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CALIFORNIA AN INTIMATE HISTORY
STATE OF
CALIFORNIA
GERTRUDE ATHERTON
V
E
A
↓FRAN
EN
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01231 0113
GENEALOGY 979.4 AT44C
CALIFORNIA
BOOKS BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON
[PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS]
THE STORY OF CALIFORNIA. Illustrated. Crown 8vo
RULERS OF KINGS. Post 8vo
THE BELL IN THE FOG. Frontispiece Portrait. Post 8vo THE TRAVELLING THIRDS. Post 8vo
ANCESTORS. (Californian.) Post 8vo
[PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE]
NOVELS AND STORIES OF CALIFORNIA
REZANOV (1806) ¿ To be issued in one volume,
THE DOOMSWOMAN (1840) } "Before the Gringo Came"
THE SPLENDID IDLE FORTIES (1800-46)
THE VALIANT RUNAWAYS (1840)
A DAUGHTER OF THE VINE (The Sixties)
AMERICAN WIVES AND ENGLISH HUSBANDS (The Eighties) THE CALIFORNIANS (The Eighties)
A WHIRL ASUNDER (The Nineties)
OTHER NOVELS AND STORIES
PERCH OF THE DEVIL
PATIENCE SPARHAWK AND HER TIMES
SENATOR NORTH
HIS FORTUNATE GRACE
THE GORGEOUS ISLE
MRS. PENDLETON'S FOUR-IN-HAND
THE ARISTOCRATS
TOWER OF IVORY
JULIA FRANCE AND HER TIMES
THE CONQUEROR
BIOGRAPHY
A FEW OF HAMILTON'S LETTERS
This monument was
erected in San Fran-
cisco, September 9, 1897, to commemorate the admission of Cali- fornia to the Union, September 9, 1850, and dedicated to the Native Sons of the Golden West. The sculptor
was Douglas Tilden, a
native of California, and the monument was presented to the city
by James D. Phelan.
THE NATIVE SONS' FOUNTAIN
CALIFORNIA
AN INTIMATE HISTORY
BY
GERTRUDE
ATHERTON
ILLUSTRATED
ΛΑΜΠΑΔΙΑ
Ε ΧΟΝΤΕΣ
ΔΙΚΑΔΠΣΟΤΣΟΝ
ΛΛΗΛΟΙΣ
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXIV
-
COPYRIGHT. 1914. BY HARPER & BROTHERS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1914
K-O
TO JAMES D. PHELAN THIS STORY OF THE CALIFORNIA TO WHOM HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN FAITHFUL
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAP.
I.
THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA
I
II.
THE MISSION PADRES
15
III.
THE SPANISH GOVERNORS-I .
36
IV.
THE SPANISH GOVERNORS-II
47
V.
THE MEXICAN GOVERNORS-I
62
VI.
THE MEXICAN GOVERNORS-II
78
VII.
FRÉMONT AND THE BEAR-FLAG REVOLUTION
94
VIII.
GOLD
II6
IX.
SAN FRANCISCO
I30
X.
CRIME AND FIRE
I44
XI.
POLITICS
162
XII.
JAMES KING OF WM.
174
XIII.
THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE OF 1856
190
XIV.
THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE AND DAVID S. TERRY
201
XV.
BRODERICK
218
XVI.
BRODERICK AND GWIN
230
XVII. THE BRODERICK-TERRY DUEL
XVIII. THE WAR
.
263
249
XIX.
THE TERRIBLE SEVENTIES
272
XX.
THE CHINESE IN CALIFORNIA
282
XXI.
"THE CHINESE MUST GO"
290
XXII.
£
LAST PHASES
308
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE NATIVE SONS' FOUNTAIN Frontis piece
From a photograph by Charles Weidner.
KAWEAH MOUNTAINS, NEAR KERN RIVER CAÑON . Facing D. 6
THREE BROTHERS, SHOWING THE MERCED RIVER . 12
From a photograph by Taber.
GLACIER POINT, 3,300 FEET, AND SOUTH DOME . 12
From a photograph by Taber.
STATUE OF PADRE JUNÍPERO SERRA From a photograph by Charles Weidner.
18
SANTA BARBARA MISSION-FOUNDED 1786 28
From a photograph by Graham & Morrill.
SAN GABRIEL MISSION (FIRST GOLD FOUND IN 1842) 28 From a photograph by Graham & Morrill.
DON JOSÉ DE LA GUERRA
80
DON PABLO DE LA GUERRA
80
From a photograph in the Charles B. Turrill collection.
GEN. DON JOSÉ CASTRO 80
From a photograph loaned by Delfina de la Guerra.
CASA GRANDE, THE HOME OF THE DE LA GUERRAS 90 From a photograph loaned by Delfina de la Guerra.
JOHN A. SUTTER 102
From a photograph in the Charles B. Turrill collection.
JAMES W. MARSHALL . = 102
GEN. JOHN C. FREMONT From Harper's Weekly, 1860.
102
GEN. M. G. VALLEJO 102
From a photograph by Taber loaned by Delfina de la Guerra.
SONOMA MISSION 104
MISSION SAN JUAN BAUTISTA . 104
SUTTER'S FORT AS IT WAS IN 1848 From California Illustrated, 1853.
I16
MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 118
From The Expedition of the Donner Party.
FROM "LONDON PUNCH," 1860
122
THE "EL DORADO" GAMBLING SALOON From Annals of San Francisco.
122
vii
ILLUSTRATIONS
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, 1850
. Facing p. 136 From The United States Illustrated. Published by H. J. Meyer.
SAN FRANCISCO 136 From an old print.
FIRST ADMISSION-DAY CELEBRATION, 1850, CALIFORNIA AND MONTGOMERY STREETS . 168
From an old print.
JAMES KING OF WM. . I74 From a photograph in the Charles B. Turrill collection.
BACK OF A TYPICAL LETTER-SHEET SUCH AS WAS USED FOR
PERSONAL LETTERS TO CORRESPONDENTS "EAST"
From an old print in the Charles B. Turrill collection.
186
FORT VIGILANCE, OR FORT GUNNYBAGS. WILLIAM T. COLE- MAN, PRESIDENT OF THE COMMITTEE OF VIGILANCE . From a photograph in the Charles B. Turrill collection.
210
DAVID C. BRODERICK 252
COL. E. D. BAKER
DAVID S. TERRY 252
252
WILLIAM M. GWIN
252
WILLIAM C. RALSTON [INSERT], WHO FREQUENTLY TOOK HIS GUESTS TO YOSEMITE AND BIG TREES, WAS THE FIRST TO DRIVE A FOUR-IN-HAND THROUGH "WAWONA"
274
JAMES D. PHELAN
310
From a photograph by Hartsook.
JUDGE LAWLOR . 66
320 From a photograph by Vaughan & Fraser.
RUDOLPH SPRECKELS
320
From a photograph by Habenicht
FRANCIS J. HENEY
320
FREMONT OLDER
320
From a photograph by Estey.
Gov. HIRAM JOHNSON
324
From a photograph by Pach Brothers.
PRUNE-ORCHARD
328
From a photograph in the Charles B. Turrill collection.
WHEAT-FIELD
From a photograph in the Charles B. Turrill collection.
328
IN compressing the history of California, a state of unexampled variety and crowding interest, an uncommon number of personalities and dramatic incidents, into one volume it is only possible to select the main historic events for treatment, connecting them with a synopsis of the contributing causes and illustrating them with all the personalities and anecdotes available. The details neces- sarily sacrificed are so well worth reading, however, that I shall feel I more than doubly have achieved my purpose in telling this strange tale of California in rapid narrative if I have stimulated an interest that will send readers to Theodore A. Hittell's History of California (four volumes); Bancroft's many volumes on the Pacific coast; Josiah Royce's California (one volume and dealing mainly with Frémont); Jeremiah Lynch's Senator of the Fifties (Brod- erick); the memoirs of William M. Gwin and of Stephen J. Field; the various books relating to the Vigilance Com- mittee of 1856, and to a possible reprint of that delightful and useful volume, The Annals of San Francisco, by Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbit, from which all historians of the period between 1849 and 1854 have drawn, with never an acknowledgment. For those interested in the later political history of the state, and particularly of San Francisco, there are the "Report on the Causes of Mu- nicipal Corruption in San Francisco," etc., made by a committee appointed by Mayor Taylor in 1908, of which Mr. William Denman, always keenly interested in the
ix
reform of the city, was chairman, and a forthcoming volume called The System, by Franklin Hichborn, who made a thorough investigation of the records of the San Francisco graft prosecution before they began to take wings.
To those interested in the geology of the state there are the works of Professor Whitney, chief of the first Pacific Coast Geodetic Survey sent out by the United States government in the early 60's; that impeccable classic by a member of his staff, Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada; the works of John Muir, George Davidson, and of Professor Le Conte of the University of California.
I have striven to be as accurate as history-never accurate-will permit, while writing an interesting story -or a paradoxical drama-but I have enjoyed the reading of the many authorities as much as my own work, and therefore confidently recommend to Californians, at least, a thorough course in California history.
If I used the word " paradox " just now it was because I suddenly remembered how many good men we have pro- duced in California and what bad history they have suc- ceeded in making.
GERTRUDE ATHERTON.
NEW YORK, August 11, 1914.
CALIFORNIA
CALIFORNIA
I
THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA
WHEN Gaspar de Portolá discovered the Bay of San Francisco in 1769 he found the surrounding country in- habited by Indians whose ancestors had dwelt on the peninsula and among the Marin hills ever since that uneasy coast had been hospitable to man. From them he heard the tradition that some two hundred years earlier the space covered by the great inland sheet of water had been a valley, fertile and beautiful, broken by hills and watered by two rivers that rose in the far north and found their outlet to the sea through Lake Merced. Then came a mighty earthquake, the valley sank, the hills of the coast were rent apart, the salt waters rushed in and covered not only the sunken valley floor, but all save the tips of its hills. A man on the peak of Mount Tamalpais might have seen the whole terrific drama, and then, later, marveled at the justice of Nature. Only the end of the fertile Central Valley was gone, and in its place the Pacific coast had been presented with one of the three great harbors of the world.
There are certain facts that give a strong color to the truth of this legend; and, although it makes a geologist
I
CALIFORNIA
writhe even to intimate that any significant physical phenomena can have taken place within the historic era, the layman is sometimes reminded that the most con- servative students of the rocks do not always maintain the theories they have inherited, or even advanced, long enough to permit them to grow quite hoary with age. The reader, therefore, is invited to take his choice.
It was on June 17, 1579, that Drake cast anchor in the little bay that bears his name. It is but fifteen miles north of the Golden Gate. He not only disembarked and lived with his officers intents for thirty-six days, but took excursions over the Marin hills and valleys under the guidance of the friendly Indians who besought him to remain and be their king. Drake neither heard nor saw anything of this superb green jewel of ours; if he had, England, instead of being profoundly indifferent to the strip of land he dutifully took possession of in the name of the crown, would have grabbed it promptly. Even if he had sailed up the coast of California there would have been nothing remarkable in his oversight, provided he had not lingered in his little cove; for the long narrow cleft between the hills known as the Golden Gate is often ob- literated by fog. But that after his long sojourn, dur- ing which he must have climbed Tamalpais and roamed the hills above Sausalito, he should have left the coast in ignorance of this inland tract of water, dotted with beautiful islands and large enough to harbor the com- bined navies of the world, is incredible save on the hypothesis that it did not exist. For all we know Drake and his party may have picnicked in the glades on the lower slope of Belvedere, now many fathoms beneath the green nervous waters of the bay.
2
THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA
The great valley of the Yosemite looks as if miles had been neatly sliced out of a high plateau and dropped like a plummet into the yawning earth; the walls are often perpendicular, rising to the height of several thousand feet. Professor Whitney admits that the bottom may have dropped out of the space covered by the present valley floor, although, being a wary geologist, he hastens to add that it was probably at a time when that section of the earth was semi-viscid.1 Even conservative geolo- gists admit that the subsidence which forms the Golden Gate and filled the end of the Central Valley with sea- water occurred in later Pleistocene-that is to say, only about forty thousand years ago. But it is a mere idiosyn- crasy of the scientific mind which persists in relegating any phenomenon of which it has not positive historical data to as remote a period geologically as the rocks will stand. An earthquake which metamorphosed some fifty miles of coast-land, however quick in action, was no more phenomenal than the performances of the Mississippi Valley in 1811-12, of Krakatoa in 1883, nor that titanic convulsion in India in 1762, when all but the higher parts of an area of sixty square miles of coast sank beneath the sea. For several days after the California earthquake of 1906, when San Francisco for a long minute seemed to fight with the very roots of the earth for release, govern- ment boats were to be seen daily in the bay taking sound- ings; much apprehension was felt lest the profound dis- turbance of its floor may have rendered it unnavigable, and closed the commercial history of the state.
James Perrin Smith, to quote but one of many authori-
1 Glacial erosion is the popular belief to-day, but to one brought up in an earthquake country the old theory seems more natural.
3
CALIFORNIA
tative writers on the disturbance of 1906, has this to say in Science, September 10, 1909: "The last phase of the physical history of the western coast is the recent sub- sidence that allowed the sea to encroach on the river- valleys forming the Bay of San Francisco and other bays along the coast. This has been going on in almost modern times, for Indian shell-mounds, apparently made by the same race that still exists in California, have been flooded by the continued subsidence of the Bay of San Francisco." It must be borne in mind that a geologist's modern time is not ours; but, as there is no evidence that Indians were living in California during any of the interglacial periods, nor, in all likelihood, for many years after the end of the Pleistocene-some twenty-five thousand years ago-we may believe, if we like, that the Bay of San Francisco is post-Drakian.
Far more sharply outlined and more independent of its Indian traditions is the history of the Salton Sea. There is no doubt that when Francisco de Ulloa explored the Gulf of California in 1539 that long arm of the sea differed little if any from its present channel and termination. Its lost two hundred miles, to be known by us as Salton Sink, had run their course from a dismembered part of the Great Pacific Ocean, down through long geological ages to a mere desert of salt.
The enemy here was the Colorado River, whose mouth was then some sixty miles east of its present location. It built, with true geological leisure, the delta that gradually separated the headwaters of the gulf from its main supply. This creature of a sovereign and cruel river was alternately toyed with and neglected; sometimes rejuvenated with an abundant stream of fresh - water,
4
THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA
when his majesty, the Colorado, tired of the less respon- sive gulf, abruptly swung aside and poured his offerings into the lake. But his long periods of neglect grew longer, the stranded sea contracted, its waters more and more alkaline; deserted, finally, it fell a victim to the dry winds of the desert, its aqueous history at an end for a thousand years. The Salton's chief title to fame other than spectacular is its depression below sea-level, 273.5 feet, a distinction it shares with but one other tract of land in the United States.
But although as recently as 1901 the Salton Sea looked as ancient and as dead as the moon, its history was not finished. During that year the Colorado River, via the Alamo and the New rivers, made one of its old capricious visits, overflowed the Salton Sink, threatened a section of the Southern Pacific Railroad with destruction, and obliterated a great corporation industry. It flooded the Sink, burying the productive salt-beds fifty feet deep. In the autumn of 1906 the Southern Pacific Company managed to shut it off, only to do battle once more in December, and again to conquer. Whether the science and determination of man will prevail against one of the most irresistible and wickedly resourceful forces of the Western Hemisphere remains to be seen. The river that made the Grand Cañon of Arizona, gnawing out mile after mile of solid rock, fighting Nature herself at every step, is likely to fume and fret under the harness of man and, finally, to take a swift revenge.
But both the San Francisco Bay and the Salton Sea, whatever their birth-dates, are the youngest of California's phenomena children, born in the last of her throes, pic- turesque hostages that her monstrous labors were over,
5
CALIFORNIA
that, save for an occasional spasm along her earthquake rift, she would make geological history no more.
California, according to conservative geologists, reading the tale of the Archean rocks in the Sierra Nevada range, began her life some hundred and fifty million years ago. But it was not until the latter part of the Paleozoic era, some thirty million years ago, that an uplift began along the axis of the range, manifesting itself in outpourings of lavas and other volcanic ejecta. And it was not until several million years later, in Jurassic times, that these strange and formidable masses of rock, still insignificant in height, established themselves permanently above the epicontinental sea.
They are the oldest of California's children, sole sur- vivors of the extrusive eon, during which life made its first negligible appearance on the globe. As the range rose higher and higher during vast succeeding reaches of geological time the Sierra witnessed the gradual unfold- ing of the California drama; destined itself to undergo many and terrific changes, it was the solitary spectator of the heroic and often thwarted struggle for existence of a younger range of mountains, born of the sea.
At first the Sierra looked west over an illimitable expanse of gray water that washed its very base. What- ever folding and crumpling might be going on under that stormy surface, it was many million years before a long low chain of rocks lifted its heads and tarried long enough to be so eroded that man-when, some forty million years later, he developed the scientific brain-should read the story as the old Sierra saw it. They were smothered for eons again, not only by the sea, but by sediments many thousands of feet deep, to be known later as the Franciscan
6
KAWEAH MOUNTAINS NEAR KERN RIVER CAÑON
THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA
or Golden Gate series. The boldest of the peninsula's headlands, Telegraph Hill, and the present islands in the bay are of sandstone interspersed with shales and rocks of peculiar interest to the geologist, not only for their age and record, but for their coats of many colors.
In late Jurassic or early Cretaceous times, some twenty million years after its first baffled attempt to live, the coast, including what are now its bay shores and islands, then but a part of the range, was born again. Folded and faulted on the sea's uneasy floor, the mass was pushed up into the light at last and permitted to grow and breathe, and harden and erode, and signal across a gray cold sea to the stately first-born of the west-for nearly a million years. Then down she went once more, and the Pacific stood on end and rushed with tidal ferocity at the in- vincible Sierra.
But the Coast Range, if her ambitions were curtailed, did not waste her time. During that long period of sub- mergence she accumulated those deposits of fossiliferous, Cretaceous, Eocene, and Miocene treasures, so beloved of her students to-day. The sediments of the last period alone attained a thickness of eight thousand feet. This took time, and it was not until some twelve million years after her first appearance, and during the Miocene, that she got her hydra-headed masses out again. The faulting and crumpling and folding and deformation went on dur- ing that vast reach of time until, bombarded from below, the reluctant sea parted and there rose at last a real range of mountains, oscillating and bowing through the mists to the Sierra, who thought that her long and lonely watch was ended. But alas! Reckoning geologically, which was all the time she knew, her companionship was
7
CALIFORNIA
brief. In late Pliocene the Coast Range subsided once more, and only a long low chain of hills held their heads obstinately above the sea and broke the ponderous at- tacks of the Sierra's old enemy.
It was during the Pliocene, late Tertiary, about six hun- dred thousand years ago, that the Coast Range achieved her wonderful series of deposits known as the Merced, which may be seen to-day along the edge of the ocean near San Francisco. The deposit is a mile in thickness, and at its base is what the sea has left of an old pine forest. During the last submergence it went down some five thousand feet, and so rapidly that the trees were buried under sediment before they could decay. In the upper beds are fossils of Recent Quartenary, which began (to be conservative) but twenty-five thousand years ago. Their elevation has been more gradual than their descent, and they are now tilted up at an almost perpendicular angle and dislocated by a fault.
It was not long before that doughty coast proved- what all geologists now admit-that her disposition, un- daunted by cruel vicissitudes, is to grow, and not long after her subsidence she began once more to rise. At one time, indeed (early Quartenary), she stood some three thousand feet higher than now, if we read aright the tale of her submerged cañons, eroded by other elements than the sea. But although she was forced to accept a later subsidence-no doubt to fill a hole in ocean's floor-she kept her heads out, as we have seen, and she has been growing ever since.
It was at the beginning of the Miocene that certain faulting and folding developed the great earthquake rift of California. That was something over two million
8
THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA
years ago, and one shudders to think what it must have done in its heyday. For that old wound has never healed; every forty or fifty years the Coast Range has an acute attack of Miocene fever, accompanied by spasms and followed by many minor protests at this long chastise- ment of nature.
But these are merely the pangs of old age, which she endures with more equanimity than we do, ruminating as she must upon the visitations of her youth and maturity; and not only upon those painful births, deaths, burials, and reincarnations, but that terrific vulcanic period when she was forced to tear apart her smooth young flanks and the most lofty and aspiring of her brows to disgorge into the shrinking central sea the molten masses the earth could no longer contain.
That, of course, was the most spectacular era of our Western Hemisphere's history, but the great Sierra herself was too fully occupied letting the fiery blood of the swollen patient to observe and admire the new activities of her interesting neighbor. But to the men in the moon, whose atmosphere as it sank inward may have been converted, for aught we know (all things being so wonder- ful at that time), into a powerful lens, it must have been a stupendous drama: that red and roaring world, dulling the music of the spheres, ten hundred thousand thousand flames distorted into as many shapes, and seen fitfully through a smoky curtain rent with boiling rock magma.
The igneous activities began with the close of the Cretaceous period and reached its climax some seven million years later in the Miocene, although by no means its end. Of course, the Coast Range, being swallowed periodically, was unable to discharge her share of the
9
CALIFORNIA
obligation during all of that time, but making due al- lowance for periods of rest-throughout long geologic ages-and these mean tens of thousands of years at best- torrents of flaming lava poured incessantly from the lofty craters and the mangled sides of both of California's mountain-chains. Before the waters retreated during the early Pliocene the central sea was a steaming hissing cauldron, hiding the throes of one range from the other, and after that the valley was dry and scorched, the thick Miocene deposits pelted with red-hot rocks and ash. Gradually, however, the valley floor was raised and built up by sediment, and during those intervals, now and then, when the plutonic energy of the mountains ceased, the ranges, scarred and battered but serene, smiled at each other across a magnificent valley, dotted with lakes and groves of trees, and, no doubt, ancient and fearsome monsters, now happily extinct save in museums.
And during all these measureless eons, while her neighbor was tossed aloft or recalled to stop a hole in the sea, the Sierra had many and varied trials of her own, holding her breath for centuries, wondering if she, too, were to be engulfed, if that persistent, ponderous, roaring ocean meant to devour her. There had been compression and faulting at the end of the Palæozoic, as well as some igneous activity and, later, erosion. The whole range, about eleven million years ago, at the close of the Jurassic, was once more compressed, folded, and then triumphantly uplifted. But the elements peneplained her until the close of the Miocene, and the sea tore at her roots unceasingly, although never again to dislodge them. Rivers wore away her surfaces, to lay the floor of the central sea until she was some four thousand feet lower than she is
IO
THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA
to-day. It was during this period, when the vast Eocene sea threatened her existence, and she was torpid with fear and exhaustion, that her "aged rivers" rescued the gold from her battered veins and, crawling downward with their heavy burden, disgorged it into the lower cañons, or carried it out into the sea between the ranges, where it sank into the rising beds of future rivers.
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