Greater Britain

Between the presidio and the Mission Dolores lies Lone Mountain Cemetery, in that solitary calm and majesty of beauty which befits a home for the dead, the most lovely of all the cemeteries of America. Queen Emma, of the Sandwich Islands, who is here at present, said of it yesterday to a Californian merchant: “How comes it that you Americans, who live so fast, find time to bury your dead so beautifully?”

Lone Mountain is not the only delicious spot that is given to the American dead. Laurel Hill, Mount Auburn, Greenwood, Cypress Grove, Hollywood, Oak Hill, are names not more full of poetry than are the places to which they belong; but Lone Mountain has over all an advantage in its giant fuchsias, and scarlet geraniums of the size and shape of trees; in the distant glimpses, too, of the still Pacific.

San Francisco is ill placed, so far as mere building facilities are concerned. When the first houses were built in 1845 and 1846, they stood on a strip of beach surrounding the sheltered cove of Yerba Buena, and at the foot of the steep and lofty sand-hills. Dunes and cove have disappeared together; the hills have been shot bodily into the bay, and the former harbor is now the business quarter of the city. Not a street can be built without cutting down a hill, or filling up a glen. Never was a great town built under heavier difficulties; but trade requires it to be exactly where it is, and there it will remain and grow. Its former rivals, Vallejo and Benicia, are grass-grown villages, in spite of their having had the advantage of “a perfect situation.” While the spot on which the Golden City stands was still occupied by the struggling village of Yerba Buena, Francisca was a rising city, where corner lots were worth their ten or twenty thousand dollars. When the gold rush came, the village, shooting to the front, voted itself the name of its great bay, and Francisca had to change its title to Benicia, in order not to be thought a mere suburb of San Francisco. The mouth of the Columbia was once looked to as the future haven of Western America, and point of convergence of the railroad lines; but the “center of the universe” has not more completely removed from Independence to Fort Riley than Astoria has yielded to San Francisco the claim to be the port of the Pacific.

The one great danger of this coast all its cities share in common. Three times within the present century, the spot on which San Francisco stands has been violently disturbed by subterranean forces. The earthquake of last year has left its mark upon Montgomery Street and the plaza, for it frightened the San Franciscans into putting up light wooden cornices to hotels and banks, instead of the massive stone projections that are common in the States; otherwise, though lesser shocks are daily matters, the San Franciscans have forgotten the “great scare.” A year is a long time in California. There is little of the earliest San Francisco left, though the city is only eighteen years old. Fires have done good work as well as harm, and it is worth a walk up to the plaza to see how prim and starched are the houses which now occupy a square three sides of which were, in 1850, given up to the public gaming-hells.

One of the few remaining bits of old Golden City life is to be found in the neighborhood of the “What Cheer House,” the resting-place of diggers on their way from the interior to take ship for New York or Europe. Here there is no lack of coin, no want of oaths, no scarcity of drinks. “Juleps” are as plentiful as in Baltimore itself; Yerba Buena, the old name for San Francisco, means “mint.”

If the old character of the city is gone, there are still odd scenes to be met with in its streets. To-day I saw a master builder of great wealth with his coat and waistcoat off, and his hat stowed away on one side, carefully teaching a raw Irish lad how to lay a brick. He told me that the acquisition of the art would bring the man an immediate rise in his wages from five to ten shillings a day. Unskilled labor, Mexican and Chinese, is plentiful enough, but white artisans are scarce. The want of servants is such, that even the wealthiest inhabitants live with their wives and families in hotels, to avoid the cost and trouble of an establishment. Those who have houses pay rough unkempt Irish girls from £6 to £8 a month, with board, “outings” when they please, and “followers” unlimited.

The hotel boarding has much to do with the somewhat unwomanly manner of a few among the ladies of the newest States, but the effect upon the children is more marked than it is upon their mothers. To a woman of wealth, it matters, perhaps, but little whether she rules a household of her own, or boards in the first floor of some gigantic hostelry; but it does matter a great deal to her children, who, in the one case, have a home to play and work in, and who, in the other, play on the stairs or in the corridors, to the annoyance of every sojourner in the hotel, and never dream of work out of school-hours, or of solid reading that is not compulsory. The only one of the common charges brought against America in English society and in English books and papers that is thoroughly true, is the statement that American children, as a rule, are “forward,” ill mannered, and immoral. An American can scarcely be found who does not admit and deplore the fact. With the self-exposing honesty that is a characteristic of their nation, American gentlemen will talk by the hour of the terrible profligacy of the young New Yorkers. Boys, they tell you, who in England would be safe in the lower school at Eton or in well-managed houses, in New York or New Orleans are deep gamesters and God-defying rowdies. In New England, things are better; in the West, there is yet time to prevent the ill arising; but even in the most old-fashioned of American States, the children are far too full of self-assurance. Their faults are chiefly faults of manner, but such in children have a tendency to become so many vices. On my way home from Egypt, I crossed the Simplon with a Southerner and a Pennsylvanian boy of fourteen or fifteen. An English boy would have expressed his opinion, and been silent: this lad‘s attacks upon the poor Southerner were unceasing and unfeeling; yet I could see that he was good at bottom. I watched my chance to give him my view of his conduct, and when we parted, he came up and shook hands, saying: “You‘re not a bad fellow for a Britisher, after all.”

In my walks through the city I found its climate agreeable rather for work than idleness. Sauntering or lounging is as little possible as it is in London. The summer is not yet ended; and in the summer at San Francisco it is cold after eleven in the day – strangely cold for the latitude of Athens. The fierce sun scorches up the valleys of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento in the early morning; and the heated air, rising from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled by the cold breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa Range is unbroken but by the single gap of the Golden Gate, and through this opening the cold winds rush in a never-ceasing gale, spreading fanlike as soon as they have passed the narrows. Hence it is that the Golden Gate is called “The Keyhole,” and the wind “The Keyhole Breeze.” Up country they make it raise the water for irrigation. In winter there is a calm, and then the city is as sunny as the rest of California.

So purely local is the bitter gale that at Benicia, ten miles from San Francisco, the mean temperature is ten degrees higher for the year, and nearly twenty for the summer. I have stood on the shore at Benicia when the thermometer was at a hundred in the shade, and seen the clouds pouring in from the Pacific, and hiding San Francisco in a murky pall, while the temperature there was under seventy degrees. This fog retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San Francisco Bay. The entrance to the Golden Gate is narrow, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake, Viscaino, sailed past it without seeing that there was a bay, and the great land-locked sea was first beheld by white men when the missionaries came upon its arms and creeks, far away inland.

The peculiarity of climate carries with it great advantages. It is never too hot, never too cold, to work – a fact which of itself secures a grand future for San Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked. At a San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not American. Even the lean Western men and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the winds. The high metallic ring of the New England voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, California must have been that fabled province of Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever a man‘s age when he entered it, he never grew older by a day. To dogs and strangers there are drawbacks in the absence of winter: dogs are muzzled all the year round, and musquitoes are perennial upon the coast.

The city is gay with flags; every house supports a liberty pole upon its roof, for when the Union sentiment sprang up in San Francisco, at the beginning of the war, public opinion forced the citizens to make a conspicuous exhibition of the stars and stripes, by way of showing that it was from no want of loyalty that they refused to permit the circulation of the Federal greenbacks. In this matter of flags the sea-gale is of service, for were it not for its friendly assistance, a short house between two tall ones could not sport a huge flag with much effect. As it is, the wind always blowing across the chief streets, and never up or down, the narrowest and lowest house can flaunt a large ensign without fear of its ever flapping against the walls of its proud neighbors.

It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Californian English have the old-world type. With less ingenuity than the New England Yankees, they have far more depth and solidity in their enterprise; they do not rack their brain at inventing machines to peel apples and milk cows, but they intend to tunnel through the mountains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with its waters irrigate the Californian plains. They share our British love for cash payments and good roads; they one and all set their faces against repudiation in any shape, and are strongly for what they call “rolling-up” the debt. Throughout the war they quoted paper as depreciated, not gold as risen. Indeed, there is here the same unreasoning prejudice against paper money that I met with in Nevada. After all, what can be expected of a State which still produces three-eighths of all the gold raised yearly in the world?

San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities bid fair to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands beneath the sun. New Englanders and Englishmen predominate in energy, Chinese in numbers. The French and Italians are stronger here than in any other city in the States; and the red-skinned Mexicans, who own the land, supply the market people and a small portion of the townsfolk. Australians, Polynesians, and Chilians are numerous; the Germans and Scandinavians alone are few; they prefer to go where they have already friends – to Philadelphia or Milwaukee. In this city – already a microcosm of the world – the English, British, and American are in possession – have distanced the Irish, beaten down the Chinese by force, and are destined to physically preponderate in the cross-breed, and give the tone, political and moral, to the Pacific shore. New York is Irish, Philadelphia German, Milwaukee Norwegian, Chicago Canadian, Sault de Ste Marie French; but in San Francisco – where all the foreign races are strong – none is dominant; whence the singular result that California, the most mixed in population, is also the most English of the States.

In this strange community, starting more free from the Puritan influence of New England than has hitherto done any State within the Union, it is doubtful what religion will predominate. Catholicism is “not fashionable” in America – it is the creed of the Irish, and that is enough for most Americans; so Anglicanism, its critics say, is popular as being “very proper.” Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is flourishing in California, and it seems probable that the church which gains the day in California will eventually be that of the whole Pacific.

On Montgomery Street are some of the finest buildings in all America; the “Occidental Hotel,” the “Masonic Hall,” the “Union Club,” and others. The club has only just been rebuilt after its destruction by a nitro-glycerin explosion which occurred in the express office next door. A case, of which no one knew the contents, was being lifted by two clerks, when it exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and breaking half the windows in the city. On examination it was found to be nitro-glycerin on its way to the mines.

Another accident occurred here yesterday with this same compound. A sharp report was heard on board a ship lying in the docks, and the cook was found dead, below; pieces of a flask had been driven into his heart and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was examined, and found to be common oil; but this morning, I read in the Alta a report from a chemist that traces of nitro-glycerin have been discovered by him upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands says that the ship on her way up had called at Manzanilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a merchant‘s office, emptied it of its contents, the character of which was unknown to him, and filled it with common vegetable oil.

Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerin has been the nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes they care little, but the freaks of the devilish oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in the Nevada mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself a demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and then the slightest friction will explode it – that, on the other hand, it goes off if heated. If you leave it standing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are that it undergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it explodes; and no lapse of time has on its power the smallest deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the oil will crystallize, and then its strength for harm is multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed by earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerin.

A day or two after my return from Benicia, I escaped from the city, and again went south, halting at San José, “The Garden City,” and chief town of the fertile Guadalupe district, on my way to the quicksilver mines of New Almaden, now the greatest in the world since they have beaten the Spanish mines and Idria. From San José, I drove myself to Almaden along a sun-dried valley with a fertile tawny soil, reaching the delicious mountain stream and the groves it feeds in time to join my friends at lunch in the shady hacienda. The director took me through the refining works, in which the quicksilver may be seen running in streams down gutters from the furnaces, but he was unable to go with me up the mountain to the mines from which the cinnabar comes shooting down by its weight. The superintendent engineer – a meerschaum-equipped Bavarian – and myself mounted, at the Hacienda Gate, upon our savage-looking beasts, and I found myself for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican saddle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups that I had seen used by the Utes in Denver. The riding feats of the Mexicans and the Californian boys are explained when you find that their saddle puts it out of the question that they should be thrown; but the fatigue that its size and shape cause to man and horse, when the man is a stranger to New Spain, and the horse knows that he is so, outweighs any possible advantages that it may possess. With their huge gilt spurs, attached to the stirrup, not to the boot, the double peak, and the embroidered trappings, the Mexican saddles are the perfection at once of the cumbersome and the picturesque.

Silently we half scrambled, half rode, up a break-neck path which forms a short cut to the mine, till all at once a charge of our horses at an almost perpendicular wall of rock was followed by their simultaneously commencing to kick and back toward the cliff. Springing off, we found that the girths had been slackened by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit of mountain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners and mining in French, my German not being much worse than my Bavarian‘s English.

After viewing the mines, the walls of which, composed of crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torch-glare, we worked our way through the tunnels to the topmost lode and open air.

Bidding good-by to what I could see of my German in the fog from his meerschaum, I turned to ride down by the road instead of the path. I had not gone a furlong, when, turning a corner, there burst upon me a view of the whole valley of tawny California, now richly golden in the colors of the fall. Looking from this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the Contra Costa Range before me, and Mount Hamilton towering from the plain, apart, I could discern below me the gleam of the Coyote Creek, and of the windows in the church of Santa Clara – in the distance, the mountains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo to Alameda and San Pablo, basking in unhindered sun. The wild oats dried by the heat made of the plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups of black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain foot with “chapparal.” The volcanic hills were rounded into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature overspread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the mighty fog was beginning to pour in through the Golden Gate to refresh America with dews from the Pacific.

CHAPTER XXIII.

LITTLE CHINA

“THE Indians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity County. One man and a Chinaman have been killed, and a lady crippled for life.”

That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to colored races was not less strong in California than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the Alta Californian of the day of my return to San Francisco.

A determination to explore Little China, as the celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humor of the Alta, and I at once set off in search of two of the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had some sort of introduction, and put myself under their charge for the night.

We had not been half an hour in the Chinese theater or opera house before my detectives must have repented of their offer to “show me around,” for, incomprehensible as it must have seemed to them with their New England gravity and American contempt for the Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the performance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh that I had enjoyed since I had left the plantations of Virginia.

When we entered the house, which is the size of the Strand Theater of London, it may have been ten or eleven o‘clock. The performance had begun at seven, and was likely to last till two A.M. By the “performance” was meant this particular act or scene, for the piece had been going on every evening for a month, and would be still in progress during the best part of another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama to take up the hero at an early age, and conduct him to the grave, which he reaches full of years and of honor.

The house was crammed with a grinning crowd of happy “yellow boys,” while the “China ladies” had a long gallery to themselves. No sound of applause is to be heard in a Chinese place of amusement, but the crowd grin delight at the actors, who, for their part, grin back at the crowd.

The feature of the performance which struck me at once was the hearty interest the actors took in the play, and the chaff that went on between them and the pit; it is not only from their numbers and the nature of their trades that the Chinese may be called the Irish of the Pacific: there was soul in every gesture.

On the stage, behind the actors, was a band, which played unceasingly, and so loud that the performers, who clearly had not the smallest intention of subordinating their parts to the music, had to talk in shrieks in order to be heard. The audience, too, all talked in their loudest natural tones.

As for the play, a lady made love to an old gentleman (probably the hero, as this was the second month or third act of the play), and, bawling at him fiercely, was indignantly rejected by him in a piercing shriek. Relatives, male and female, coming with many howls to the assistance of the lady, were ignominiously put to flight, in a high falsetto key, by the old fellow‘s footmen, who were in turn routed by a force of yelling spearmen, apparently the county posse. The soldiers wore paint in rings of various colors, put on so deftly, that of nose, of eyes, of mouth, no trace could be discovered; the front face resembled a target for archery. All this time, a steady, unceasing uproar was continued by four gongs and a harp, with various cymbals, pavilions, triangles, and guitars.

Scenery there was none, but boards were put up in the Elizabethan way, with hieroglyphics denoting the supposed locality; and another archaic point is, that all the female parts were played by boys. For this I have the words of the detectives; my eyes, had I not long since ceased to believe them, would have given me proof to the contrary.

The acting, as far as I could judge by the grimace, was excellent. Nowhere could be found greater spirit, or equal power of facial expression. The stage fight was full of pantomimic force; the leading soldier would make his fortune as a London pantaloon.

When the detectives could no longer contain their distaste for the performance, we changed our quarters for a restaurant – the “Hang Heong,” the wood of which was brought from China.

The street along which we had to pass was decorated rather than lit by paper lanterns hung over every door; but the “Hang Heong” was brilliantly illuminated, with a view, no doubt, to attracting the crowd as they poured out from the theater at a later hour. The ground-floor was occupied by shop and kitchen, the dining-rooms being up stairs. The counter, which is on the plan of that in the houses of the Palais Royal, was presided over, not by a smiling woman, but by grave and pig-tailed gentlemen in black, who received our order from the detective with the decorous solemnity of the head waiter in an English country inn.

The rooms up stairs were nearly full; and as the Chinese by no means follow the Americans in silent eating, the babel was tremendous. A saucer and a pair of chopsticks were given each of us, but at our request a spoon was furnished as a special favor to the “Melicans.”

Tiny cups of a sweet spirit were handed us before supper was brought up. The liquor was a kind of shrub, but white, made, I was told, from sugar-canes. For first course, we had roast duck cut in pieces, and served in an oil-filled bowl, and some sort of fish; tea was then brought in, and followed by shark‘s fin, for which I had given a special order; the result might have been gum arabic for any flavor I could find. Dog was not to be obtained, and birds’-nest soup was beyond the purse of a traveler seven thousand miles from home, and twelve thousand from his next supplies. A dish of some strange, black fungus stewed in rice, followed by preserves and cakes, concluded our supper, and were washed down by our third cups of tea.

After paying our respects and our money to the gentleman in black, who grunted a lugubrious something that answered to “good night,” we paid a visit to the Chinese “bad quarter,” which differs only in degree of badness from the “quartier Mexicain,” the bad pre-eminence being ascribed, even by the prejudiced detectives, to the Spaniards and Chilenos.

Hurrying on, we reached the Chinese gaming-houses just before they closed. Some difficulty was made about admitting us by the “yellow loafers” who hung around the gate, as the houses are prohibited by law; but as soon as the detectives, who were known, explained that they came not on business, but on pleasure, we were suffered to pass in among the silent, melancholy gamblers. Not a word was heard, beyond every now arid then a grunt from the croupier. Each man knew what he was about, and won or lost his money in the stillness of a dead-house. The game appeared to be a sort of loto; but a few minutes of it was enough, and the detectives pretended to no deep acquaintance with its principles.