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) 📕

no rest for them any where after a short revel. They are

brought up with a round turn, and either die at the prompt

hands of Justice Lynch, or flee into parts unknown. The

tendency of things is healthy; strongly, hopefully, joyfully so,

and I rejoice as an American citizen that California, with her,

cornucopia of fruits and flowers, her largess of silver and

gold, is to become the mother of men and women, who will

22 ORATION.

be worthy to inhabit a country, in so many respects, the most

favored in the world.

Not to conclude in too serious a strain,let me draw your two

pictures, and then, with one word for our Common Country,

I will conclude. If I wished to give a stranger in the most

rapid way, an idea of California, I would blindfold him the

other side the Golden Gate, and take off his bandage in the

middle of some mining town, or camp, like Murphy's or if

a larger scale were desired, Placerville or Folsom. Between

the scarred and hydraulicked sides of a gulch in the foot-hills,

torn and disfigured as with the wicked sport of a band of

tipsy Titans pelting each other with earth and stones, he

should open his eyes upon a narrow street lined with one-story

small wooden houses, with here and there a brick or stone

building of two or three stories breaking the sky line into

gappy irregularity, and with green iron shutters panelling the

fronts. A few stores bursting with stocks of goods of a pro

digious size and variety, compared with the apparent demand,

should attest the difficulty of replenishing a business stock,

the distance of the country from its base of supplies at New

York, and the large capital involved in trade, accounting for

the enormous prices demanded at retail.

Passing along, the fresh eye would note almost at once cer

tain characteristic things ; five or six saloons standing wide

open, with enormous bars of liquors and still more extraordi

nary supplies of billiard tables, which no where else in

the rudest hamlets are regarded as a first neccessity of life.

Next, four or five restaurants with small tables attended

by a speckled population of English, French, Italian, Ger

man, Spanish, Mexican, Chilian, Chinese, Indian and American

servants but in which great muffy Diggers, natural perukes,

or else shaved pig-tailed Johns, form the most picturesque fea

tures. Three barber's shops, each big enough to shave a city

in, with every possible extravagance of luxury in them, and

some new wrinkle, on which to found an extra quarter's charge

introduced once a week; next, a pair of solemn looking insti

tutions, in which the dignity of a bench of Judges is inge

niously blended with the indignity of the Stocks, which gradually

ORATION. 23

develop themselves on the mystified stranger, as "the peculiar

institution " of the country in short a boot blacking establish

ment. Dont let me forget to point out two extensive and excel

lent bathing establishments connected with the barber's shops

and a half dozen laundries, where John is seen spirting the

water from his mouth upon a snow white shirt, and then

smoothing it down with a brazier of live-coals ; three or four

fruit-stores that make a stranger's mouth water ; six tobacco

and segar cubby holes ; two stands of yellow novels, periodi

cals, and newspapers, illustrated and otherwise ; Wells &

Fargo's express office, of course; an apothecary shop, or drug

store, whose stock would indicate that the people lived at least

half on medicines, and especially quack medicines, politely

known as Patent ; four or five small taverns, one or two unex

pectedly comfortable ; the placard of the circus, for which

you are to " wait," and the equescurriculum, which you are

''not to forget ;" and the concert which Messrs. Dodge & Hay-

ward have come so far to charm you with ; not to speak of

sundry most brilliant pictures of ladies in very short petti

coats, and gentlemen in very tight breeches, sometimes unhap

pily in next to none at all, stuck on the street corners, and

hanging in the barber's shops for I never dared to enter the

saloons ; in the distance, a wooden ditch of muddy water,

elevated OD a staging a hunded feet high, and in the road

beneath it, the Pioneer Company's Stages, with nine inside,

and fifteen a-top, the legs dangling round the entire roof, and

forming a charming fringe, of boots, shoes and Chinese slippers

for the delectation of the inside passengers, all dashing along,

generally three or four of them, with six horses each, up to the

tavern, where already stand the noble horses that are to relieve

their sweating mates. If I add that about half the houses and

stores have the words " to let " upon them, it will serve to indi

cate the uncertain effect, and " seen-better-days" character,

which marks all mining towns that are not founded on a quartz

basis.

If the stranger were not satisfied with this characteristic

picture, I would bandage him up again and giving him over as

a dull fellow for the interpretation of human and social physi-

24 ORATION.

ognomy, offer him one more chance to redeem himself by a

glance at your scenery. First I would set him down at the

charming door of the Big Tree Hotel, and after he had there

recovered on excellent fare from the exhausting admiration

awakened by the rare greenness, the smoothness and vastness

of the hills among which his winding way up to the elevation

he had reached had lain, an admiration forced out of him by

those sugar pines, straight as arrows and from two to three

hundred feet high, and six, eight and ten feet in diameter ;

their bark mottled like an adder's skin, and suggesting the idea

that some new Moses after having restored their erectness had

changed back the serpents into rods fit for the wands of demi

gods, I would carry him out into the grove a grove such as

no Druid ever worshipped in, where that great council of mon-

archs of the forest stands, surrounded by a court of Dryads,

each of which would alone dignify any other scene. I would

call his attention to the vigorous youth of these vast growths

which a thousand years has not carried beyond their prime,

and which a thousand years more will not humble to old age.

Was ever the majesty of organized form, the mingled beauty and

grandeur of vegetable growth, the solemn mystery of vital pro

cesses and the awing associations of lapsing ages, which these

silent witnesses have seen come and depart, more impressively

united ! How their grand boles flame up, columns of ruddy

energy and beauty, fingers of light and power, in the dark

forest that embosoms them ; how like vast Indian chiefs, in

their old war paint, their tall plumes still nodding, they stand

guardians of the hunting grounds of a thousand years ago !

If this vast victory of vegetative vitality did not bring our

visitor to his knees, I would hurry him straight to Yo-Semite

and imprison him before he was aware, in that most wondrous

fortress of rock ; its green, meadowy floor, swept with the

pullucid waters of the raging, playful, changing, mighty, meek

Merced ; a floor, a mile down from the cornice of granite

walls, that, steep as the sides of your city streets, hang in pre

cipitous curtains of rock, now white, now brown, now black,

fringed above with a vegetation, fine as box to look up at,

coarse as timber land, to visit ; and below, edged with firs and

ORATION.

pines, too large for the masts of frigates, but dwarfed from above

into bushes and tufts. 

Here garlanded with cataracts, that

hang in bridal veils and flutter on the breeze, he should look

up two thousand feet to see rivers darting over the brink, to

flow and flow and flow, breaking in terror into splinters of

watery wrath, exploding in pyrotechnics of fluid rockets, as

if diamonds and pearls had suddenly taken on the qualities of

shells and gunpowder. If these sublime combinations of rocks

and waters, of chasms and precipices, over which beauty had

poured her oil, and "smoothed the raven down of darkness till

it smiled," did not suffice to awaken that pleasing terror, that

exstatic pain, that purifies and exalts the sensitive soul, I would

remand the insensate wretch, whose heart was dead, to the Cal

ifornia Gehenna, and after treating him with a course of sul

phur, alum, soda, magnesia, and epsom salts fresh from your

great subterranean apothecary-shop at the Geysers after

riding him bare-back on the ETog's Back, not in the safe-keeping

of Mr. Foss, fling him at last into the Witches' Cauldron, to

be converted, not from the hopeless errors of his wa^s, but

into the acids and alkalies that compose a cynical and unad-

miring biped of the genus homo.

Pioneers! My light task is almost done. Would that the

Nation's solemn weighty work were as nearly complete ! But

let me ask you, if California means that the jewel she has

wrought and hung among its peers, about the country's neck

shall fall and roll into the sea, a prey to any maritime power

that piratically watches to snaich it up, when the cord that

strings our priceless beads is broken ? Did you discover and

add this El Dorado to the National Domain, to stand idly by,

when the old soil was over-run with rebel parricides, and deny

your part in the great and costly work of maintaining the in

stitutions, which Pioneers like yourselves founded and handed

down in tearful, prayerful faith to your sacred keeping ? No

there is not a vein in your golden leads you would not bleed

to its last drop to supply the arteries that run with the life

blood of your country ! There is not a heart in an honest

Pioneer's bosom, that does not burst with longing for the res-

26 ORATION.

toration of the Nation's security, the stability of the great

American Temple of Liberty. And Pioneers ! you have con

quered too many enemies, space and drought, and ocean, and

isthmus, and isolation and fire and