CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION by REV. HENRY V. BELLOWS., FRANK BRET HARTE (mobi reader .txt) 📖
- Author: REV. HENRY V. BELLOWS., FRANK BRET HARTE
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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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 6
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
If you had been obliged to grow up, as most peoples havehad 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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 7
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.
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