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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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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 15
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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 16
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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 17
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
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