CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION by REV. HENRY V. BELLOWS., FRANK BRET HARTE (paper ebook reader TXT) 📕

I put it to you, ye candid Pioneers ! did you suspect what this

rough boy, who sowed, I suppose, all those "wild oats" that now

enrich your State, but at a great expense to his own passing re

putation, was coming to ? Yet here he is, a hard-working,

calculating, earnest family man, rather young to have assum

ed such responsibilities with no very serious scars from his

rough bringing up, who takes very naturally to in-door life,

goes up and down stairs, without Indian awkwardness, does

not positively insist upon drinking his Coffee without milk, his

whiskey without water, or his soup without a spoon ; nay, who

is not absolutely wedded to canvas houses and cotton parti

tions through which every thing comes except comfort and

privacy but can even tolerate a Cosmopolitan Hotel, and

sleep in the third story without dreaming of earthquakes, who

supports public schools, as good as any in New England, as

naturally as if he had learned his A. B. C. in a brick school house

in one of the tortuous streets of Boston, and erects churches as

costly and beautiful as are found any where in the country, not

to speak of stores, stocked more extensively than most in New

York, and a style of wooden houses unrivalled in beauty and

workmanship, in costliness and comfort, any where in the

world.

There may be those who affect to think it wonderful that

California in fifteen years, should have essentially overtaken

the civilization of the older portion of our country. But

when we come to consider what extraordinary advantages she

has enjoyed, it is on the whole not surprising that she has

achieved so much, bnt only surprising that such a concurrence

10 ORATION.

of propitious circumstances should have united for her further

ance. Whenever before was such a population placed in such

a province ; the new Potosi of the world, worked by the most

energetic portion of the most energetic people of the youngest

nation in history. With your golden ladle you skim the cream

of American enterprise off thirty growing States, and then

call the world to wonder that you pack so many lumps of

golden butter, or rather buttery gold, into those iron firkins

called bank vaults. You discard all the too young, and all

the too old, from your population, straining emigration through

your wide desert and your long or expensive lines of trans

portation round the Horn, or over the Isthmus, until nothing

human reaches you that has not vigor in its arms and legs, and

resolution and productiveness in its will and faculties, and

then, with a people all in the prime of life, and all ambitious,

capable, fertile in resource and patient in endurance, you

feign surprise that you should have outstripped in your civil

ization, any rate hitherto on record, and made yourselves the

"2.40" people on the race-course of history. To have a suc

cessive stream of middle-aged people thus feeding a population,

instead of waiting for the slow process of generations to

grow up and perish, and give place to succeeding waves of

energy, is to work by "double shift,' 7 to abolish nights and

have it always day ; is to condense centuries into lustres, and

decades into months. And it is literally true, and not sur

prising either, that you have every year done the work of a

generation. Remember, too, to qualify your self-complacency,

that you have a new country, but are an old people. You

represent the education, habits, tastes and experiences of the

other slope ; were brought up among "folks," and had your

notions, wants and standards essentially fixed before you came

here.

You are using "our thunder," to blast your rocks and

make them give way to your wonderful roads, and to tear open

the mountains and pluck away their golden entrails. You

did not start here with strokes and pot-hooks, but had your

fine-hand copy set you "at home." Your idea of civilization,

with schools and churches, with Boards of Trade, and Colleges

of Learning, with Street Rail-Roads, Aqueducts > Cemeteries

ORATION. 11

Agricultural Societies and Mechanical Fairs, was perfect

when you came ; and it is far more than half the job completed,

for a people to have well defined wants, fixed tastes and a

unanimous and imperative instinct as to what they are driving

had to do, feeling by slow and painful degrees, their way to

improvement, inventing under the pressure of necessity, the

arts and sciences, and slowly perfecting a social system, you

would be at this time, "no-where" in the race of American

States, instead of nearly in the van. And while you have

had this secret standard of things at home, unconsciously

animating, directing and shaping all your thoughts and as

pirations, taking away the necessity of any deliberate plans,

you have been remote enough from comparison, excited enough

by success, and independent enough in your feelings, to be un

conscious of any imitation and careless of any general result,

and have therefore built up your civilization, as the coral

insects build their marble palaces for the sea-nymphs, or the

beaver his dam for the hatter, with a spontaneous freedom and

a largeness of result, never bestowed on intentional and self-

limited undertakings. If it were asked who planned and

built the first era of California civilization, I should answer,

those Titans and giants, who have every where laid in mythic

courses, the foundations of great states ; the unconscious

faculties of a race working under the inspiration of motives

and influences too absorbing to be reflected upon ; the passion

ate concurrence of manly energies in a common work that

none of them comprehended ; the abandon of America's most

vigorous population, called as of old to a great "raising," and

half in frolic and half in earnest, lifting in a day, timbers that

a calculating generation have afterward gazed at with stupid

wonderment how they ever found their places. Even now,

the early history of your State, is escaping distinct recollec

tion, is passing into golden mist, and resists sober description.

Recent as it is, its strange, passionate character gives it an

antiquity of its own. The faculties refuse to reproduce its

curious story, and one is left to guess, surmise and reduce to

prose, the poetry you all once felt, but cannot sing. 

I defy

12 ORATION.

any Pioneer to feel that California is young ; that 1849 was

only fifteen calendar years ago ! It is for him a pre-noachic

date : anterior to the original, not the Sacramento, Flood : a

time so remote that how he has ever lived to see these common

days, and this vulgar era of 1864, or how he remembers even

as well as he does, that misty morning of history, is a wonder

and surprise ! A true Pioneer is ashamed of his present

youthful looks ! He knows perfectly well that to be respectable

and in keeping with his ancient experiences, he ought to have

a head as white as the Sierras, or as bald as 'El Capitan," to

totter on a cane, and carry the decrepitudes of a century upon

his gouty toes. As he looks in the glass and sees his teeth to be

his own, his whiskers unturned, and his natural strength un

abated, he secretly exclaims, "I am an imposter, I dreamed a

dream, which 1 have palmed upon a credulous crowd of new

folks who have come here at their ease within the last ten

years, as the early history of California, at whose birth and

babyhood, I claim to have assisted. But I have mistaken my

self for my grandfather, or some remoter ancestor, because to

be frank and honest, this ridiculous youthfulness of mine,

added to the dimness of all my recollections clearly demon

strates that I am not the man I have passed myself off for."

Thus it is, that all the great eras of the world, refuse to be

questioned and strike dumb the witnesses of their own origin.

The great doers are small talkers, and have short memories.

The historians come long after the creators of history. Here

and there, a blind poet who heard, but could not see the

pother of his own great day, tells in an Homeric epic, which

doubtless bears as much resemblance to the sober facts as a

game of blindman's buff to what has often of late had its

realization, the bandaged eyes of a hero, shot for deserting to

the side of his own sacred flag what henceforth passes for the

seige of Troy ; and it is only in such precious parodies and

immortal fictions, that we catch the flavor and spirit of times

that can never be made a part of the sober history of the

world ! As well hope to recall the exstacies of our first tender

passion, as write in cold blood that melodramatic fairy tale,

the first decade of California life ! Perhaps, some weather-

ORATION. 13

beaten miner who never condescended to lay up a half eagle

from his original sovereign contempt for economy in a country

where every gulch was a till of coin, might still in the remoter

Sierras, dozing on a grizzly bear skin, with his old rifle within

reach, pull at his belt, roll over his quid, or lower his pipe,

and spin a short yarn to his comrades which would have more

of the color, flavor and reality of the early time in it than

any but a first-rate poet will ever be able to reproduce. But

alas, he will never be overheard by any body that can repeat

his story, and the tragic-comedy, the Arabian tale of a history,

you have yourselves not only passed through, but enacted, slips

hopelessly from our grasp.

Let me then, abandoning all hope of understanding the

causes of things, give you, in what remains, a very few of the

impressions, your present civilization makes upon me. I will

name only four.