USA > California > California; an intimate history > Part 4
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But he had his match at home, and his own domestic affairs were the talk of California. His servants whis- pered the secrets of the gubernatorial household to the "wash-tub mail"-the women that washed in the stone tubs sunken in the ground near a convenient spring or creek-and they told other servants, who told their ladies, who wrote to other ladies at other presidios. Society was barely out of its shell in those days, and that first dish of gossip must have been a godsend.
The Señora Fages has the honor to be the first woman named in the history of California. If wives and daughters accompanied the previous governors and their officers they were too meek to win mention in the records, but the helpmate of Fages was an individual if not an angel. As it is not possible that she was with her husband during that first expedition into unknown territory, this lady of high degree, and consequence in the City of Mexico, must have had the courage to take the long and hazardous journey with a child and a retinue of ignorant peon ser- vants, practically alone. But that same spirit made her too mettlesome for the hearthstone. And brave and hardy as she was, she abominated the rough presidio life that awaited her at Monterey. No doubt she had read Montalvo and dreamed her dreams.
To be sure, the missionaries and settlers were cultivating the fields, and her table was loaded with delicate fish and luscious fruits, venison, fowl, and bear-steak; there were pine woods on the hills where she and the officers' ladies
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could roam and talk of the City of Mexico, and look at whales, spouting iridescent geysers in the bay, a bay as blue as the vice-reine's sapphires, and curving to silver sands; she could thrill at the whoops of unbaptized In- dians prowling round the stockade at night; and on Sun- day, after mass, she could attire herself in a flowered gown, drape her handsome head in a mantilla, and, coquettishly wielding a fan from Madrid, sit on the corridor surrounded by gallant officers and watch a bull fight a bear in the plaza; and there were festas aplenty at the missions. But, although everybody seems to have worked himself to the bone to please her, there was no peace in the governor's mansion-which she called an adobe hovel. She wanted the pleasures and excitements of the City of Mexico; and, as the governor could not import them and would not return, neither he nor all his minions could smooth her brow nor curb her tongue. The padres, called in by the unhappy governor, talked to her of the consolations of the Church, and were treated with high disdain.
Exhausting her resources in other directions, she pre- tended to be jealous of her husband, that stern dispenser of stocks and stripes to amorous soldiers. In her deter- mination to amuse herself with a scandal she became a scandal herself, for she hurled her wrongs into the public ear, which expanded to twice its natural size.
Once more the distracted Fages appealed to the priests, and this time they entered her sala with the authority of the Church and threatened her with handcuffs and a sound whipping. Her silvery laughter could be heard all over the presidio. Well she knew that never would they dare to put such an indignity upon the Señora Goberna- dora, even though she belonged to that sex held in such
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casual regard by the men of her race. The padres gave her up, and Capt. Nicolas Soler, first in military command, was next called in. Soler was not only a disciplinarian of the first water, but diplomatic and resourceful. He began by upbraiding her furiously, telling her that she was a keg of gunpowder full of sparks which sooner or later would blow up California and lower the prestige of Spain in the eyes of the world. This flattered her, and she applied her- self to calming the indignant officer, who in turn wheedled her. Perhaps her mood of revolt had worn itself out; in this more enlightened era it would seem that the poor exiled lady was merely suffering from nerves and idleness. She settled down finally into the leader of fashion, not only for Monterey, but for those growing pueblos, San José and Los Angeles, and for the other presidios. Her maiden name was Eulalia Challis, and she deserves fame as the first woman of California to assert her rights and stand upon them, albeit her methods were a bit old-fashioned. Peace was restored in the gubernatorial mansion by the unconditional surrender of the governor himself. Every packet-boat until the end of the Fages administration in 1790 brought her gowns and mantillas, guitars and fans, music and candelabra from the City of Mexico. But all breathed more freely when she left; and so, no doubt, did she.
Doña Josefa Romeau, whose husband succeeded Fages, had no chance to display what individuality she may have possessed, for she was fully occupied nursing a man who was a prey to insomnia and finally to tuberculosis. He died in 1792, and Don José de Arrillaga served as Gobernador interino for two years. Diego de Borica received the appointment of Gobernador propietario by a
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royal order from Madrid in June, 1793, but did not arrive in Monterey until the following year.
It was not the fate that Diego de Borica would have chosen, exile to the wilderness of the Californias, a country comparatively uninhabited, believed to be too poor to progress far beyond its present condition and with no society worthy the name.
Borica was the first man of solid intellectual attainments to take up his residence in California. Mexico was already old enough to have its scholars and seats of learning, and with these Borica had been in close touch, delighting in literature and controversial hours. This was the more remarkable as he was an active soldier and made close companions of his wife and daughter. It is doubt- ful if there was even a book of old plays in California at that time. The priests had their hands full educating the Indians in religion, agriculture, and manufacturing. The comandantes of the four presidios-Monterey, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco-found them- selves as fully occupied with military duties, siestas, flirt- ing, bull-fights, and cock-fights; they would have thought it a sin to waste time cultivating their minds. The settlers of the pueblos were men that had been failures at home, and degenerated instead of developing any pioneer traits. California was a veritable exile for an intellectual man.
But Borica, now a man of fifty, was also a soldier. He did as he was told. For a few weeks after his arrival in Monterey he had the consolation of the society of two explorers and men of the world, George Vancouver and Peter Puget, who were anchored in the harbor; but even before they sailed away he had set himself to work to
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improve conditions in general with a zeal that never flagged throughout the five years and eight months of his administration. He determined to lay the corner-stone, at least, of a future civilization.
One of his first measures after strengthening the forti- fications along the coast was to reform the pueblos. He scolded the alcaldes (the alcalde was an official who com- bined several administrative offices in one and finally wielded a power that led to great abuses) so vehemently and threatened them with punishments so dire that there was an immediate decrease in the amount of liquor sold and consumed; and the settlers, instead of spending their time gambling and drinking and fighting, cultivated their fields with an almost feverish ardor.
Knowing his sovereign's desire that many civil com- munities should flourish in the province, he next turned his attention to the founding of a "city" near the present site of Santa Cruz. It was laid out by the one engineer in the country, Alberto de Cordoba, a young man both able and thorough. The city he made on paper had a church, fine government buildings, houses of adobe for the colonists instead of huts thatched with tules like those of San José and Los Angeles. Nor was it huddled about a plaza; it covered four square leagues of land, with long streets and ample building-lots and grants beyond for farms. It was named the Villa de Branciforte in honor of the Viceroy of New Spain.
The most favorable terms were offered to colonists, but in spite of Borica's stipulation that they should include not only able-bodied men and women, but agricultu- rists, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, tailors, shoemakers, tanners, and fishermen, only seventeen poverty-stricken,
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diseased, half-naked emigrants arrived by the first ship, and the subsequent relays were no better. Lieutenant Moraga, however, made them work, and the first crops were good. But the Villa Branciforte barely survived Borica's administration nor traveled far beyond Cordoba's table. The enthusiasm and enterprise of one man cannot make a city, and the inhabitants of Branciforte were no better and little more intelligent than the native Indians. No doubt they were degenerated half-breeds, already de- generated at birth. In spite of its beautiful situation on the Bay of Santa Cruz it disappeared, while the little pueblos of San José and Los Angeles clung to the map and are cities to-day.
But Borica's chief and lasting work was the schools he founded. Not only was there until his time no teaching outside the missions for the white children, but the Indians themselves received no more than enabled them to under- stand the exhortations and orders of the padres. The priests opposed him violently, but he established secular schools and installed the best teachers he could find. He also controlled to a large extent the cruelties practised by the priests on the Indians, which, since Father Serra's death, had become a scandal in the land. As long as he remained in California the unfortunate natives were not hunted down like dogs if they ran away nor lashed in the missions until they bled. It was during Borica's administration also that the military post, Yerba Buena, the site of the future City of San Francisco, was founded.
If this enlightened man did not accomplish all he strove for he at least managed to fill his time during his long exile, and it is doubtful if he contemplated failure for a moment. And he accomplished a great deal. Not only
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did he compel parents to send their children to his schools, but, despairing of decent immigrants, he ordered the Spanish families - gente de razon-to have their boys taught the mechanical occupations. To this there was much opposition; the best families were all military in origin, or fact, and the blue in their veins kept family pride alive even in a colony. But Borica put his foot down, and the boys went to work. The province flour- ished as never before, for few dared to be idle. The fields and orchards yielded enormous harvests, and there were now hundreds of acres sown in hemp and flax. Blankets and cloth for even the gente de razon were woven; and cattle and sheep, horses and mules, roamed through every valley of the Coast Range; the great Central Valley at this time was almost unknown.
If severe and inexorable, Borica was a just man. He would not permit natives to be executed, no matter how grave their offense, holding that their contact with civilization was far too recent to have taught them the laws of right and wrong and the sacredness of human life. No doubt he reflected also that with the exception of the missionaries and the few officers of high character, the Indians had found little to admire and emulate in the ruling class. When they were sent on errands to the presidios and pueblos or ran away and hid in them, their associates were the soldiers and immigrants, whose only virtue was obedience.
In 1779 Borica felt himself worn out with his unremit- ting labors and asked to be relieved. His release came in January of the following year, and with his devoted fam- ily he returned at once to Mexico; but not to enjoy the society of scholars and books. He died six months later.
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THE SPANISH GOVERNORS-II
IT was during the administration of Don José de Arri- llaga, who succeeded Borica as Gobernador propietario, that California set the stage for her first romantic drama. To the principals it was real enough, but to us, looking down that long perspective to a vanished day, so different from our own, it would seem as if some great stage-manager had found a sad and beautiful play and then great actors to perform it.
Concha (christened Concepcion) Argüello grew up in the presidios of Santa Barbara and San Francisco, her father being alternately comandante of these posts. Don José Arguello was not only an able and energetic officer; he was so good that he was called el santo; and, although he had worked himself up from the ranks, he had married a Castilian, Doña Ignacia Moraga, and was the most eminent of his Majesty's subjects in the Californias. Although the republican ideas flourishing in the eastern part of the continent as well as in France horrified him, and he was an uncompromising monarchist, he was more liberal in other respects than most Spaniards of any rank, and permitted his daughter Concha, a remarkably bright girl, to take full advantage of the schools founded by Borica. She was only ten when the governor resigned, but she had heard much learned talk in his family; her
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mind had received a bent which impelled her to read all the books in the country that were not under the ban of the priests.
Although much of her time was spent in the lonely presidio of San Francisco, she visited at other presidios and at many ranch-houses. California was no longer a wilderness in the year 1806, although far from the climax of that arcadian life so famous in its history. The mis- sions, but thirty miles apart, had been the first chain to link that long coast together; the ranchers were the next; and the young people, with their incessant desire to dance, picnic (merienda), and ride from one presidio and ranch to the next and then again to the next, took from the coast valleys at least all suggestion of a day, not forty years before, when the Indians ruled the land. Packet-boats brought mantillas and satins and embroid- ered shawls from Mexico, silks for rebozos (a simpler sub- stitute for the mantilla) fans, laces for the ruffles of the men, fine linen, high combs, gold chains, and books for a few.
The population of Alta California in 1806 was about twenty-seven thousand, of which a little over two thousand were whites. The gente de razon consisted not only of the immediate military society and the official members of the pueblos, but of the rapidly increasing descendants of the first officers and a few soldiers and settlers, the most enterprising of whom had managed to obtain ranchos in spite of the opposition of the padres. The women of the upper class when not bearing children (which they did commendably) had little to do but oversee their numerous Indian servants, dance, and enjoy the climate. Some of the leading families had large adobe houses, white, with
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red tiles, many of them on long irregular streets leading from the presidio; the Indians were now too broken in spirit to be dangerous-save sporadically at long intervals -or had fled to the mountains. They lived in such state as was possible with the accompaniment of whitewashed walls and horsehair furniture; and these estimable wom- en (about whom there seems never to have been a scan- dal) and such of their lords as did not gamble away their grants and patrimonies laid the foundation of one of the few real aristocracies in the United States. Their names will be given later when they enter California history through the door of politics.
Concha, when her fate sailed through the Golden Gate on that April morning, 1806, was only sixteen, but she was a Spanish girl, with the early maturity of her race and a mind and personality all her own. She was La favorita of her day, and many men sang at her grating.
Even during Arrillaga's first administration he had avowed much anxiety over the long strip of exposed coast and the dilapidated condition of the presidios. He put them in repair and caused a fort to be built near the presidio and overlooking the Golden Gate. This spot is still fortified, and we call it Fort Point. Borica followed up this good work with his usual ardor, for Spain went to war with France and believed herself to be threatened by England. He also had heavy artillery sent over from Mexico and installed at all the presidios and at Yerba Buena. The war-cloud blew away, but the Californians remained alert and were under orders from the central government to do no trading with foreign vessels, nor give them encouragement to remain in port.
Arrillaga, when made Gobernador propietario, was the
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eighth of the Spanish governors. He found about four hundred men in the military establishments of the two Californias, which cost the government nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year. There were thirty-eight men regularly on duty at San Francisco, sixty-five at Monterey, sixty-one in Santa Barbara and San Diego respectively, and seventy-one in Loreto, Baja California. Don José Argüello was chief of all the forces in Alta California, a great man in his little way, and enjoying the full con- fidence of the powers in Mexico, although for some rea- son they never made him Gobernador propietario of the Californias. Little he recked that he was to emerge from the dry pages of history as the father of his Concha.
This brilliant Spanish girl not only had the fine dense black hair and flashing black eyes of the handsomest of her race, but the white skin so prized by the blooded of Castile, and cheeks as pink as the Castilian roses that grew about her grating. All chroniclers and travelers unite in praises of her beauty and vivacity, and there is no doubt that she was high above the common, this first of California's many beauties, whose sad but exalted fate has given her a place in history. It is related by the descendants of Don José de la Guerra, of Santa Barbara, in whose house she lived for several years, that in her dark days she wished to cut off her eyelashes, which at- tracted too much attention by their extraordinary length and softness, but was ordered by a sensible priest to do nothing so foolish as to deprive her eyes of the protection the good God had given them.
At the time of Rezánov's arrival in California her father was in command at Monterey, and his son, Don Luis Argüello, at the San Francisco presidio. Luis was a man
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of no little independence and individuality himself, as we shall see later. Concha, as well as her mother and the younger children, appear to have remained as his guests.
Baron Nicolaï Petrovich de Rezánov, first Russian Ambassador to Japan, and circumnavigator of the globe, a chamberlain at court and privy councilor, chief part- ner in the great Golikov-Shelikov fur company of Rus- sian America (Alaska), author of a charter that when signed by the Tsar Paul made his company as formidable as a modern trust, a man of great gifts and ambitions and enterprise, who had tired early of court life and become one of the most active business men of his time, had spent the winter of 1805-06 in New Archangel (Sitka), and learned at first hand the privations and sufferings of his company during those long arctic months when the storms were incessant and there was little or nothing to eat.
But he heard also of a California rich in soil and climate, and he made up his mind to visit its capital and establish relations with the colony, which would enable him to obtain a yearly supply of cereals and other nourishing foodstuffs for his faithful subjects. He bought a barque, the Juno, from a Yankee skipper, and its cargo of mer- chandise; for he wanted immediate as well as future re- lief, and knew that it would be useless to go to California empty-handed. And then he set sail to play a part that never crossed even his ardent imagination. He was forty-two at this time. In his youth he had married a daughter of the merchant Shelikov, but she had died soon afterward. His mind was crowded with ambitions, duties, and business; his thoughts turned seldom these days to women.
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It was in the month of April, 1806, just one hundred years and six days before the earthquake and fire of 1906, which might have devoured a Russian city had this great practical dreamer lived a few years longer, that Rezánov sailed through the Golden Gate and into that romance which alone was to keep his name alive. He was a re- markably handsome man, both in stature and the bold outline of his rather cold and haughty face, towering above the Californians, and always wearing one or other of the superb uniforms of his rank and time. It is no wonder that there was a face at every grille on the day of his arrival, and a Castilian rose above every little ear at the ball that night.
He was received with anxious hospitality by Luis Argüello. Rezánov was a menacing figure, but his cre- dentials were in order. That night a ball was given to him and to his officers and guests, and Rezánov devoted himself to the beautiful sister of the comandante. It was a long while since the Russian had seen female beauty of any sort; and, although he probably never had talked to so young a girl before, Concha was not as other girls, and attracted him as much by her dignity and vivacious intelligence as by her exceptional beauty. That she should lose her heart to this superb and distinguished stranger, the first man of the great world she had ever met, was inevitable.
Whether Rezánov would have permitted his heart to act independently of his cool and calculating brain, had he been able to accomplish his object and sail away in a few days, no man can tell. But he met with unexpected obstacles. It was against the law of the country to trade with foreign vessels, and it was not until after the
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arrival of Governor Arrillaga (Rezánov was not permitted to go to Monterey) and Don José Argüello and long pow- wows with the subtle missionaries of Dolores (whose in- terest Rezánov had enlisted with diplomatic presents from his cargo) that they arrived at a compromise. There must be no trading, but Rezánov could sell his cargo, and with the California money immediately buy a hold-full of foodstuffs. So would the loyal governor's conscience (and possibly his official head) be saved.
Meanwhile six weeks passed. Rezánov saw Concha daily. He permitted himself to fall in love, having made up his ambitious mind that an alliance between Russian America and New Spain would be of the greatest possible advantage, not only to his starving company, but to the empire itself. He would take up his residence in Cali- fornia; little by little, and then more and more frequent- ly, he would welcome colonists from his own frozen land. These, propagating rapidly in the hospitable climate of California, would soon outnumber the Spanish (he heard of the type of colonists induced to emigrate from Mexico) ; if necessary, sudden hordes would descend from the north at the propitious moment and snatch the province from New Spain, whose navy was contemptible and whose capital was too many arid leagues away to offer success- ful resistance by land. Nor was it California alone that Rezánov desired for Russia, but the entire Pacific coast north of San Diego and as far inland as he should find it worth while to penetrate.
There was a terrific excitement at the presidio when he asked Don José for the hand of his daughter. In spite of his personal popularity all her family, save Luis and Santiago, and even the priests, opposed the marriage;
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being of the Greek Church, he was a heretic, and not for him was a Catholic maiden, particularly the daughter of el santo, loyal subject of king and Church.
But it was his personal quality, as well as his offer to go himself to Rome for a dispensation and to Madrid for the king's permission, that finally broke down their re- sistance. They even went so far as to permit a formal betrothal to take place; and late in May Rezánov re- luctantly set sail to obtain not only the consent of the pope and king, but of his own sovereign to the marriage, which he now desired with heart as well as mind. Opposi- tion, the fear that after all he might not win this girl, had completed the conquest of that imperious mind and ar- dent heart. And as bitterly as Concha did he resent the two years that must elapse until his return. Even com- munication might be impossible.
He sailed out of the Golden Gate filled with visions not only of a real happiness, despite his sadness and resentment, but of a magnificent gift to his country, a vast territory over which he as viceroy should rule with a power as absolute as the Tsar's in Russia. He saw the hills of San Francisco white with the marble of palaces and gay with bazars, flashing with the golden roofs and crosses that had made the fame of Moscow-cupolas, spires, lofty towers with bulbous domes! And about this wonderful bay, which he had had the wit to appre- ciate at a glance, a line of bristling forts, villas between, painted with the bright colors of Italy, and set in gar- dens sweet with Castilian roses. He was a great and practical dreamer, as the historians of his country testi- fied after his untimely death; but the Fates were on the side of the Americans, as usual, and they had willed that
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