Chapter XIII: Introduction: By Reuben G. Thwaites (11)

This Vigilance Committee drew a large following of citizens; but there was a continuous undercurrent of opposition. General Sherman, commander of the second division of the State militia, backed by the vacillating Governor and representing constitutional authority, was the leader of the opposition sentiment. In June, the Law-and-Order Party under him determined to rise against the Vigilantes. He appealed to General Wool, United States Commander in the Department, for arms, and also to Commodore Farragut at Mare Island. These commanders declined to interfere in State troubles without orders from the Government. Governor Johnson declared the city and county of San Francisco in a state of insurrection, and asked aid from Washington. General Sherman, finding himself powerless, resigned. Chief-Justice Terry, an active opponent of the Committee, having come from Sacramento to enforce the law, now complicated matters by stabbing an officer of the Vigilantes. The Committee held him a prisoner but set him free when his victim recovered. After three months of life, after hanging in all four criminals, well-known desperadoes, banishing many others, and paving the way for a purer administration of law, the Committee disbanded, leaving a small body to settle its affairs. The next election saw a full set of honest officials in power, and for twenty years San Francisco had the name of being one of the best-governed cities in the world.

Looking back dispassionately, it appears that the Vigilance Committee had something of the dignity and purpose and procedure of the ancient court of the Areopagus. It was not like the extemporized Sanhedrim that tried Christ, a body which kept the appearance of justice but mocked the reality. It was not a masked band of regulators like the Ku Klux or the White Caps; but it was an irresistible rising of the best citizens in calm debate, in open daylight, with sobriety and decorum and every safeguard of justice. Unlike the anti-Mafia of New Orleans, it put down the mob spirit, but did not engender it. Though acting outside of the constituted authorities, it had the severest reverence for law in the ideal. As President Coleman expressed it, the Committee did not act under lynch law, but under a sort of martial law that obtains in time of siege. Considering the daring wantonness of crime, the subsidized or terrorized condition of the courts of justice, and the immunity of criminals, law-abiding citizens seem to have been justified in reverting to the elemental order of things, as is the man who attacks the thief in the night. But, of course, loyalty from the first to public interests instead of easy optimism and self-absorption, would have held back the occasion for the heroic measures of the historic Committee. Men never learn, save through suffering, that the support of the common welfare is a sacred duty, and that this duty squares exactly with their highest private interests.

During all these years and long after, San Francisco suffered greatly from disputed land titles. Conflicting claims led to labyrinthine legislation, and increasing hardship, one crisis being the Squatter Riots.

The treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo had decreed that all property rights should be respected by the new government. So property rights founded on cloudy and ill-understood laws and customs of Spain and Mexico had now to be adjudicated in the Californian courts. San Francisco was entangled in the mazes of two rival Spanish claims, embracing well-nigh all her territory except the "made" land. There was much dispute as to whether or not the city had ever been made a pueblo proper. On this depended the holding or forfeiting of four square leagues of land. Though the city petitioned the Land Commission in 1852 for confirmation of her public grants, the controversy was pending through wearying legislation, with repeated surveys and delays and continual jeopardy of property, until finally settled by the decision of Secretary Lamar in 1887.

The decline of the gold output brought to the front the agricultural resources of the State, and San Francisco came to be the centre of distribution for wheat, wines, and fruits.

The Central Pacific Railroad was completed in 1867, with San Francisco as the Western terminus, and as by a magic stroke the city was only three thousand miles instead of nineteen thousand miles from Eastern markets. Since then three other transcontinental lines and numerous local lines have brought trade and travel into this emporium of the Pacific, while the ships of all nations fetch and carry through her Golden Gate.

The war of secession found California wavering between the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars. A large Southern element, much to the front in politics, had maintained a strong Democratic influence in the State. The celebrated duel, just outside the city limits between Broderick and Terry--the Terry of Vigilance Committee memory--turned the tide toward Republicanism and sympathy for the North. The duel grew out of the Broderick and Gwin senatorial contest. Terry stood for Southern chivalry; Broderick stood for free labor and progressive politics. Not essentially great or noble, Broderick was made heroic by his tragic death. During war times he was a colossal figure in men's minds, and his anti-slavery sentiments echoed through city and State, a slogan and a cleaving sword for freedom and the North.

In the '70's there sprang up in San Francisco a tremendous excitement over the silver mines on the Comstock Lode. The bonanza was estimated to be worth over fifteen hundred millions of dollars. True, this argent field was across the Sierras, in the State of Nevada. But most of the output found its way to San Francisco. The principal owners lived there, and San Francisco was the depot for Comstock supplies. The Stock Board operated there, and stocks bought for less than one hundred thousand dollars soared up to two hundred million. At the highest notch of prices the manipulators sold out, and the airy fabric of speculation fell with a crash. The banks had been emptied by speculators eager to buy stocks, and were greatly embarrassed. Myriads were swept into poverty, leaving immense fortunes in the hands of a few.

Soon after the Comstock collapse the Sand Lot agitation sprang into life. Over one hundred and fifty millions of dollars had been removed from circulation by the Comstock jugglery. The wealth of the outside world was temporarily diverted from the San Francisco markets. A great drought had been on the State during two years and the lean kine had devoured the fat. Harvests were sparse or wholly lacking. Cattle perished beside the dry watercourses. A large body of the outside unemployed had come to swell the tide of the city's drifting, workless ones. The railroad was threatening a reduction of wages to its thousands of men. Riots were on in Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Baltimore, and had sent contagion on the enforced idlers in San Francisco. Feeling long smouldering broke into fire against the Chinese and the railroad, two factors believed by the working-men to be largely instrumental in cheapening wages and robbing men of work. A mob gathered, threatening to rout out the Asiatics. The police could not disperse the rioters.

On July 24th there came a third call for the Vigilance Committee to assemble, which many thought an unnecessary and high-handed summons. William T. Coleman was for a third time given charge. The Committee was to proceed upon lines followed in the '50's. But this time they were to co-operate with the authorities rather than to work in opposition. On July 25th, the mob, infuriated by the menace of the Committee and looking on it as a mere support of capitalistic interests, gathered about the Pacific Mail Dock, where immigrant Chinese were landed. The Committee, armed with pick-handles, met the labor mob at the dock and a few men were killed. This ended the uprising. But the issue was soon thrust into politics. The anti-Chinese believers gathered upon the sand lots in the neighborhood of the City Hall and organized the Working-man's Party. It spread throughout the State. Dennis Kearny, an illiterate but rudely eloquent speaker, became the leader, the Wat Tyler of the hour. The movement ended in the adoption by the State of a new Constitution framed along progressive lines.

The people of San Francisco are of all kindreds and tongues. Buddha, Mahomet, and Confucius are prayed to beside the Christian temples. The Indians of the Mission have faded from the peninsula and the sombreroed Spaniard dashes no more from the Mission to the beach about his bull-fights and bear-baitings. But here are Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Celts, Greeks, Slavs, Latins, Hindus, Chinese, Kanakas, Japanese, and Chilenos, all mixing in the great crucible and slowly shaping a new type of man, the Western American. All seem to be mixing, it should be explained, except the Chinese, for, after a quarter of a century of experience, San Francisco feels that her Chinese population is still an alien body and sure to remain so even to the third and fourth generation.

The problem of Chinese immigration has come up again and again in San Francisco. In 1869 the Chinese were invited and welcomed from China. In 1892, the Geary law was passed prohibiting the coming of any but the student class and providing for deportation under certain conditions. A generation grew up between this hail and farewell, China in the meantime pouring her tens of thousands of coolies into San Francisco. California welcomes any race that affiliates. But she has found that the Chinese race is not as the impressionable Indian or negro; but is an arrested race in the yoke of caste and ancient tradition, one looking with contempt upon upstart Anglo-Saxon civilization. The Chinese swarmed into a quarter of the city about Portsmouth Square, and have made there a small, evil-smelling Canton, where only a foreign tongue is spoken, and where strange gods are worshipped. Few have brought wives. Slave girls are the only women. Every Chinese prays to die in China, or to have his bones rot there. American law to most of them is but a pestilent thing to be evaded. They have no interest in the growth of the country or its institutions. They work for starvation wages, their living being extremely cheap, requiring only tea and rice and a bare shelf to sleep upon in a room crowded with such shelves. Being imitative, and as patient as cattle, and withal so cheap as hirelings, they have taken the places of women in the household and factory and the places of men and boys in the work of dock and shop and field. The assertion that this labor liberates the whites for higher work does not seem to be verified. Many trace the vicious "hoodlum" class of both sexes to the enforced idleness of these young people, springing from the iron competition of the Chinese in the labor market.

Notwithstanding all this, the little slant-eyed men with their grotesque superstitions, their stiff, stark, unhomelike homes, add a quaintness and a touch of color to this romantic city. Gay placards of intense greens and vermilions flutter from their doorposts. Under the dull outer tunics of the elders gleam surtouts of gay brocades, while the few children, little faithful copies of their sires, all tricked out like the lanterns of the night, go toddling on tiny, rocking shoes through the narrow, dingy streets. The Chinese theatres, temples, and restaurants are full of the Oriental strangeness. The interiors of some of them are lacquered and varnished like huge tea-boxes.

As one gets a strip of Cathay in Chinatown, so he may find a corner of Italy on the south slopes of Telegraph Hill. Here children, looking like the cherubs of their kinsmen, the old masters, swarm through steep narrow streets, upon curious little balconies, out of odd windows, or upon the steps of chapels.

The architecture of San Francisco is a medley of many schools. The buildings, especially the homes, are largely of wood; the recurring feature is the bay window that focuses the light and heat. To the newcomer they all seem of the same color, for the fogs and winds soon reduce all hues to a fine, restful gray. In the beginning, by a curious irony, stone and lumber were shipped from the East and from Asia to this land of forests and granite to build some of the structures still holding their places against the pressure of time. In the newer buildings of the city there is some attempt to make the architecture express the function of the structure--the stability of the business house, the aspiration of the church, the simple security of the home. The new City Hall is an example of permanence and chaste elegance. The old mission architecture is being revived. This Spanish-Moorish adaptation is the most characteristic and harmonious development of Californian architecture. Built of the earth, the old mission piles seem almost as if not made by man, but nature. For they repeat in long stretches and low swells the contour of the hills about them, and give back their color-tones of dun and tan and rusty red.

The year the new and greater name was given to the city, a misfortune fell upon the streets. Regardless of cliff and curve, ignoring height and hollow, the streets were laid out in undeviating straight lines. And so a city on fairer than Roman hills, with circling waterways more lovely than the curve of Constantinople's Golden Horn, was deformed as far as its high bearing could be hurt; was checkered by pitiless compass lines, when it might have had windings and slow curves and gentle slopes.

Market, the main street, runs lengthwise of the peninsula. Its intersection with Kearny is a nerve-centre of the city, whence radiate three great streets. Near this spot are the main newspaper buildings and most of the large hotels. San Francisco's streets, unlike those of Sacramento and Los Angeles, are not lined with trees. But nearly every dooryard has its green place where tall geraniums, camelias, heliotropes, or fuchias fling out, the year round, their splashes of scarlet and purple.

The city boasts of one great park of a thousand acres, on the hills and ravines out by the sea. Central, Prospect, and Fairmount parks of the East fail beside the charm of this Arcadian Western park, probably the finest in North America. The trees of the world, from conifer to cactus, are here, and every flower that blooms. Beyond the park is the Cliff House, overhanging huge rocks, the rendezvous of gulls and seals and shy things of the water.

The old Portsmouth Square is dingy and draggled. It looks upon the scene of the executions of the Vigilantes and is full of memories for the chronicler. Its great charm now is the statue of Robert Louis Stevenson, who when in San Francisco, often sat there, studying the quaint, broken life about him. Another significant monument, poetic and historic presented to the city by Mayor James D. Phelan, stands before the new City Hall in honor of the Native Son of the Golden West.

It is doubtless only a question of time when expanding San Francisco will absorb the cities an hour's ride across the Bay,--Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda,--the homes now of many of San Francisco's business men.

The University of California at Berkeley draws its largest clientele from San Francisco. By the benefactions of the widow of Senator Hearst of San Francisco, this university has under way a housing perhaps the most spacious and symmetrical in the world. The structure, to cost nearly five million dollars, follows a plan chosen by experts from designs submitted after a world competition, and will crown a long hill slope, looking down on San Francisco City and Bay and out toward sleeping Asia. The allied professional colleges of the University are already in San Francisco. Its art department is in the fine old mansion of Hopkins, the railroad builder, on California Street, the home street of millionaires. A school of mechanic arts, endowed by the pioneer, James Lick, who gave the great astronomical observatory to the State University, is also under way in San Francisco.

Another university drawing its student body largely from San Francisco is an hour or more down the peninsula from the city,--the Leland Stanford, Jr., founded by Jane and Leland Stanford and wife, of San Francisco. This university, by the way, is built, after the old mission plan of one-story buildings, about an inner court, with arcades and Roman towers and tiled roof.

The city has three great working libraries, the Public, the Mercantile, and the Mechanics' Institute. Adolph Sutro, the late owner of about one tenth of the territory of San Francisco City and County, whose fine grounds out by the Cliff House have long been open to the public, left a unique collection of two hundred thousand pamphlets and volumes of rare worth, gathered for the public use. The Bancroft Library is phenomenal in that it has cornered all the original material for the history of the far West. Those myriads of manuscripts, pamphlets, and books have been indexed by experts and the library is a sort of Vatican for California.

The Bohemian Club of San Francisco, a comradery of litterateurs, artists, and lovers of the arts, is a unique expression of the æsthetic individuality of the city, and is one of its strong social forces.

San Francisco has perhaps no famous name that dominates the city as Franklin dominates Philadelphia; as Beecher, Brooklyn; as Carnegie, Pittsburg. But if great-hearted Thomas Starr King had lived longer, he might have been its crowning personality as he is now its most sainted memory. His inflexible loyalty and impassioned eloquence made him at the outbreak of the Civil War a commanding figure, if not the leading citizen of California.

Though only fifty years old, San Francisco has given to literature and art a few names that the world will not willingly let die. For forty years Joaquin Miller, the "Poet of the Sierras," has been a friend and neighbor of her hills and waters, telling in noble numbers the glories and the terrors of the strange new land "by the sundown seas." Here Bret Harte founded the _Overland Monthly_ and with "The Luck of Roaring Camp" began his creation of Californian characters. What matters it if they never existed outside of his pages,--those drinking, dirking dare-devils, those tenor-voiced, soulful-eyed gamblers, striking sorrow to the hearts of ladies? For, touched by his genius, they exist for us there, in perennial charm and invitation.

Here, too, Henry George wrote his _Progress and Poverty_, a book that was a prophet-cry heard round the world, declaring that every man has a right to a foothold on the earth. Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Warren Stoddard, John Vance Cheney, Charlotte Perkin Gilman, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and Gertrude Atherton did here a deal of their early literary work,[17] but now have wandered away into the world, leaving behind them, however, a goodly group of critics, story-writers, and poets; painters, also, William Keith and the rest, who have caught into splendid captivity some of the immensities and radiances about them.

This is but an abstract and brief chronicle of the great city at the Western gate of the world. There she sits, the ultimate outpost of the passion of progress. Sleepless unrest, forever urging the peoples westward, land by land, now, at the end of centuries, begins to surge and thunder on the shores of Balboa's Sea. But this end is only a beginning--this great city is only the first of a chain of cities fated, under the star of empire, to spring into life on these circling shores, making the Pacific at last the greater Mediterranean of mankind.

FOOTNOTE:

[17] The reader will yet more vividly recall that _The Man with the Hoe_ came out of San Francisco and will heartily approve the editor's selection of Mr. Markham to contribute this chapter to the volume.

EDITOR.

MONTEREY

CIUDAD DE AYER Y DE HOY

BY HAROLD BOLCE

To know the story of Monterey, one must go back for a moment to the southern coast of Europe. There, on an island a day's sail from the land that later cradled a prodigy destined to make dynasties his playthings, there was born, in 1713, a boy who by pacific conquests was to perform a part no less significant than Napoleon's in determining the history of nations.

While the infant Bonaparte was listening, perhaps impatiently, to Corsican lullabies, Junípero Serra, a mendicant friar from Majorca, discovered, or rediscovered, on the far shores of this continent the supposedly vanished harbor of Monterey, and thereby marked the genesis of the movement that was finally to give the American republic a western frontage on the sea.

But for this auspicious event and the stimulating effect on Spanish exploration it afterwards provoked, the great domain from San Diego to the Straits of Juan de Fuca would not to-day be rendering tribute to the Government at Washington. The western lines of the Louisiana Purchase would mark our farthermost frontier; the incredible hoard of California's roaring camps would be minted into sovereigns, shillings, rubles, imperials, or francs; no Pacific Squadron would have carried our flag to the gates of the East; and we would to-day be a hemmed-in nation, disputing our land boundaries with encroaching colonies of Europe, instead of a world power projecting canals to sever continents in the interest of our trade, and sailing our ships east and west across the seven seas.

The average tourist, viewing the adobe ruins of the Monterey presidio and recalling the futile guns of that crumbled fortress, does not dream of the place Monterey filled in the march of international events. Nor will the guide enlighten him as he takes him over the seagirt drive to Carmel and the cliffs of Point Lobos, for that profane, though picturesque historian omits even to say that Robert Louis Stevenson furnished the plan for this famous highway.

Some gleams of Monterey's immortal past illumine the reverent traveller who climbs the stone steps of Junípero's Mission at Carmel. He knows, then, vaguely, that he is exploring the venerable tomb of one of the great men of the world. And the irreverent guide, if asked, will indicate indifferently the spot on the gospel side of the sanctuary where rest the bones of this prophet and builder of empire, but before the hurrying train-catcher has returned to the Golden Gate he has ceased to reflect upon the incalculable debt America owes to this mendicant seer and colonizer who, in the name of God, St. Francis, and the King, added half a continent to the Crown of Spain, and, building better than he knew, established the western foundations of the republic that was to rise above Spanish and Mexican decay.

Monterey was an old name on the crude maps of the Mexican frontier. Eighteen years before the _Mayflower_ landed at Plymouth Rock, Don Sebastian Vizcaino had rounded the pine-edged promontory that hides the harbor of Monterey, and, anchoring in the bay, went ashore and with sacred rites named the port in honor of Count de Monterey, the reigning Viceroy. For more than a century and a half the spot was not revisited save by savage hunters. Efforts to relocate the harbor were without success.

Back of the concealing peninsula the bay of Monterey sweeps in a great crescent to Santa Cruz, thirty miles away, and to exploring navigators, shunning possible shoals, the coast presented a seemingly unbroken line. It came to be the scientific belief that some geologic upheaval had altered the contour of the coast. Mariners were mystified. Efforts to rediscover Monterey assumed the nature of crusades. No less a personage than Gaspar de Portala, with a retinue of sixty-five persons, set out overland from Loreto in 1769 to find the vanished harbor. Without identifying the haven he sought, he camped on its tree-rimmed beaches and erected a cross under the ancient oak in whose shade Vizcaino had partaken of the sacrament.

A year later came the seer and scholar Junípero. Long before, in his college in Majorca where he graced with distinction the chair of philosophy, he had read and treasured the description Vizcaino had given. Now he recognized the surviving oak and the neighboring springs, and, turning, he saw unrolled before him the bay which, in its vastness, had to other eyes seemed only a part of the open sea.

Inspecting Portala's wooden cross, Junípero saw that at the base were votive offerings of birds, shells, strings of fish newly caught, and in a beaver-skin quiver a cluster of arrows tipped with obsidian. Here were signs and portents which to Junípero were ever a source of inspiration. In after years he learned that the Eslenes, or Monterey Indians, had for ages handed down a tradition that some day a messiah would come to them; and that just before the advent of Junípero, the cross which Portala had reared seemed to rise in the sky at night until its splendor filled the heavens; and that then the tribes, believing their deliverer was at hand, came with gifts of food and trinkets to this unaccustomed altar and, in token of the peace they felt, tied a quiver of arrows to the cross.

In the fertile valley of Carmel just over the pine-clad cordillera that conceals the bay, on a slope above the thundering surf, Junípero dedicated the Mission that was to be named San Carlos in honor of the King. Hanging his bells on a cypress branch, he chimed the tidings of the gospel he was to preach.

"Why sound this call?" protested his companions; "there are no heathen here."

"Would that these bells might be heard around the world!" replied Junípero.

Few events in Spanish history since the expulsion of the Moors three centuries before had occasioned the joy that greeted the news of the rediscovery of Monterey. In the Mexican capital cathedral bells pealed throughout the night, rockets flared in the sky, and guns in the forts kept up a cannonade. Later, in Madrid the rejoicing was even more tumultuous. Royal salutes were added to the acclaim and the King declared a public holiday. A sandalled monk, seeking neither gain nor temporal glory, the leader of a handful of Franciscan pioneers, had restored a fabled harbor to the world.

The discovery of the bay of San Francisco, reported at the same time, was ignored as a trivial and miscellaneous item.

The celebration in honor of Junípero's discovery gave new impetus to his plans of Christian conquest, and Monterey was declared the capital of the colonial empire.

For a time it appeared that nothing more would be needed to stimulate Spain to hold the western coast of America against the world. But Castilian enthusiasm was short-lived. The mystery of Monterey having been cleared away and the event deliriously lauded, Spain lapsed into an indefinite programme concerning the Californian coast. Both Madrid and Mexico all but forgot Monterey and the activities of wandering friars who, radiating thence, were unconsciously preparing the way for a national destiny as glorious as Spain's, even at the height of her circumstance and pomp.

Now came the critical moment in Junípero's career, a moment that was to decide the fate of the western half of the New World. Antonio Bucareli had been installed as Viceroy of Mexico. A keen man of conventional wisdom, it seemed to him to be a waste of public money to divert a stream of gold to maintain the far-away civilizing dreams of mendicants centred at Carmel. He would close the harbor of San Blas, then maintained to equip expeditions to the Californian settlements, and abandon the fruitless undertaking of trying to populate bleak promontories swept by winds that brought home no rich argosies. The enterprise of his subjects should be devoted to more lucrative pursuits.

Here was need and opportunity for a supreme test of the resources that had made the founder of Monterey the heroic figure of the West. He saw, as did no other Spaniard of his day, the splendid future awaiting the Pacific coast. There was no time to halt between two opinions. Already Captain Behring had explored northwestern waters in the name of Russia, and now the fur traders of that empire, establishing their commercial posts at Unalaska, were prepared to claim the coast as far south as sea-otters run. Captain Cook and Vancouver were about to sail to try to nail the Union Jack on every headland from Sitka to San Diego. Disguised under the standard of Portugal, privateersmen of various nations were hoisting full sail in the race for western conquest, and Louis XVI. was planning to equip François de Gallup, Count de la Pérouse, to transplant the eagles of France to California crags. The end of the Seven Years' War, a decade before Bucareli's remarkable decision, had led to a recarving of America among European powers, and jealousy and world-wide ambition now steered the sea in search of new empire.

All this was not then apparent on the surface, but the cowled monk in his Mission at Carmel divined events. Worldly power and possession by him were trampled underfoot. In humility he had turned his back upon the emoluments of scholarship to labor among savages in the remote wilderness. The fame he had achieved by the rediscovery of Monterey was not of his choosing. Although he counted all earthly things as dross he knew the action of Bucareli meant the downfall of his spiritual kingdom. In the flutter of foreign sails he read a menace to Spain's sovereignty on the coast. And so it happened that in the same year that Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Dabney Carr in the Raleigh tavern were pleading the cause that was to wrest the Atlantic colonies from George III., an aged cripple in coarse robe of gray serge, tied at the waist with a girdle of hemp, employed his splendid eloquence in the vice-regal palace of the Mexican capital to save the Pacific coast from the hands of navigators who with roving commissions of conquest from European kings and emperors were cruising in the wake of Spanish indecision.

Here, again, Monterey was playing an all-important part in history, for it was the fame Junípero had won through its rediscovery that sped his message to the Viceroy and through him to the King. The humble monk had made the long journey from Monterey with no other escort save an Indian acolyte, and though lame, infirm, and of lowly mien, was received with the consideration due an accredited ambassador.

Bucareli was not only won over to maintain the Californian settlements, but was fired to achieve new conquests along the upper coast. Junípero's memorial, forwarded to Madrid, reawakened the sentiments his rediscovery of Monterey had stirred. By the King's order every recommendation of the pioneer friar was adopted, offices for California were created at permanent salaries, the treasury at Guadalajara was pledged to the colonization of the Pacific coast and Monterey named as the abiding capital.

Thus an open highway to the sea was unconsciously reserved for the United States. Russia was forced up against the Arctic Circle, England did not gain a foothold south of the island Vancouver named, the privateers tacked toward the South Seas, and when the French explorer, Count de la Pérouse, sailed into the harbor of Monterey the only thing he could do to save his name from engulfing obscurity was to introduce potatoes to a smiling land. The following season, instead of the fleur-delis, potato blossoms in the flowering Carmel were the only token that the King of France had ever had designs upon the coast.

The relief the Viceroy sent to Monterey in response to Junípero's plea came none too soon. For thirty-seven days the latter's boyhood friend and lifelong collaborator, Palou, and his comrades at Carmel had gone without a tortilla or a crumb of bread, subsisting patiently on a little meal ground from peas. But now began the years of mission prosperity and peace, and thereafter in Monterey was presented in miniature the story of the glory and decline of Spain.

For half a century it was the brilliant capital of Spain's new empire. It was a thriving metropolis and the gay seat of the Spanish Court fifty years before the settlement at San Francisco became more than a straggling pueblo, struggling to survive against wind and sand. In fact, for two generations after the founding of Monterey San Francisco's chief claim to distinction was that the first craft to pass through the pillared channel that leads to its incomparable harbor was a launch hewn from a redwood felled by Ayala on the banks of the Carmel.

Year after year in Monterey were great fêtes, the laughter of beautifully gowned women, the melody of troubadours, the click of castanets, the trampling of horsemen in gay attire, the triumphs of governors and captains, and the booming of guns in the walled presidio. Here at this capital titled officials sat at the receipt of customs; here galleons from Manila put in for repairs and departed with cargoes of furs, and hither came fragatas and paquebotes from the Mexican coast and imposing craft from the four corners of the earth. Over picturesque adobe consulates in Monterey floated the flags of foreign nations when the only standard reared in San Francisco was a desolate wooden cross in the Mission Dolores. And the road through the mountain pines to Junípero's spiritual capital, his cabecera, three miles away, over which governors followed by glittering retinues marched to solemnize their oaths of office and whither they were borne for sepulture, was worn to its primal rocks long before the path from the San Francisco Mission to the bay became more than a shifting trail.

San Francisco now can stand these invidious comparisons, for when glory finally sailed through the Golden Gate, fame departed from Monterey.

The genius of Junípero gave to Monterey an impetus that long survived his death. As unconscious trustee, Spain, centring power at Monterey, was holding the coast for the larger destiny to follow.

The shadow of new events crept toward Portala's cross. In a winter month in the third decade of the nineteenth century an unprecedented happening awakened the fears of the Franciscans at Carmel,--the holy water in the baptismal font in the San Carlos Mission was found to be frozen. This unparalleled thing in that bland clime could not, they believed, but portend some unhappy fate. In confirmation of their worst fears came the news that the Viceroy had repudiated allegiance to the King. The eagle of Mexico had soared above the lion of Castile, and a rebel had supplanted the King in the litany of prayers. The conerstone of the mission system had been broken; the crumbling process was at hand.

Then came Fernandez, the Canónigo, the most exalted ecclesiastical dignitary that had ever set foot in Monterey. Junípero was a Puritan of humble and contrite virtue. The Canónigo was a swaggering roysterer, pledging the revenues of the Church in games of chance. On the occasions of Junípero's journeyings from his capital, the tears of his neophytes, the sound of mission bells, and the prayers of his comrades attested the reverence he had won. Races, revels, and bull-fights in Monterey celebrated the convivial departure of Fernandez.

A new era was at hand. Under the unstable Mexican _régime_, chaos followed confusion. In the twenty-four years that intervened before the Stars and Stripes, hoisted over Monterey, proclaimed the advent of the golden age in the West, that city saw thirteen governors come and go. Communication with Mexico was difficult. A governor at Monterey when he rose in the morning did not know whether to salute the flag of a liberator, an emperor, a rebel, a president, or a king. Monterey, too, had turmoils and revolutions of her own. Ambitious intrigue placarded her adobe walls with flaming ultimatos. The alcalde and regidores of one day were prisoners in irons the next. Anarchy to-day sat gravely in the Ayuntamiento to-morrow, and governors turned fugitive as usurpers assumed control.

Yet these Monterey revolutions were anæmic, attended with less shedding of blood than the bull-fights that celebrated the triumphs of her voluble warriors. It was the opera-bouffe warfare of little statesmen making their clamoring exit from the stage of history.

The spectacular caballero in his jacket laced with gold was passing away with the phantoms he had chased. The Mission bells grew silent. New horsemen thronged over the mountain roads. New sailors cast anchor in the harbor. A new flag floated over the presidio, a flag that was not to be pulled down. The American Republic had reached the western sea.

Of these later events the guide informs you with some fidelity to the facts as you start on the famous Twenty-Mile Drive. He tells you how the brig _Natalia_, upon which Napoleon escaped from Elba, was wrecked by storms in Monterey Bay in 1834 to typify that Europe's power over California was gone forever, and he will sell you fragments of the wreck; he will tell you how Commodore Jones in 1842, by mistake but in prophecy of things to come, hoisted the American ensign over Monterey; how in 1846, that flag, in the hands of Commodore Sloat, went up to stay; how in the following month the first newspaper published on the Pacific coast made its appearance in Monterey; in the corners of the public squares he will show you the cannon of John C. Frémont, and he will point you to the Gabilan Mountains where on their highest peak overlooking Monterey the famed "pathfinder" unfurled the colors of his country and bade defiance to the Mexicans, even before he knew that war raged between the two republics. Then your proud historian will show you the ancient adobe capitol where in 1849, just one hundred years from the time Junípero set sail from Majorca, the first convention met to form the commonwealth of California,--a convention which, though composed in the major part of adventurers, some of whom looked upon murder as a pastime, sent to Washington the unanimous declaration that slavery should never stain the Golden West, and thus revived the great conflict in the Senate and caused the famous compromise.

Then your pilot will guide you to the fishing villages whence Spanish pescadores once put out in their shallops to harvest the bay for the governor and his Court. Later came the American whalers before the tide of commerce turned the sperm whale and the finback to remoter waters. Occasionally yet comes a sulphurbottom following the tides of the Kuro Sirva, and then there is vast excitement in Pescadero Bay.

Now through the groves of giant pines at the edge of the sea where the western Chautauqua meets, and then to Cypress Point, whose trees, the guide informs you loftily, are identical with the cedars of Lebanon, and you are nearing the resting-place of Junípero.

With the adjournment of the convention that met at Monterey in response to the proclamation of the military governor to frame a State, the capital passed from that historic town, and for many years the grave of its founder was forgotten. The rush to the gold mines trod underfoot the old-time glories of Monterey. From a throbbing capital it became for a while a deserted village. Lichens grew in its streets and the roofs of its houses crumbled.

As for the Mission at Carmel, rust muffled its chimes; Spanish moss covered its tumbling pilasters; its sanctuary was choked with wild mustard; storms blew through the fallen roof. The lizard alone kept watch of the ruin.

But when the new civilization had built its cities and established its railways and there was time again to cultivate the arts of rest, romance turned once more to Monterey. Capital saw in its ruins an opportunity for gain. In its environs Stevenson beheld a paradise for poets, and Monterey became a field of dalliance, a mecca for millionaires at play, an unfailing inspiration to every spirit in a mood to dream.

Junípero at Monterey initiated the activities that held the coast against envious nations, and now to his tomb comes the tide of travel. A few years ago Mrs. Leland Stanford, representing patriotic citizens and students whom the eloquent writings of the historian Hittell had inspired to veneration of Junípero, restored the ruined Mission, so that now his tomb is marked by no traces of neglect, and there with the Carmel surf chanting his eternal requiem, side by side with the comrades he loved and the governors he and his followers installed, this unconquerable friar who trudged, lamely, ten thousand miles in the name of God, establishing the outposts of Christianity and opening the way for the Democracy to come, is receiving the tardy homage his genius and character deserve.

He was indeed one of Emerson's men who "pin continents together."

Now you climb to the crest of the cordillera. Before you is the circling bay with its border of white beaches. Beyond, Frémont's Peak, the tall sentinel that first proclaimed the advent of the dominant American. At your feet the quaint capital that Junípero founded, half adobe, half modern. You can distinguish the time-tumbled walls that tell of Spain's departed glory, and you see the crumbling Cuartel and Custom-House of the Mexicans, who lacked the Spaniards' Moorish taste in their homes and public buildings. The old capital has outlived its day. It thrives now on trinkets and abelone shells, painted with memories of the past. But on your left, set in the midst of five hundred acres of flowers and oaks and pines, are luxurious touches of modern life where business comes to forget its cares, and romance spends its honeymoon.

Descend the slope toward the city, passing on your way ruined adobe cabins. Rounding a turn in the historic road you see the smoke of an incoming steamer bringing holiday passengers through waters where, aforetime, Spanish corvettes lurked for wily smugglers. From the Cuartel as you near the old capital you hear, instead of the war ballads of quixotic guerreros, the merriment of school-children at play. On the streets, instead of the alférez coming on caparisoned horse to announce the presence in the harbor of a stranger craft, you encounter hotel-runners clattering in 'buses to the pier. On surviving fragments of villa walls you discern no solemn reglamentos. Advertisements of swimming suits and fishing tackle have supplanted the rhetorical decrees of the Spanish governors. The descendants of the naked Indians that crowded round the royal carriage of Doña Eulalia of Catalonia a century ago, shocking that titled lady to throw them some of her purple and fine linen, now shamble by you in slattern calico and jeans, bearing bundles of laundry to a neighboring lagoon. The cleansing process of their trade has for them no personal contagion. In curio shops that crowd the site of the old presidio where the soldiers of Charles III. performed their part in the programme of civilization Junípero had outlined, you buy your souvenirs.

Then climb to Vizcanio's oak. Beyond the cross reared here are the tottering memorials in the ancient graveyard. A century of strange and stirring romance is buried there. From this weed-grown cemetery haunted by memories which your guide cannot recall, you again see the town and harbor in panorama, and you get clearer glimpses of the paradise into which landscape-gardeners have transformed surrounding acres of sand-dunes over which pobladores once ranged seeking pasturage for their herds.

At your feet, along a well-kept road of pounded shells, and across bridges framed of the skeletons of whales buttressed with moss-grown rocks, roll automobiles and victorias in the pursuit of pleasure. Follow them blithely, if you will, waving your hand to the past; or, in the true spirit of historic pilgrimage, kneel in this place of burial and spell the imperfectly chiselled story of the Spanish pioneers who, despite their visionary dreams, held, for the government Washington was founding, a highway to the Pacific.

LOS ANGELES

THE CITY OF THE ANGELS

BY FLORENCE E. WINSLOW

"Very near the terrestrial paradise," said the old Spanish explorer of the sunlit country, where stood in a later century the pueblo of Los Angeles. Very near the terrestrial paradise has it seemed to weary travellers, hopeful invalids, and delighted home-makers, who have from year to year wandered across the desert to find rest, health, and comfort in a climate where the terms winter and summer are misnomers, where snows are seen only on the mountain-tops above the flowering plain, where severe heats are unknown, and where Nature rewards those who seek her gifts in largest measure. Climate and situation are the environing elements which count for most in the development of the history of Los Angeles. These are responsible both for the easy, courteous, pleasure-loving lives of the Spanish rancheros, and the strenuous, vivid, progressive, municipal experiences of the Americans in this modern "pleasure city."

Los Angeles treasures the memory of ancient Spanish days of daring and romance, among which lie the beginnings of its civil life. All that is left of the old Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles may be seen now clustered about the old plaza, with its church, in what is known as Sonora town. Here the sun-baked adobe walls of the houses nestle, with their Mexican residents, in the midst of the bustling city, awaiting the final decay which marks the passing of the Pueblo.

Precedent to later social conditions of ease, the careful student will find in the lives of the earlier settlers of Alta California a strong, vital, self-sacrificing religious impulse, which, upon Pacific as upon Atlantic shores, induced the initial movement in a civilization which moved to its attempted end indifferent to climate or environment, and using the material only to subserve the interests of the dominant spiritual. Junípero Serra, with his mission settlers of 1769, was in subtlest ways akin to the Pilgrim Fathers of the preceding century. As Los Angeles was but a humble dependent on San Gabriel Mission, its beginnings may best be traced in connection with the history of the mission fathers, the earliest colonizers and civilizers of the sunset land. Their unstinted and self-sacrificing devotion to the Indians of California, their great mission trade-schools, where not only the salvation of souls but the training of the minds and hands of the neophytes was undertaken, their wise administration of their trusts, both spiritual and material, make this initial movement in the colonization of California one of the brightest incidents in the story of the Golden West.

Out of the mists of romance which envelop the earlier explorers of the Pacific Coasts appear the forms of Cabrillo and Vizcaino, the first historic visitors to Southern California.

It may be that Francisco de Ulloa had in 1539 gained from the Pacific a glimpse of the land, or that Hernando de Alarçon from the Gila country saw the plain of Los Angeles in 1540. Sure it is that Cabrillo in 1542, and Vizcaino in 1603 visited San Diego and San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles. The latter landed at San Diego, seeking a suitable port for ships engaged in trade with the Philippines, dug wells, and erected a church tent for three friars who were of the party, and then for 166 years this "fair land without snow" drops out of history. It is left to its Indian residents, left treasuring its resources for future generations, for new peoples.

In 1769 came Junípero Serra--saint, hero, and Franciscan father. In him the romance of missionary enterprise finds embodiment; with him and his missions the colonization of Alta California began. The missions in the peninsula of Lower California were, by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, left in charge of the Franciscans, and Serra's burning zeal for the conversion of the Indians led him to urge the prosecution of a long-cherished plan of the Government. This was to provide the Manila ships with good ports on the northwest coasts and to promote settlements there. There was a union of spiritual and physical forces--soldiers under the military government of Portolá co-operating with the missionaries under Serra. Four expeditions, two proceeding by sea and two by land, were reunited at San Diego, where, on July 16th, the noble missionary dedicated the first mission in Alta California. It was but two years later that the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel was founded, with solemn chants of Veni, Creator Spiritus and Te Deum Laudamus, and in the presence of many Indians. Serra, who had entered in a litter the land of promise where his zeal and courage were to accomplish so much, had already travelled toward San Francisco, crossing mountain and desert on foot, and establishing the Mission of San Carlos. The missions were firmly organized and devoutly conducted, and there were eighteen of them by the end of the century. Forty padres had gathered in these first industrial training-schools a population of 13,500 converted Indian neophytes, to whom they had taught the arts of civilization.

San Gabriel became one of the richest missions. Its church has never been disused; to-day it welcomes strangers as in the time when it received those weary pilgrims, the founders of Los Angeles, who came from Loreto across the deserts of Colorado, on the route first taken by Anza through the San Gorgonio pass, and were provided by the hospitable fathers with all that was needed for rest and refreshment. The centre of the civilized and agricultural life of the district, San Gabriel, was a great material as well as spiritual force. It had its guard of ten soldiers and its three padres. Two of these, Cruzado and Sanchez, ministered side by side to the California Indians for thirty years, and the latter had a missionary experience of fifty-five years.

The name of Los Angeles is first found in the Mission report of 1773. It is given to the river first named Porzinucula discovered by Portolá's expedition of 1769. This discovery, as recorded by Padre Crespi, was made upon the anniversary of the feast of our Lady of Angels. The Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles was founded in 1781. Till then there had been in the new country only missions and presidios, the military stations; but the settlement of colonies in pueblos was part of the original Spanish plan, and the necessity of obtaining additional supplies for the use of the presidios gave the needed stimulus.

Under instructions issued by Governor Néve a site for a dam was first selected, water being then as now a primary essential. The pueblo was placed on high land near these facilities for irrigation, a plaza of two hundred by three hundred varas being laid out, with corners facing the cardinal points, so that three streets should run perpendicularly from each of its four sides, that no street might be swept by the winds. Yet tradition saith that Los Angeles winds have not kept always to the cardinal points. Solares, or house-lots, of twenty by forty varas were given to settlers in numbers equal to the available suertes, field-lots. Two suertes of dry, and two of irrigable land, were given to each family. One fourth of the suertes were left vacant, as realangas or government lands, while a number, called propios, were reserved for municipal expenses. Colonists received ten dollars a month each, for two years; also regular rations, seeds, clothing, and live stock. Twelve men with their families, including eleven women and twenty-six children, were the colonizers of Los Angeles. They were principally Spanish soldiers. On September 14, 1781, the plaza of the new town was solemnly dedicated by the mission priests, who came in procession from San Gabriel, attended by Indian neophytes and a guard of soldiers. To the twelve settlers, twelve building-lots were given. These were laid out on three sides of the plaza, while the fourth was reserved for a church and public buildings. In 1786 the Governor sent José Arguello to formally renew the leases of houses, lots, and branding-irons. At this time not one settler could sign his name. A small church was erected in 1784. It was but twenty-three by fifty feet in size, and was served by the padres of San Gabriel. One of these, Padre Oumetz, was for thirty years a companion of Serra in his missionary labors. He died at San Gabriel in 1811. It was at least twenty years before Los Angeles ceased to be dependent on San Gabriel and to develop a small trade of its own. Outside the pueblo provisional grants of ranchos were soon made. The largest and best of all of these was known later as Los Nietos, and was given to the heirs of Manuel Nito by Figueroa, who divided it into tracts in 1834. The Dominguez rancho, given by Fages to Don José Dominguez, was regranted by Sola in 1822 to Sergeant Christobal Dominguez. La Zanja, the home of the Verdugos, the Encino and the Simi ranchos, Las Virgines, El Conejo Santa Ana, the Bartolo Tapia and Antonio Maria ranchos, were the homes of such families as the Picos and Ortegas, whose wealth and power contributed to the future glory of the pueblo near which they lived, while the Félix ranch was actually within the pueblo bounds.