The California Birthday Book Part 43

NOVEMBER 28.

CALIFORNIA TO IRELAND.

Great! Erect! Majestic! Free!

Thrilled with life from sea to sea.

See the Motherland uphold To the sky her Green and Gold.

LAURENCE BRANNICK.

NOVEMBER 29.

And the books! Without final data at hand, I incline to believe that by the time the war came along to give us a new text, California had already, in a dozen years, doubled the volume of American literature.

In the same way, of course, that it was doubled again--for our war literature was not mostly written upon the battle-field. In half a century this current has not ceased. It is a lean month even now which does not see, somewhere, some sort of book about California. It is certain that as much literature (using the word as it is used) has been written of California as of all the other states together. This means, of course, only matter in which the State is an essential, not an incident.

CHARLES F. LUMMIS, in _The Right Hand of the Continent, Out West, June_, 1902.

NOVEMBER 30.

By a queer sequence of circ.u.mstances, the essays, begun in the _Lark_, were continued in the _Queen_, and, if you have read these two papers, you will know that one magazine is as remote in character from the other as San Francisco is from London. But each has happened to fare far afield in search of readers, and between them I may have converted a few to my optimistic view of every-day incident. To educate the British Matron and Young Person was, perhaps, no more difficult than to open the eyes of the California Native Son. The fogs that fall over the Thames are not very different to the mists that drive in through the Golden Gate, after all!

GELETT BURGESS, in _The Romance of the Commonplace._

DECEMBER 1.

The Bohemian Club, whose real founder is said to have been the late Henry George, was formed in the '70's by newspaper writers and men working in the arts or interested in them. It had grown to a membership of 750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers, musicians and actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group of men, and hospitality was their evocation. Yet the thing which set this club off from all others in the world was the midsummer High Jinks. The club owned a fine tract of redwood forest fifty miles north of San Francisco. In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from business, went up to this grove and camped out for two weeks. On the last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle in praise of the forest with poetic words, music and effects done by the club. In late years this has been practically a masque or an opera. It cost about $10,000. * * * The thing which made it possible was the art spirit which is in the Californian.

WILL IRWIN, in _The City That Was._

DECEMBER 2.

Nearly all is now covered with a luxuriant growth of vegetation the most diverse, yet all of it foreign to the soil. Side by side are the products of two zones, reaching the highest stages of perfection, yet none of them natives of this coast.

Gay cottages now line the roads where so recently the hare cantered along the dusty cattle-trail; and villages lie brightly green with a wealth of foliage where the roaring wings of myriads of quail shook the air above impenetrable jungles of cactus.

T.S. VAN d.y.k.e, in _Southern California._

DECEMBER 3.

* * * The chief and highest function of the University is to a.s.sert and perpetually prove that general principles--laws--govern Man, Society, Nature, Life; and to make unceasing war on the reign of temporary expedients. * * * There never was a period or a country in which the reign of fundamental law needed constant a.s.sertion and more perpetual proof than our own period and our own country. * * * The living danger is that society may come to permanently distrust the reign of law. * * * A national or a personal life built on expedients of the day, like a house built on the sand, will inevitably come to ruin.

PRESIDENT HOLDEN, in _Inaugural Address of University of California_, 1886.

DECEMBER 4.

And now my story is told, the story of my work, and the story of my life. Looking back over all the long stretch of years that I have carried this heavy burden, though I should not care to a.s.sume it again, yet I am not sorry to have borne it. Of the various motives which urge men to the writing of books, perhaps the most worthy, worthier by far than the love of fame, is the belief that the author has something to say which will commend itsself to his fellow-man, which perchance his fellow-man may be the better for hearing. If I have fulfilled in some measure even the first of these conditions, then has my labor not been in vain.

HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT, in _Literary Industries._

DECEMBER 5.

LAW IN THE EARLY MINING-CAMPS.

Here, in a new land, under new conditions, subjected to tremendous pressure and strain, but successfully resisting them, were a.s.sociated bodies of freemen bound together for a time by common interests, ruled by equal laws, and owning allegiance to no higher authority than their own sense of right and wrong. They held meetings, chose officers, decided disputes, meted out a stern and swift punishment to offenders, and managed their local affairs with entire success; and the growth of their committees was proceeding at such a rapid rate, that days and weeks were often sufficient for vital changes, which, in more staid communities, would have required months or even years.

CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, in _Mining Camps._

DECEMBER 6.

New towns were laid out in the valleys to supply the camps, and those already established grew with astonishing rapidity. Stockton, for instance, increased in three months from a solitary ranch-house to a canvas city of one thousand inhabitants. Sacramento also became a canvas city, whose dust-clouds whirled, and men, mules, and oxen toiled; where boxes, barrels, bales innumerable, were piled in the open air, no shelter being needed for months. For the City Hotel, Sacramento, thirty thousand dollars per year was paid as rent, although it was only a small frame building. The Parker House, San Francisco, cost thirty thousand dollars to build, and rented for fifteen thousand dollars per month.

CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, in _Mining Camps._

DECEMBER 7.

The prospector is the advance agent of progress, civilization and prosperity. * * * It is for the sight of a yellow streak in his pan that he has been tempted to endure the fatigue, cold, and hunger of the mountains, and the heat, thirst and horror of the desert.

The prospector is a man of small pretensions, of peaceful disposition, indomitable will, boundless perseverance, remarkable endurance, undoubted courage, irrepressible hopefulness, and unlimited hospitality He is the friend of every man till he has evidence that the man is his enemy, and he is the most respected man in the mining regions of the West.

ARTHUR J. BURd.i.c.k, in _The Mystic Mid-Region._