Californians

“ The Californians like most other Mexican Spaniards, are a lazy, indolent and cowardly people, and have neither enterprise nor spirit of improvement in their disposition, they are only a grade above the aborigines, and like them they will soon be compelled from the very nature of things, to yield to the swelling tide of Anglo-Saxon adventure. Almost every thing which the Californians possess, is of the rudest and simplest construction. ”

“ The native Californians form a goodly proportion of the gold-seekers. Many of the men are accompanied by their wives, who are attended by Indian girls. The graceful Spanish costume of the Californians adds quite a feature to the busy scene at the mines. ”

“ The Californians were in reality gratified by the prospect of American success in their territory, for they believed that it would secure a stable and progressive government, under which, that beautiful region would be gradually developed. ”

“ Under the peculiar circumstances in which California becomes a State—with an unexampled increase of a population coming from every part of the world, speaking various languages, and imbued with different feelings and prejudices, no form of government, no system of laws, can be expected to meet with immediate and unanimous assent. It is to be remembered, moreover, that a considerable portion of our fellow-citizens are natives of Old Spain, Californians, and those who have voluntarily relinquished the rights of Mexicans to enjoy those of American citizens. ”

“ A courier arrived to-day from los Angeles. Every thing continues quiet there. The Californians had entirely dispersed, and retired to their ranchos, with the exception of those few who had gone upon a forlorn hope to Sonora. They will never be able to raise a force there sufficient to make any impression here. Mexico has enough to do in her own borders, without an attempt to retake California. ”

“ The inhabitants of the City of the Angels, being generally of the wealthy class of Californians, have always strongly adhered to the institutions of Mexico. They offered the most strenuous resistance to the American forces at the time of the conquest of California, but were vanquished in two battles, and the city taken. All the customs and amusements peculiar to the Spaniards and the countries which they colonized, are here in full vogue. Music, dancing, singing, slaughtering cattle, or gambling, are the usual pastimes of the inhabitants. ”

“ At the present time, it is a matter of doubt, whether the Americans or the foreigners predominate in the population of California. It is certain that the former have things pretty much their own way in the various cities and in the mines. But that may be from a want of unity of action among the foreigners. The habits and modes of life belonging to the Americans are generally prevalent in the cities; but in the smaller and older towns, the native Californians conduct every thing in the old Spanish mode. ”

“ With such a climate and soil, to say nothing of its enormous mineral wealth, ‘it is bound,’ to use the local word, to leave New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the old leading States of the Union far behind, and, indeed, every other part of the world, whether new or old.
California compared with Italy.
One cannot become acquainted with half-a-dozen Californians without seeing that man himself has been improved in this wonder-working region—the [Pg 55] finest, not only that the Anglo-Saxon race, but that any race of man has ever inhabited. ”

“ East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. ”

“ For, as you shall learn, she was reputed the most beautiful of women; and it was she, O Californians, who wedded the gallant prince Talanque,—your first-known king. The supporters of the arms of the beautiful shield of the State of California should be, on the right, a knight armed cap-à-pie, and, on the left, an Amazon sable, clothed in skins, as you shall now see.
Mr. E. E. Hale, of Boston, sent to the Antiquarian Society last year a paper which shows that the name of California was known to literature before it was given to our peninsula by Cortés. ”

“ The Californians have a jolly, good-natured way of regarding idiosyncrasies, and a kind of lavish generosity in the distribution of their alms, quite different from the careful and judicious method of the Eastern people. ”

“ The army has covered itself with laurels on the plains of Mexico, and might have won honors here with an adequate force; but to rely on sixty dragoons in the face of a thousand Californians, armed with the rifle and lance, and accustomed to the saddle from their birth, is to trifle with the stern solemnities of war. It is requiring too much of us, who have lived here through the war, and are conversant with its history, to claim our assent to the allegation, that California has been conquered through the achievements of the army. ”

“ This apparent thinness California has in common with the routine photoplay, which is at times as shallow in its thought as the shadow it throws upon [Pg xvi] the screen. This newness California has in common with all photoplays. It is thrillingly possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual tradition and depth together.
“Part of the thinness of California is not only its youth, but the result of the physical fact that the human race is there spread over so many acres of land. “Good” Californians count their mines and enumerate their palm trees. ”

“ Men came to kiss, and stayed to tear away her flesh with their teeth. When her skeleton has been torn forth, even to the uttermost rib, then the spell of the wicked fairy will be broken, and California be the most gracious mother mankind has ever known. ”

“ Under all its deviations and variations lies the old Puritan conscience, which is still the backbone of the civilization of the republic. Life in California is a little fresher, a little freer, a good deal richer, in its physical aspects, and for these reasons, more intensely and characteristically American. With perhaps ninety per cent of identity there is ten per cent of divergence, and this ten per cent I have emphasized even to exaggeration. We know our friends by their slight differences in feature or expression, not by their common humanity. ”

“ It requires no prophet to forecast the educational pre-eminence of California, for the basis of intellectual development is already assured. But however close the alliance with Eastern culture, to the last, certain traits will persist. California is the most cosmopolitan of all the states of the Union, and such she will remain. Whatever the fates may bring, her people will be tolerant, hopeful, and adequate, sure of themselves, masters of the present, fearless of the future. ”

“ The children of California, other things being equal, are larger, stronger and better formed than their Eastern cousins of the same age. This advantage of development lasts, unless cigarettes, late hours, or grosser forms of dissipation come in to destroy it. A wholesome, sober, out-of-door life in California invariably means a vigorous maturity.
A third element of charm in California is that of personal freedom. The dominant note in the social development of the state is individualism, with all that it implies of good or evil. ”

“ The glamour of the gold excitement passed away with the first fifteen years of marvelous growth, and California was simply a new State, with, for a new State, a large class of wealthy men with the habits of men of business everywhere. ”

“ And live like hunted beasts. I like the valley; the sun in winter, the cool mountains in summer. If I am victor to-morrow, all the Indians in California will call me chief. They will run here from every Mission and hacienda, and from every hill and mountain, like little ones to their good father; and we will drive the priests out of the country, and make the hidalgos, the caballeros, the soft silk-dressed donas our friends or our slaves—as they wish. California belongs to us. The Great Spirit put us here, not the white man. ”

“ How I happened to be born so far away from the home of my ancestors, the type of life lived here on the frontier by a transplanted New England family, and the conditions that prevailed in California in the period between the mining rush and the tourist rush, is the story I shall tell.
The usual things had happened down the years on the east coast,—births, marryings, many children, death; new generations, scatterings, the settling and the populating a new land. ”

“ Yet it is doubtful if there are any people who will resent an insult quicker and more seriously than they will. They are brave and manly; yet those who are of mixed blood, such as the Greasers, are low, degraded, treacherous and cruel. In California there were a few of the higher class, many more of a medium kind, and still more of the lower class; so that in summing up the total of California's inhabitants in 1846-7, the country was only half civilized and thinly inhabited.
At that time the country was wild, being overrun with wilder horses, cattle, sheep and goats. ”

“ A peninsula which to the Spanish conquistadores was an island glistening in the azure web of romance; a land for which the padres gave their lives in fanatic devotion to the Cross; a land rich in history, when the timbers of the Mayflower were yet trees in the forest. Lower California, once sought and guarded for her ores and her jewels, now a veritable terra incognita, slumbering, unnoticed, at the feet of her courted child, the great State of California. Lower California, her romance nigh forgotten, her possibilities overlooked by enterprise and by the statesmen of the two republics. ”

“ California, the home of the movie, the Spanish mission, the golden poppy, the militant labor leader, the turkey-trot, the grizzly-bear, the bunny-hug, progressive politics and most American slang; California, which can at a moment's notice produce an earthquake, a volcano, a geyser; California, where the spring comes in the fall and the fall comes in the summer and the summer comes in the winter and the winter never comes at all; California, where everybody is born beautiful and nobody grows old—that California is populated mainly with Californiacs. ”

“ Instead of returning, as the most of the gold-seekers intended to do on leaving their homes, they found California a delightful climate, with rich and fertile valleys, and many, very many of them concluded, after having a year's experience in the country, to become citizens, and a little later in the fifties, there were a great many people in the Western States who sold their homes and started with their families for the golden shores of the Pacific—in other words, for California—in view of adopting that State for their future homes. ”

“ But the most fertile lands in California, as yet developed, lie around the missions of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, through the long narrow valleys of San José and San Juan, along the margin of the Salinas, through the dells of San Louis Obispo, and in the vicinity of los Angeles. These, and other insular spots, may be made perfect gardens; but take California as a whole, she is not the country which agriculturists would select. Her whole mining region is barren; nature rested there with what she put beneath the soil. ”

“ The press of the nation took up the story, and the people of the United States were taught to look upon California as a land of infinite promise, abounding in agricultural and commercial possibilities, full of game, rich in timber, possessed of perfect climate, and feebly held by an effeminate people quite lacking in enterprise and disorganized among themselves. ”

“ The collection for the history of California is absolutely complete; and it should be regarded as of the greatest importance to the State, not only that such a collection exists, but that there exists in its owner a man with the high ambition to extract from it, with infinite labor and ample resources, a perfectly accurate as well as thoroughly creditable history of the country from the earliest times to the present—an advantage no other State of any nation has ever possessed. ”

“ Indeed, it seems to be a settled opinion, that California is henceforth to compose a part of the United States, and every American who is now here considers himself as treading upon his own soil, as much as if he were in one of the old thirteen revolutionary states. ”

“ The Indians were early converted to Christianity, gradually weaned from their nomadic and barbaric state, and induced to lead a settled life. They were taught farming and other civilized pursuits and became in time a peaceful and industrious people. The Spanish Government, which intended eventually to turn the mission estates into administrative districts, never acknowledged the title of the priests to the land, and in 1777 began the founding of pueblos or towns. Upper California was divided into the four provinces of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. ”

“ But I was speaking a while ago of this province of California. Do you realize, Captain, that here is a country exceeding Spain in area and equaling her soil in fertility?"
"I do realize it, indeed, señora. What we see here," indicating the waving valley, "and even after a winter of drought, is a demonstration of most wonderful fertility."
"Under the English flag all old customs will flourish here; the civilization developed will be along Spanish lines. Colonists will come in numbers and a mighty principality will grow—still it will be, in essentials, Spanish. ”