In The Footprints Of The Padres Part 4

There was a long table in the centre of each room; it was always surrounded by swarms of Chinamen. Not a few foreigners of various nationalities were there. They were all intensely interested in some game that was being played upon that table. We heard the "c.h.i.n.k" of money; and as the players came and went some were glad and some were sad and some were mad. These were the gambling halls of Chinatown. They were not at all beautiful or alluring to the eye, but they cast a spell over the minds and the pockets of men that was irresistible. Nowadays the place is kept under lock and key, and you must give the countersign or you will be turned away from the door thereof by a Chinaman whose face is the image of injured innocence.

The authors of the annals of San Francisco, 1854, say:

"During 1853, most of the moral, intellectual, and social characteristics of the inhabitants of San Francisco were nearly as already described in the reviews of previous years. There was still the old reckless energy, the old love of pleasure, the fast making and fast spending of money; the old hard labor and wild delights; jobberies, official and political corruption; thefts, robberies, and violent a.s.saults; murders, duels and suicides; gambling, drinking, and general extravagance and dissipation.... The people had wealth at command, and all the pa.s.sions of youth were burning within them; and they often, therefore, outraged public decency. Yet somehow the oldest residenters and the very family-men loved the place, with all its brave wickedness and splendid folly."

I can testify that the town knew little or no change in the two years that followed. The "El Dorado" on the plaza, and the "Arcade" and "Polka" on Commercial Street, were still in full blast. How came I aware of that fact? I was a child; my guide, philosopher and friend was a child, and we were both as innocent as children should be. It is written, "Children and fools speak the truth." I may add, "Children and 'fools rush in where angels fear to tread.'" The doors of "El Dorado,"

of the "Arcade," and the "Polka" were ever open to the public. We saw from the sidewalk gaily-decorated interiors; we heard enchanting music, and there seemed to be a vast deal of jollity within. No one tried to prevent our entering; we merely followed the others; and, indeed, it was all a mystery to us. Cards were being dealt at the faro tables, and dealt by beautiful women in bewildering attire. They also turned the wheels of fortune or misfortune, and threw dice, and were skilled in all the arts that beguile and betray the innocent. The town was filled with such resorts; some were devoted to the patronage of the more exclusive set; many were traps into which the miner from the mountain gulches fell and where he soon lost his bag of "dust,"--his whole fortune, for which he had been so long and so wearily toiling. There he was shoulder to shoulder with the greaser and the lascar, the "shoulder-striker" and the hoodlum; and they were all busy with monte, faro, rondo, and rouge-et-noir.

There was no limit to the gambling in those days. There was no question of age or color or s.e.x: opportunity lay in wait for inclination at the street corners and in the highways and the byways. The wonder is that there were not more victims driven to madness or suicide.

The pictures were not all so gloomy. Six times San Francisco was devastated by fire, and all within two years--or, to speak accurately, within eighteen months. Many millions were lost; many enterprising and successful citizens were in a few hours rendered penniless. Some were again and again "burned out"; but they seemed to spring like the famed bird, who shall for once be nameless, from their own ashes.

It became evident that an efficient fire department was an immediate and imperative necessity. The best men of the city--men prominent in every trade, calling and profession--volunteered their services, and headed a subscription list that swelled at once into the thousands. Perhaps there never was a finer volunteer fire department than that which was for many years the pride and glory of San Francisco. On the Fourth of July it was the star feature of the procession; and it paraded most of the streets that were level enough for wheels to run on--and when the mud was navigable, for they turned out even in the rainy season on days of civic festivity. Their engines and hose carts and hook and ladder trucks were so lavishly ornamented with flowers, banners, streamers, and even pet eagles, dogs, and other mascots, that they might without hesitation have engaged in any floral battle on any Riviera and been sure of victory.

The magnificence of the silver trumpets and the quant.i.ty and splendor of the silver trappings of those fire companies pa.s.s all belief. It begins to seem to me now, as I write, that I must have dreamed it,--it was all so much too fine for any ordinary use. But I know that I did not dream it; that there was never anything truer or better or more efficient anywhere under the sun than the San Francisco fire department in the brave days of old. Representatives of almost every nation on earth could testify to this, and did repeatedly testify to it in almost every language known to the human tongue; for there never was a more cosmical commonwealth than sprang out of chaos on that Pacific coast; and there never was a city less given to following in the footsteps of its elder and more experienced sisters. Nor was there ever a more spontaneous outburst of happy-go-luckiness than that which made of young San Francisco a very Babel and a bouncing baby Babylon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Warner's at Meigg's Wharf]

VII.

A BOY'S OUTING

There was joy in the heart, luncheon in the knapsack, and a sparkle in the eye of each of us as we set forth on our exploring expedition, all of a sunny Sat.u.r.day. Outside of California there never were such Sat.u.r.days as those. We were perfectly sure for eight months in the year that it wouldn't rain a drop; and as for the other four months--well, perhaps it wouldn't. It is true that Longfellow had sung, even in those days:

Unto each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.

Our days were not dark or dreary,--indeed, they could not possibly be in the two-thirds-of-the-year-dry season. It did not rain so very much even in the rainy season, when it had a perfect right to; therefore there was joy in the heart and no umbrella anywhere about when we prepared to set forth on our day of discovery.

We began our adventure at Meigg's Wharf. We didn't go out to the end of it, because there was nothing but crabs there, being hauled up at frequent intervals by industrious crabbers, whose nets fairly fringed the wharf. They lay on their backs by scores and hundreds, and waved numberless legs in the air--I mean the crabs, not the crabbers. We used to go crabbing ourselves when we felt like it, with a net made of a bit of mosquito-bar stretched over an iron hoop, and with a piece of meat tied securely in the middle of it. When we hauled up those home-made hoop-nets--most everything seems to have been home-made in those days--we used to find one, two, perhaps three huge crabs revolving clumsily about the centre of attraction in the hollow of the net; and then we shouted in glee and went almost wild with excitement.

Just at the beginning of Meigg's Wharf there was a house of entertainment that no doubt had a history and a mystery even in those young days. We never quite comprehended it: we were too young for that, and too shy and too well-bred to make curious or impertinent inquiry. We sometimes stood at the wide doorway--it was forever invitingly open, --and looked with awe and amazement at paintings richly framed and hung so close together that no bit of the wall was visible. There was a bar at the farther end of the long room,--there was always a bar somewhere in those days; and there were cages filled with strange birds and beasts,--as any one might know with his eyes shut, for the odor of it all was repelling.

The strangest feature of that most strange hostelry was the amazing wealth of cobwebs that mantled it. Cobwebs as dense as c.r.a.pe waved in dusty rags from the ceiling; they veiled the pictures and festooned the picture-frames, that shone dimly through them. Not one of these cobwebs was ever molested--or had been from the beginning of time, as it seemed to us. A velvet carpet on the floor was worn smooth and almost no trace of its rich flowery pattern was left; but there were many square boxes filled with sand or sawdust and reeking with cigar stumps and tobacco juice. Need I add that some of those pictures were such as our young and innocent eyes ought never to have been laid on? Nor were they fit for the eyes of others.

There was something uncanny about that house. We never knew just what it was, but we had a faint idea that the proprietor's wife or daughter was a witch; and that she, being as cobwebby as the rest of its furnishings, was never visible. The wharf in front of the house was a free menagerie.

There were bears and other beasts behind prison bars, a very populous monkey cage, and the customary "happy family" looking as dreadfully bored as usual. Then again there were whole rows of parrots and c.o.c.katoos and macaws as splendid as rainbow tints could make them, and with tails a yard long at least.

From this bewildering pageant it was but a step to the beach below.

Indeed the water at high tide flowed under that house with much foam and fury; for it was a house founded upon the sand, and it long since toppled to its fall, as all such houses must. We followed the beach, that rounded in a curve toward Black Point. Just before reaching the Point there was a sandhill of no mean proportions; this, of course, we climbed with pain, only to slide down with perspiration. It was our Alp, and we ascended and descended it with a flood of emotion not unmixed with sand.

Near by was a wreck,--a veritable wreck; for a ship had been driven ash.o.r.e in the fog and she was left to her fate--and our mercy. Probably it would not have paid to float her again; for of ships there were more than enough. Everything worth while was coming into the harbor, and almost nothing going out of it. We looked upon that old hulk as our private and personal property. At low tide we could board her dry-shod; at high tide we could wade out to her. We knew her intimately from stem to stern, her several decks, her cabins, lockers, holds; we had counted all her ribs over and over again, and paced her quarter-deck, and gazed up at her stumpy masts--she had been well-nigh dismantled,--and given sailing orders to our fellows amidships in the very ecstasy of circ.u.mnavigation. She has gone, gone to her grave in the sea that lapped her timbers as they lay a-rotting under the rocks; and now pestiferous factories make hideous the landscape we found so fair.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Old Flume at Black Point, 1856]

As for Black Point, it was a wilderness of beauty in our eyes; a very paradise of live-oak and scrub-oak, and of oak that had gone mad in the whirlwinds and sandstorms that revelled there. Beyond Black Point we climbed a trestle and mounted a flume that was our highway to the sea.

Through this flume the city was supplied with water. The flume was a square trough, open at the top and several miles in length. It was cased in a heavy frame; and along the timbers that crossed over it lay planks, one after another, wherever the flume was uncovered. This narrow path, intended for the convenience of the workmen who kept the flume in repair, was our delight. We followed it in the full a.s.surance that we were running a great risk. Beneath us was the open trough, where the water, two or three feet in depth, was rushing as in a mill-race. Had we fallen, we must have been swept along with it, and perhaps to our doom.

Sometimes we were many feet in the air, crossing a cove where the sea broke at high tide; sometimes we were in a cut among the rocks on a jutting point; and sometimes the sand from the desert above us drifted down and buried the flume, now roofed over, quite out of sight.

So we came to Fort Point and the Golden Gate; and beyond the Fort there was more flume and such a stretch of sea and sh.o.r.e and sunshine as caused us to leap with gladness. We could follow the beach for miles; it was like a pavement of varnished sand, cool to the foot and burnished to the eye. And what sea-treasure lay strewn there! Mollusks, not so delicate or so decorative as the sh.e.l.ls we had brought with us from the Southern Seas, but still delightful. Such starfish and cloudy, starch-like jelly-fish, and all the livelier creeping and crawling creatures that populate the sh.o.r.e! Brown sea-kelp and sea-green sea-gra.s.s and the sea-anemone that are the floating gardens of the sea-G.o.ds and sea-G.o.ddesses; sea-birds, soft-bosomed as doves and crying with their ceaseless and sorrowful cry; and all they that are sea-borne along the sea-board,--these were there in their glory.

We hid in caverns and there dreamed our sea-dreams. We ate our lunches and played at being smugglers; then we built fires of drift-wood to warn the pa.s.sing ships that we were castaways on a desert island; but when they took no heed of our signals of distress we were not too sorry nor in the least distressful.

At the seal rocks we tarried long; for there are few spots within the reach of the usual sight-seer where an enormous family of sea-lions can be seen at home, sporting in their native element, and at liberty to come and go in the wide Pacific at their own sweet wills. There they had lived for numberless generations unmolested; there they still live, for they are under the protection of the law.

The famous Cliff House is built upon the cliff above them, and above it is a garden bristling with statues. Thousands upon thousands of curious idlers stare the sea-folks out of countenance--or try to; but they, the sons of the salt sea and the daughters of the deep, climb into the crevices of the rocks to sun themselves, unheeding; or leap into the waves that girdle them and sport like the fabled monsters of marine mythology. Seal, sea-leopard, or sea-lion--whatever they may be--they cry with one voice night and day; and it is not a pleasant cry either, though a far one, they mouth so horribly. Long ago it inspired a wit to madness and he made a joke; the same old joke has been made by those who followed after him. It will continue to be made with impertinent impunity until the sea gives up its seals; for the temptation is there daily and hourly, and the humorist is but human--he can not long resist it; so he will b.u.t.tonhole you on the veranda of the Cliff House and whisper in your astonished ear as if he were imparting a state secret: "Their bark is on the sea!"

The way home was sometimes a weary one. After leaving the bluff above the sh.o.r.e, we struck into an almost interminable succession of sand-dunes. There was neither track nor trail there; there was no oasis to gladden us with its vision of beauty. The pale poet of destiny and despair has written:

In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste there still is a tree; And a bird in the solitude singing, Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

There was no fountain in our desert, and we knew it well enough; for we had often braved its sands. In that wide waste there was not even the solitary tree that moved the poet to song; nor a bird in our solitude, save a sea-gull cutting across-lots from the ocean to the bay in search of a dinner. There were some straggling vines on the edge of our desert, thick-leaved and juicy; and these were doing their best to keep from getting buried alive. The sand was always shifting out yonder, and there was a square mile or two of it. We could easily have been lost in it but for our two everlasting landmarks--Mount Tamalpais across the water to the north, and in the south Lone Mountain. Lone Mountain was our Calvary--a green hill that loomed above the graves where slept so many who were dear to us. The cross upon its summit we had often visited in our holiday pilgrimages. They were _holydays_, when our childish feet toiled hopefully up that steep height; for that cross was the beacon that lighted the world-weary to everlasting rest.

And so we crossed the desert, over our shoetops in sand; climbing one hill after another, only to slide or glide or ride down the yielding slope on the farther side. Meanwhile the fog came in like a wet blanket.

It swathed all the landscape in impalpable snow; it chilled us and it thrilled us, for there was danger of our going quite astray in it; but by and by we got into the edge of the town, and what a very ragged edge it was in the dim long ago! Once in the edge of the town, we were masters of the situation: you couldn't lose us even in the dark. And so ended the outing of our merry crew,--merry though weary and worn; yet not so worn and weary but we could raise at parting a glad "Hoorah for Health, Happiness, and the Hills of Home!"

VIII.

THE MISSION DOLORES

I have read somewhere in the pages of a veracious author how, five or six years before my day, he had ridden through chaparral from Yerba Buena to the Mission Dolores with the howl of the wolf for accompaniment. Yerba Buena is now San Francisco, and the mission is a part of the city; it is not even a suburb.

In 1855 there were two plank-roads leading from the city to the Mission Dolores; on each of these omnibuses ran every half hour. The plank-road was a straight and narrow way, cut through acres of chaparral--thickets of low evergreen oaks,--and leading over forbidding wastes of sand. To stretch a figure, it was as if the sea-of-sand had been divided in the midst, so that the children of Israel might have pa.s.sed dry-shod, and the Egyptians pursuing them might have been swallowed up in the billows of sand that flowed over them at intervals.

Somewhere among those treacherous dunes--of them it might indeed be said that "the mountains skipped like rams and the little hills like lambs,"--somewhere thereabout was located the once famous but now fabulous Pipesville, the country-seat of my old friend, "Jeems Pipes of Pipesville." He was longer and better known to the world as Stephen C.

Ma.s.sett, composer of the words and music of that once most popular of songs, "When the Moon on the Lake is Beaming," as well as many another charming ballad.

Stephen C. Ma.s.sett, a most delightful companion and a famous diner-out, give a concert of vocal music interspersed with recitations and imitations, in the school-house that stood at the northwest corner of the plaza. This was on Monday evening, June 22, 1849; and it was the first public entertainment, the first regular amus.e.m.e.nt, ever given in San Francisco. The only piano in the country was engaged for the occasion; the tickets were three dollars each, and the proceeds yielded over five hundred dollars; although it cost sixteen dollars to have the piano used on the occasion moved from one side of the plaza, or Portsmouth Square, to the other. On a copy of the programme which now lies before me I find this line: "N.B.--Front seats reserved for ladies!" History records that there were but four ladies present--probably the only four in the town at the time. Ma.s.sett died in New York city a few months ago,--a man who had friends in every country under the sun, and, I believe, no enemy.

I remember the Mission Dolores as a detached settlement with a p.r.o.nounced Spanish flavor. There was one street worth mentioning, and only one. It was lined with low-walled adobe houses, roofed with the red curved tiles which add so much to the adobe houses that otherwise would be far from picturesque. The adobe is a sun-baked brick; it is mud-color; its walls look as if they were moulded of mud. The adobes were the native California habitations. We spoke of them as adobes; although it would probably be as correct, etymologically, to refer to brick houses as bricks.

There were a few ramshackle hotels at the mission; for in the early days it seemed as if everybody either boarded or took in boarders, and many families lived for years in hotels rather than attempt to keep house in the wilds of San Francisco. The mission was about one house deep each side of the main street. You might have turned a corner and found yourself face to face with the cattle in the meadow. As for the goats, they met you at the doorway and followed you down the street like dogs.

At the top of this street stood the mission church and what few mission buildings were left for the use of the Fathers. The church and the grounds were the most interesting features of the place, and it was a favorite resort of the citizens of San Francisco; yet it most likely would not have been were the church the sole attraction. Here, in appropriate enclosures, there were bull-fighting, bear-baiting, and horse-racing. Many duels were fought here, and some of them were so well advertised that they drew almost as well as a c.o.c.k-fight. c.o.c.k-fighting was a special Sunday diversion. Through the mission ran the highway to the pleasant city of San Jose; it ran through a country unsurpa.s.sed in beauty and fertility. Above the mission towered the mission peaks, and about it the hillslopes were mantled with myriads of wild flowers, the splendor and variety of which have added to the fame of California.

The mission church was never handsome; but the facade with the old bells hanging in their niches, and the almost naive simplicity of its architectural adornment, are extremely pleasing. It is a long, narrow, dingy nave one enters. Its walls of adobe do not retain their coats of whitewash for any length of time; in the rainy season they are damp and almost clammy. The floor is of beaten earth; the Stations upon the walls of the rudest description; the narrow windows but dimly light the interior, and rather add to than dispel the gloom that has been gathering there for ages. The high altar is, of course, in striking contrast with all that dark interior: it is over-decorated in the Mexican manner--flowers, feathers, tinsel ornaments, tall candlesticks elaborately gilded; all the statues examples of the primitive art that appealed strongly to the uncultivated eye; and all the adornments gay, gaudy, if not garish. Do you wonder at this? When you enter the old church at the Mission Dolores you should recall its history, and picture in your imagination the people for whom the mission was established.

The Franciscans founded their first mission in California at San Diego in 1769. The Mission Dolores was founded on St. Francis' Day, 1776. To found a mission was a serious matter; yet one and twenty missions were in the full tide of success before the good work was abandoned. The friars were the first fathers of the land: they did whatever was done for it and for the people who originally inhabited it. They explored the country lying between the coast range and the sea. They set apart large tracts of land for cultivation and for the pasturing of flocks and herds. For a long time Old and New Spain contributed liberally to what was known as the Pious Fund of California. The fund was managed by the Convent of San Fernando and certain trustees in Mexico, and the proceeds transmitted from the city of Mexico to the friars in California.

The mission church was situated, as a rule, in the centre of the mission lands, or reservations. The latter comprised several thousand acres of land. With the money furnished by the Pious Fund of California the church was erected, and surrounded by the various buildings occupied by the Fathers, the retainers, and the employees who had been trained to agriculture and the simple branches of mechanics. The presbytery, or the rectory, was the chief guest-house in the land. There were no hotels in the California of that day, but the traveller, the prospector, the speculator, was ever welcome at the mission board; and it was a bountiful board until the rapacity of the Federal Government laid it waste. Alexander Forbes, in his "History of Upper and Lower California"

(London, 1839), states that the population of Upper California in 1831 was a little over 23,000; of these 18,683 were Indians. It was for the conversion of these Indians that the missions were first established; for the bettering of their condition--mental, moral and physical--that they were trained in the useful and industrial arts. That they labored not in vain is evident. In less than fifty years from the day of its foundation the Mission of San Francisco Dolores--that is in 1825--is said to have possessed 76,000 head of cattle; 950 tame horses; 2,000 breeding mares; 84 stud of choice breed; 820 mules; 79,000 sheep; 2,000 hogs; 456 yoke of working oxen; 18,000 bushels of wheat and barley; besides $35,000 in merchandise and $25,000 in specie.