In The Footprints Of The Padres Part 5

That was, indeed, the golden age of the California missions; everybody was prosperous and proportionately happy. In 1826 the Mission of Soledad owned more than 36,000 head of cattle, and a larger number of horses and mares than any other mission in the country. These animals increased so rapidly that they were given away in order to preserve the pasturage for cattle and sheep. In 1822 the Spanish power in Mexico was overthrown; in 1824 a republican const.i.tution was established. California, not then having a population sufficient to admit it as one of the Federal States, was made a territory, and as such had a representative in the Mexican Congress; but he was not allowed a vote on any question, though he sat in the a.s.sembly and shared in the debates.

In 1826 the Federal Government began to meddle with the affairs of the friars. The Indians "who had good characters, and were considered able to maintain themselves, from having been taught the art of agriculture or some trade," were manumitted; portions of land were allotted to them, and the whole country was divided into parishes, under the superintendence of curates. The zealous missionaries were no longer to receive a salary--four hundred dollars a year had formerly been paid them out of the national exchequer for developing the resources of the State. Everybody and everything was now supposed to be self-sustaining, and was left to take care of itself. It was a dream--and a bad one!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lone Mountain, 1856]

Within one year the Indians went to the dogs. They were cheated out of their small possessions and were driven to beggary or plunder. The Fathers were implored to take charge again of their helpless flock.

Meanwhile the Pious Fund of California had run dry, as its revenues had been diverted into alien channels. The good friars resumed their offices. Once more the missions were prosperous, but for a time only. It was the beginning of the end. Year after year acts were pa.s.sed in the Mexican Congress so hampering the friars in their labors that they were at last crippled and helpless. The year 1840 was specially disastrous; and in 1845 the Franciscans the pioneer settlers and civilizers of California, were completely denuded of both power and property.

In that year a number of the missions were sold by public auction. The Indian converts, formerly attached to some of the missions, but now demoralized and wandering idly and miserably over the country, were ordered to return within a month to the few remaining missions, _or those also would be sold_. The Indians, having had enough of legislation and knowing the white man pretty well by this time, no doubt having had enough of him, returned not, and their missions were disposed of. Then the remaining missions were rented and the remnants divided into three parts: one kindly bestowed upon the missionaries, who were the founders and rightful owners of the missions; one upon the converted Indians, who seem to have vanished into thin air; one, the last, was supposed to be converted into a new Pious Fund of California for the further education and evangelization of the ma.s.ses--whoever they might be. The general government had long been in financial distress, and had often borrowed--to put it mildly--from the friars in their more prosperous days. In 1831 the Mexican Congress owed the missions of California $450,000 of borrowed money; and in 1845 it left those missionaries absolutely penniless.

Let me not harp longer upon this theme, but end with a quotation from the pages of a non-Catholic historian. Referring to the Franciscans and their mission work on the Pacific coast, Josiah Joyce, a.s.sistant professor of philosophy in Harvard College, says:[1]

"No one can question their motives, nor may one doubt that their intentions were not only formally pious but truly humane. For the more fatal diseases that so-called civilization introduced among the Indians, only the soldiers and colonists of the presidios and pueblos were to blame; and the Fathers, well knowing the evil results of a mixed population, did their best to prevent these consequences, but in vain; since the neighborhood of a presidio was often necessary for the safety of a mission, and the introduction of a white colonist was an important part of the intentions of the home government. But, after all, upon this whole toil of the missions, considered in itself, one looks back with regret, as upon one of the most devout and praiseworthy of mortal efforts; and, in view of its avowed intentions, one of the most complete and fruitless of human failures. The missions have meant, for modern American California, little more than a memory, which now indeed is lighted up by poetical legends of many sorts. But the chief significance of the missions is simply that they first began the colonization of California."

The old mission church as I knew it four and forty years ago is still standing and still an object of pious interest. The first families of the faithful lie under its eaves in their long and peaceful sleep, happily unmindful of the great changes that have come over the spirit of all our dreams. The old adobes have returned to dust, even as the hands of those who fashioned them more than a century ago. Very modern houses have crowded upon the old church and churchyard, and they seem to have become the merest shadows of their former selves; while the roof-tree of the new church soars into s.p.a.ce, and its wide walls--out of all proportion with the Dolores of departed days--are but emblematic of the new spirit of the age.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: In "California," 1886,--one of the admirable American Commonwealths Series.]

IX.

SOCIAL SAN FRANCISCO

Social San Francisco during the early Fifties seems to have been a conglomeration of unexpected externals and surprising interiors. It was heterogeneous to the last degree. It was hail-fellow-well-met, with a reservation; it asked no questions for conscience's sake; it would not have been safe to do so. There were too many pasts in the first families and too many possible futures to permit one to cast a shadow upon the other. And after all is said, if sins may be forgiven and atoned for, why should the memory of a shady past imperil the happiness and prosperity of the future? All futures should be hopeful; they were "promise-crammed" in that healthy and hearty city by the sea.

It was impossible, not to say impolite, to inquire into your neighbors'

antecedents. It was currently believed that the mines were filled with broken-down "divines," as if it were but a step from the pulpit to the pickaxe. As for one's family, it was far better off in the old home so long as the salary of a servant was seventy dollars a month, fresh eggs a dollar and a quarter a dozen, turkeys ten dollars apiece, and coal fifty dollars a ton.

In 1854 and 1855 San Francisco had a monthly magazine that any city or state might have been proud of; this was _The Pioneer_, edited by the Rev. Ferdinand C. Ewer. In 1851, a lady, the wife of a physician, went with her husband into the mines and settled at Rich Bar and Indian Bar, two neighboring camps on the north fork of the Feather River. There were but three or four other women in that part of the country, and one of these died. This lady wrote frequent and lengthy descriptive letters to a sister in New England, and these letters were afterward published serially in _The Pioneer_. They picture life as a highly-accomplished woman knew it in the camps and among the people whom Bret Harte has immortalized. She called herself "Dame Shirley," and the "Shirley Letters" in _The Pioneer_ are the most picturesque, vivid, and valuable record of life in a California mining camp that I know of. The wonder is that they have never been collected and published in book form; for they have become a part of the history of the development of the State.

The life of a later period in San Francisco and Monterey has been faithfully depicted by another hand. The life that was a mixture of Gringo and diluted Castilian--a life that smacked of the presidio and the hacienda,--that was a tale worth telling; and no one has told it so freely, so fully or so well as Gertrude Franklin Atherton.

"Dame Shirley" was Mrs. L.A.C. Clapp. When her husband died she went to San Francisco and became a teacher in the Union Street public school. It was this admirable lady who made literature my first love; and to her tender mercies I confided my maiden efforts in the art of composition.

She readily forgave me then, and was the very first to offer me encouragement; and from that hour to this she has been my faithful friend and unfailing correspondent.

South Park and Rincon Hill! Do the native sons of the golden West ever recall those names and think what dignity they once conferred upon the favored few who basked in the sunshine of their prosperity? South Park, with its line of omnibuses running across the city to North Beach; its long, narrow oval, filled with dusty foliage and offering a very weak apology for a park; its two rows of houses with, a formal air, all looking very much alike, and all evidently feeling their importance.

There were young people's "parties" in those days, and the height of felicity was to be invited to them. As a height o'ertops a hollow, so Rincon Hill looked down upon South Park. There was more elbow-room on the breezy height; not that the height was so high or so broad, but it _was_ breezy; and there was room for the breeze to blow over gardens that spread about the detached houses their wealth of color and perfume.

How are the mighty fallen! The Hill, of course, had the farthest to fall. South Parkites merely moved out: they went to another and a better place. There was a decline in respectability and the rent-roll, and no one thinks of South Park now,--at least no one speaks of it above a whisper. As for the Hill, the Hillites hung on through everything; the waves of commerce washed all about it and began gnawing at its base; a deep gully was cut through it, and there a great tide of traffic ebbed and flowed all day. At night it was dangerous to pa.s.s that way without a revolver in one's hand; for that city is not a city in the barbarous South Seas, whither preachers of the Gospel of peace are sent; but is a civilized city and proportionately unsafe.

A cross-street was lowered a little, and it leaped the chasm in an agony of wood and iron, the most unlovely object in a city that is made up of all unloveliness. The gutting of this Hill cost the city the fortunes of several contractors, and it ruined the Hill forever. There is nothing left to be done now but to cast it into the midst of the sea. I had sported on the green with the goats of goatland ere ever the stately mansion had been dreamed of; and it was my fate to set up my tabernacle one day in the ruins of a house that even then stood upon the order of its going,--it did go impulsively down into that "most unkindest cut,"

the Second Street chasm. Even the place that once knew it has followed after.

The ruin I lived in had been a banker's Gothic home. When Rincon Hill was spoiled by bloodless speculators, he abandoned it and took up his abode in another city. A tenant was left to mourn there. Every summer the wild winds shook that forlorn ruin to its foundations. Every winter the rains beat upon it and drove through and through it, and undermined it, and made a mush of the rock and soil about it; and later portions of that real estate deposited themselves, pudding-fashion, in the yawning abyss below.

I sat within, patiently awaiting the day of doom; for well I knew that my hour must come. I could not remain suspended in midair for any length of time: the fall of the house at the northwest corner of Harrison and Second Streets must mark my fall. While I was biding my time, there came to me a lean, lithe stranger. I knew him for a poet by his unshorn locks and his luminous eyes, the pallor of his face and his exquisitely sensitive hands. As he looked about my eyrie with aesthetic glance, almost his first words were: "What a background for a novel!" He seemed to relish it all--the impending crag that might topple any day or hour; the modest side door that had become my front door because the rest of the building was gone; the ivy-roofed, geranium-walled conservatory wherein I slept like a Babe in the Wood, but in densest solitude and with never a robin to cover me.

He liked the crumbling estate, and even as much of it as had gone down into the depths forever. He liked the sagging and sighing cypresses, with their roots in the air, that hung upon and clung upon the rugged edge of the remainder. He liked the shaky stairway that led to it (when it was not out of gear), and all that was irrelative and irrelevant; what might have been irritating to another was to him singularly appealing and engaging; for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson. He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill to chat and to dream; he called it "the most San Francisco-ey part of San Francisco," and so it was. It was the beginning and the end of the first period of social development on the Pacific coast. There is a picture of it, or of the South Park part of it, in Gertrude Atherton's story, "The Californians." The little glimpse that Louis Stevenson had of it in its decay gave him a few realistic pages for _The Wrecker_.

I have referred to the surprising interiors of the city in the Fifties.

What I meant was this: there was not an alley so miserable and so muddy but somewhere in it there was pretty sure to be a cottage as demure in outward appearance as modesty itself. Nothing could be more una.s.suming: it had not even the air of genteel poverty. I think such an air was not to be thought of in those days: gentility kept very much to itself. As for poverty, it was a game that any one might play at any moment, and most had played at it.

This cottage stood there--I think I will say _sat_ there, it looked so perfectly resigned,--and no doubt commanded a rent quite out of proportion to its size. It had its shaky veranda and its French windows, and was lined with canvas; for there was not a trowel full of plaster in it. The ceiling bellied and flapped like an awning when the wind soughed through the clapboards; and the walls sometimes visibly heaved a sigh; but they were covered with panelled paper quite palatial in texture and design, and that is one thing that made those interiors surprising.

At the windows the voluminous lace draperies were almost overpowering.

Satin lambrequins were festooned with colossal cord and ta.s.sels of bullion. A plate-gla.s.s mirror as wide as the mantel reflected the Florentine gilt carving of its own elaborate frame. There were bronzes on the mantel, and tall vases of Sevres, and statuettes of bisque brilliantly tinted. At the two sides of the mantel stood pedestals of Italian marble surmounted by urns of the most graceful and elegant proportions, and profusely ornamented with sculptured fruits and flowers. There was the old-fashioned square piano in its carven case, and cabinets from China or East India; also a lacquered j.a.panese screen, marble-topped tables of filigreed teek, brackets of inlaid ebony. Curios there were galore. Some paintings there were, and these rocked softly upon the gently-heaving walls. As for the velvet carpet, it was a bed of gigantic roses that might easily put to the blush the prime of summer in a queen's garden.

I well remember another home in San Francisco, one that possessed for me the strongest attraction. It was bosomed in the sandhills south of Market Street,--I know not between what streets, for they had all been blurred or quite obliterated by drifts of sifting sand. It was a small house fenced about; but the fence was for the most part buried under sand, and looked as if it were a rampart erected for the defense of this isolated cot. Some few hardy flowers had been planted there, but they were knee-deep in sand, and their petals were full of grit. One usually blew into that house with a pinch of sand, but how good it was to be there!

Within those walls there was the unmistakable evidence of the feminine touch, the aesthetic influence that refines and beautifies everything.

It was not difficult to idealize in that atmosphere. It was the home of a lady who chose to conceal her ident.i.ty, though her pen-name was a household word from one end of the coast to the other. She was a star contributor to the weekly columns of the _Golden Era,_ a periodical we all subscribed for and were immensely proud of. It was unique in its way. Of late years I have found no literary journal to compare with it at its best. It introduced Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and many others, to their first circle of admirers. In the large mail-box at its threshold--a threshold I dared not cross for awe of it--I dropped my earliest efforts in verse, and then ran for fear of being caught in the act.

Imagine the joy of a lad whose ambition was to write something worth printing, and whose wildest dream was to be named some day with those who had won their laurels in the field of letters,--imagine his joy at being petted in the sanctum of one who was in his worshipful eyes the greatest lady in the land! About her were the trophies of her triumph, though she was personally known to few. Each post brought her tribute from the grateful hearts of her readers afar off in the mountain mining camps, and perhaps from beyond the Rockies; or, it may have been, from the unsuspecting admirer who lived just beyond the first sandhill. This was another surprising interior. There was plain living and high thinking in the midst of a wilderness that was, to say the least, uninviting; the windows rattled and the sand peppered them. Without was the abomination of desolation; but within the desert blossomed as the rose.

There were other homes as homely as the one I preferred--for there was sand enough to go round. It went round and round, as G.o.d probably intended it should, until a city sat upon it and kept it quiet. Some of these homes were perched upon solitary hilltops, and were lost to sight when the fog came in from the sea; and some were crowded into the thick of the town, with all sorts of queer people for neighbors. You could, had you chosen to, look out of a back window into a hollow square full of cats and rats and tin cans; and upon the three sides of the quadrangle which you were facing, you might have seen, unblushingly revealed, all the mysteries and miseries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceanica; for they were all of them represented by delegates.

Of course there were handsome residences (not so very many of them as yet), where there was fine art--some of the finest. But often this art was to be found in the saloons, and the subjects chosen would hardly find entertainment elsewhere. The furnishing of the houses was within the bounds of good taste. Monumental marbles were not erected by the hearth-side; the window drapery was diaphanous rather than dense and dowdy. The markets of San Francisco were much to blame for the flashiness of the domestic interior: they were stocked with the gaudiest fixtures and textures, and in the inspection of them the eye was bewildered and the taste demoralized.

Harmony survived the inharmonious, and it prevailed in the homes of the better cla.s.ses, as it was bound to do; for refinement had set its seal there, and you can not counterfeit the seal of refinement. But I am inclined to think that in the Fifties there was a natural tendency to overdress, to over-decorate, to overdo almost everything. Indeed the day was demonstrative; if the now celebrated climate had not yet been elaborately advertised, no doubt there was something hi it singularly bracing. The elixir of it got into the blood and the brain, and perhaps the bones as well. The old felt younger than they did when they left "the States,"--the territory from the Rockies to the Atlantic Ocean was commonly known as "the States." The middle-aged renewed their youth, and youth was wild with an exuberance of health and hope and happiness that seemed to give promise of immortality.

No wonder that it was thought an honor to be known as the first white child born in San Francisco--I'd think it such myself,--and I'm proud to state that all three claimants are my personal friends.

X.

HAPPY VALLEY

How well I remember it--the Happy Valley of the days of old! It lay between California Street and Rincon Point; was bounded on the east by the Harbor of San Francisco, and on the west by the mission peaks. I never knew just why it was called _happy_; I never saw any wildly-happy inhabitants singing or dancing for joy on its sometimes rather indefinite street corners. If there is happiness in sand, then, happily, it was sandy. You might have climbed knee-deep up some parts of it and slid down on the other side; you could have played at "hide-and-seek"

among its shifting undulations. From what is now known as n.o.b Hill you could have looked across it to the heights of Rincon Point--and, perchance, have looked in vain for happiness. Yet who or what is happiness? A flying nymph whose airy steps even the sand can not stay for long.

Down through this Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right angles, as if life were a treadmill and there were no hope of change until the great change comes?

Happy Valley! I remember one cool twilight when a "prairie schooner,"

that was time-worn and weather-beaten, drifted down Montgomery Street from Market Street, and rounded the corner of Sutter Street, where it hove to. You know the "prairie schooner" was the old-time emigrant wagon that was forever crossing the plains in Forty-nine and the early Fifties. It was scow-built, hooded from end to end, freighted with goods and chattels; and therein the whole family lived and moved and had its being during the long voyage to the Pacific Coast.

On this twilight evening the captain of the schooner, a.s.sisted by a portion of his crew, deliberately took down part of the fence which enclosed a sand-lot bounded by Montgomery, Sutter and Post Streets; driving into the centre of the lot; the horses--four jaded beasts--were turned loose, and soon a camp-fire was lighted and the entire emigrant family gathered about it to partake of the evening meal. On this lot now stands the Lick House and the Masonic Hall--undreamed of in those days.

No one seemed in the least surprised to find in the very heart of the city a scene such as one might naturally look for in the heart of the Rocky Mountains and the wilds of the great desert, or the heights of the Humboldt. No doubt they thought it a Happy Valley; and well they might, for they had reached their journey's end.

A stone's throw from that twilight camp, on the south side of Market Street, stood old St. Patrick's Church. It was a most unpretending structure, and was quite overshadowed by the R.C. Orphan Asylum close at hand. Both were backed by sandhills; and both, together with the sand, have been spirited away. The Palace and Grand Hotels now stand on the spot. The original St. Patrick's still exists; and, after one or two transportations, has come to a final halt near the Catholic cemetery under the shadow of Lone Mountain. It must be ever dear to me, for within its modest rectory I met the first Catholic clergyman I ever became acquainted with; and within it I grew familiar with the offices of the Church; though I was instructed by the Rev. Father Accolti, S.J., at old St. Ignatius', on Market Street; and by him baptized at the St.

Mary's Cathedral, on the corner of California and Dupont Streets, now the church of the Paulist Fathers. I have referred to dear old St.

Patrick's--which was dedicated on the first Sunday in September, 1851--in the story of my conversion, a little bit of autobiography ent.i.tled "A Troubled Heart, and How It was Comforted at Last." The late Peter H. Burnett, first Governor of California, was my G.o.dfather.