of the
Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were
dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever-climes, in
dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the
wreck, -
"When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown."
The light-hearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks,
fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor`s life on shore have
spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or
sea has covered them.
Even the animals are gone, - the colony of dogs, the broods of poultry,
the useful horses; but the coyotes bark still in the woods, for they belong
not to man, and are not touched by his changes.
I walked slowly up the hill, finding my way among the few bushes, for the
path was long grown over, and sat down where we used to rest in carrying our
burdens of wood, and to look out for vessels that might, though so seldom, be
coming down from the windward.
To rally myself by calling to mind my own better fortune and nobler lot,
and cherished surroundings at home, was impossible. Borne down by depression,
the day being yet at its noon, and the sun over the old point, - it is four
miles to the town, the Presidio, - I have walked it often, and can do it once
more, - I passed the familiar objects, and it seemed to me that I remembered
them better than those of any other place I had ever been in; - the opening to
the little cave; the low hills where we cut wood and killed rattlesnakes, and
where our dogs chased the coyotes; and the black ground where so many of the
ship`s crew and beach-combers used to bring up on their return at the end of
a liberty day, and spend the night sub Jove.
The little town of San Diego has undergone no change whatever that I can
see. It certainly has not grown. It is still, like Santa Barbara, a Mexican
town. The four principal houses of the gente de razon - of the Bandinis,
Estudillos, Arguellos, and Picos - are the chief houses now; but all the
gentlemen - and their families, too, I believe - are gone. The big vulgar
shop-keeper and trader, Fitch, is long since dead; Tom Wrightington, who kept
the rival pulperia, fell from his horse when drunk, and was found nearly eaten
up by coyotes; and I can scarce find a person whom I remember. I went into a
familiar one-story adobe house, with its piazza and earthen floor, inhabited
by a respectable lower-class family by the name of Muchado, and inquired if
any of the family remained, when a bright-eyed middle-aged woman
recognized me, for she had heard I was on board the steamer, and told me she
had married a shipmate of mine, Jack Stewart, who went out as second mate the
next voyage, but left the ship and married and settled here. She said he
wished very much to see me. In a few minutes he came in, and his sincere
pleasure in meeting me was extremely grateful. We talked over old times as
long as I could afford to. I was glad to hear that he was sober and doing
well. Dona Tomasa Pico I found and talked with. She was the only person of the
old upper class that remained on the spot, if I rightly recollect. I found an
American family here, with whom I dined, - Doyle and his wife, nice young
people, Doyle agent for the great line of coaches to run to the frontier of
the old States.
I must complete my acts of pious remembrance, so I take a horse and make
a run out to the old Mission, where Ben Stimson and I went the first liberty
day we had after we left Boston. All has gone to decay. The buildings are
unused and ruinous, and the large gardens show now only wild cactuses,
willows, and a few olive-trees. A fast run brings me back in time to take
leave of the few I knew and who knew me, and to reach the steamer before she
sails. A last look - yes, last for life - to the beach, the hills, the low
point, the distant town, as we round Point Loma and the first beams of the
light-house strike out towards the setting sun.
Wednesday, August 24th. At anchor at San Pedro by daylight. But instead
of being roused out of the forecastle to row the long-boat ashore and bring
off a load of hides before breakfast, we were served with breakfast in the
cabin, and again took our drive with the wild horses to the Pueblo and spent
the day; seeing nearly the same persons as before, and again getting back by
dark. We steamed again for Santa Barbara, where we only lay an hour, and
passed through its canal and round Point Conception, stopping at San Luis
Obispo to land my friend, as I may truly call him after this long passage
together, Captain Wilson, whose most earnest invitation to stop here and visit
him at his rancho I was obliged to decline.
Friday evening, 26th August, we entered the Golden Gate, passed the
light-houses and forts, and clipper ships at anchor, and came to our dock,
with this great city, on its high hills and rising surfaces, brilliant before
us, and full of eager life.
Making San Francisco my head-quarters, I paid visits to various parts
of the State, - down the Bay to Santa Clara, with its live oaks and sycamores,
and its Jesuit College for boys; and San Jose, where is the best girls` school
in the State, kept by the Sisters of Notre Dame, - a town now famous for a
year`s session of "The legislature of a thousand drinks," - and thence to the
rich Almaden quicksilver mines, returning on the Contra Costa side through the
rich agricultural country, with its ranchos and the vast grants of the Castro
and Soto families, where farming and fruit-raising are done on so large a
scale. Another excursion was up the San Joaquin to Stockton, a town of some
ten thousand inhabitants, a hundred miles from San Francisco, and crossing the
Tuolumne and Stanislaus and Merced, by the little Spanish town of Hornitos,
and Snelling`s Tavern, at the ford of the Merced, where so many fatal fights
are had. Thence I went to Mariposa County, and Colonel Fremont`s mines, and
made an interesting visit to "the Colonel," as he is called all over the
country, and Mrs. Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons of
Paris and the drawing-rooms of New York and Washington, or the roughest life
of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa, - with their fine family of
spirited, clever children. After a rest there, we went on to Clark`s Camp and
the Big Trees, where I measured one tree ninety-seven feet in circumference
without its bark, and the bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode
through another which lay on the ground, a shell, with all the insides out, -
rode through it mounted, and sitting at full height in the saddle; then to the
wonderful Yo Semite Valley, - itself a stupendous miracle of nature, with its
Dome, its Capitan, its walls of three thousand feet of perpendicular height, -
but a valley of streams, of waterfalls from the torrent to the mere shimmer of
a bridal veil, only enough to reflect a rainbow, with their plunges of
twenty-five hundred feet, or their smaller falls of eight hundred, with
nothing at the base but thick mists, which form and trickle, and then run and
at last plunge into the blue Merced that flows through the centre of the
valley. Back by the Coulterville trail, the peaks of Sierra Nevada in sight,
across the North Fork of the Merced, by Gentry`s Gulch, over hills and through
canons, to Fremont`s again, and thence to Stockton and San Francisco, - all
this at the end of August, when there has been no rain for four months, and
the air is clear and very hot, and the ground perfectly dry; windmills, to
raise water for artificial irrigation of small patches, seen all over the
landscape, while we travel through square miles of hot dust, where they tell
us, and truly that in winter and early spring we should be up to our knees in
flowers; a country, too, where surface gold-digging is so common and
unnoticed that the large, six-horse stage-coach, in which I travelled from
Stockton to Hornitos, turned off in the high road for a Chinaman, who, with
his pan and washer, was working up a hole which an American had abandoned, but
where the minute and patient industry of the Chinaman averaged a few dollars a
day.
These visits were so full of interest, with grandeurs and humors of all
sorts, that I am strongly tempted to describe them. But I remember that I am
not to write a journal of a visit over the new California, but to sketch
briefly the contrasts with the old spots of 1835-6, and I forbear.
How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this marvellous
city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board shanty. In 1836, one adobe
house on the same spot. In 1847, a population of four hundred and fifty
persons, who organized a town government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the
flocking together of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth
of a city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times in
eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars, and as often
rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and stone, of nearly one
hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the accompaniments of wealth and
culture, and now (in 1859) the most quiet and well-governed city of its size
in the United States. But it has been through its season of Heavendefying
crime, violence, and blood, from which it was rescued and handed back to
soberness, morality, and good government, by that peculiar invention of
Anglo-Saxon Republican America, the solemn, awe-inspiring Vigilance
Committee of the most grave and responsible citizens, the last resort of the
thinking and the good, taken to only when vice, fraud, and ruffianism have
intrenched themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage, and ballot, and there
is no hope but in organized force, whose action must be instant and thorough,
or its state will be worse than before. A history of the passage of this city
through those ordeals, and through its almost incredible financial extremes,
should be written by a pen which not only accuracy shall govern, but
imagination shall inspire.
I cannot pause for the civility of referring to the many kind attentions
I received, and the society of educated men and women from all parts of the
Union I met with; where New England, the Carolinas, Virginia, and the new West
sat side by side with English, French, and German civilization.
My stay in California was interrupted by an absence of nearly four
months, when I sailed for the Sandwich Islands in the noble Boston clipper
ship Mastiff, which was burned at sea to the water`s edge; we escaping in
boats, and carried by a friendly British bark into Honolulu, whence, after a
deeply interesting visit of three months in that most fascinating group of
islands, with its natural and its moral wonders, I returned to San Francisco
in an American whaler, and found myself again in my quarters on the morning of
Sunday, December 11th, 1859.
My first visit after my return was to Sacramento, a city of about forty
thousand inhabitants, more than a hundred miles inland from San Francisco, on
the Sacramento, where was the capital of the State, and where were fleets of
river steamers, and a large inland commerce. Here I saw the inauguration of a
Governor, Mr. Latham, a young man from Massachusetts, much my junior; and met
a member of the State Senate, a man who, as a carpenter, repaired my father`s
house at home some ten years before; and two more Senators from southern
California, relics of another age, - Don Andres Pico, from San Diego; and Don
Pablo de la Guerra, whom I have mentioned as meeting at Santa Barbara. I had a
good deal of conversation with these gentlemen, who stood alone in an assembly
of Americans, who had conquered their country, spared pillars of the past. Don
Andres had fought us at San Pazqual and Sepulveda`s rancho, in 1846, and as he
fought bravely, not a common thing among the Mexicans, and, indeed, repulsed
Kearney, is always treated with respect. He had the satisfaction, dear to the
proud Spanish heart, of making a speech before a Senate of Americans, in favor
of the retention in office of an officer of our army who was wounded at San
Pazqual and whom some wretched caucus was going to displace to carry out a
political job. Don Andres` magnanimity and indignation carried the day.
My last visit in this part of the country was to a new and rich farming
region, the Napa Valley, the United States Navy Yard at Mare Island, the river
gold workings, and the Geysers, and old Mr. John Yount`s rancho. On board the
steamer, found Mr. Edward Stanley, formerly member of Congress from North
Carolina, who became my companion for the greater part of my trip. I also met
- a revival on the spot of an acquaintance of twenty years ago - Don Guadalupe
Vallejo; I may say acquaintance, for although I was then before the mast, he
knew my story, and, as he spoke English well, used to hold many conversations
with me, when in the boat or on shore. He received me with true earnestness,
and would not hear of my passing his estate without visiting him. He reminded
me of a remark I made to him once, when pulling him ashore in the boat, when
he was commandante at the Presidio. I learned that the two Vallejos, Guadalupe
and Salvador, owned, at an early time, nearly all Napa and Sonoma, having
princely estates. But they have not much left. They were nearly ruined by
their bargain with the State, that they would put up the public buildings if
the Capital should be placed at Vallejo, then a town of some promise. They
spent $100,000, the Capital was moved there, and in two years removed to San
Jose on another contract. The town fell to pieces, and the houses, chiefly
wooden, were taken down and removed. I accepted the old gentleman`s invitation
so far as to stop at Vallejo to breakfast.
The United States Navy Yard, at Mare Island, near Vallejo, is large and
well placed, with deep fresh water. The old Independence, and the sloop
Decatur, and two steamers were there, and they were experimenting on building
a despatch boat, the Saginaw, of California timber.
I have no excuse for attempting to describe my visit through the fertile
and beautiful Napa Valley, nor even, what exceeded that in interest, my visit
to old John Yount at his rancho, where I heard from his own lips some of his
most interesting stories of hunting and trapping and Indian fighting, during
an adventurous life of forty years of such work, between our back settlements
in Missouri and Arkansas, and the mountains of California, trapping in
Colorado and Gila, - and his celebrated dream, thrice repeated, which led him
to organize a party to go out over the mountains, that did actually rescue
from death by starvation the wretched remnants of the Donner Party.
I must not pause for the dreary country of the Geysers, the screaming
escapes of steam, the sulphur, the boiling caldrons of black and yellow and
green, and the region of Gehenna, through which runs a quiet stream of pure
water; nor for the park scenery, and captivating ranchos of the Napa Valley,
where farming is done on so grand a scale, - where I have seen a man plough a
furrow by little red flags on sticks, to keep his range by, until nearly out
of sight, and where, the wits tell us, he returns the next day on the back
furrow; a region where, at Christmas time, I have seen old strawberries still
on the vines, by the side of vines in full blossom for the next crop, and
grapes in the same stages, and open windows, and yet a grateful wood fire on
the hearth in early morning; nor for the titanic operations of hydraulic
surface mining, where large mountain streams are diverted from their ancient
beds, and made to do the work, beyond the reach of all other agents, of
washing out valleys and carrying away hills, and changing the whole surface of
the country, to expose the stores of gold hidden for centuries in the darkness
of their earthly depths.
January 10th, 1860. I am again in San Francisco, and my revisit to
California is closed. I have touched too lightly and rapidly for much
impression upon the reader on my last visit into the interior; but, as I have
said, in a mere continuation to a narrative of a seafaring life on the coast,
I am only to carry the reader with me on a visit to those scenes in which the
public has long manifested so gratifying an interest. But it seemed to me that
slight notices of these entirely new parts of the country would not be out of
place, for they serve to put in strong contrast with the solitudes of 1835-6
the developed interior, with its mines, and agricultural wealth, and rapidly
filling population, and its large cities, so far from the coast, with their
education, religion, arts, and trade.
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