California Saved

CALIFORNIA saved the Republic once, and has been saved by it in return. How saved ?

Did it ever occur to the reader how opportune was the discovery of the placers at Coloma, coming, as it did, right upon the heels of the conquest of Mexico ? The heroes of Buena Vista and Chapultepec had, by that conquest, been enabled to spy out the land and the mines, and straightway there was a current of adventure and speculation setting toward her fabulous silver. But the fame of California turned aside this current, let us hope forever. American men and American money would have grouped themselves about the richest mines, and, becoming compactly knit together in strong towns, would have revolted, as the Lone Star Republic did, and brought Mexico knocking at our doors eventually. And Mexico is death. Rome girdled nearly all the known world with victories ; but from the day when her legions went down to Egypt there was opened a fountain of corruption and contention which subverted the empire. The day when we add Mexico it becomes our Egypt. California saved us from Mexico, however, at least temporarily, and we need not revolve these Babylonian members further.

The reader may, however, regard this as a case only vaguely made out, and negative at least; but there is another and a very positive element of salvation which California brought to the Republic struggling for life, in the $131,300,000 of her gold product during the four years of the war, to say nothing of the million or more contributed out of her prodigal generosity toward the Sanitary fund. There has never been any adequate official acknowledgment of the mighty succor given by California to the life of the nation in those evil days. But Congress understood it well when there came a rumor and a dread that some losel rebel might fall foul of the monthly argosy, heavy with oro Americano, off the coast of Mazatlan, and when, in all haste, though in the midst of a gigantic and immensely expensive civil war, it voted millions to set the overland railroad digging. General Grant understood it when, upon the completion of that railroad, he congratulated the country that it was able now to reach over, and finger its " strong box ” quickly in the day of its necessity.

But it is the main business of this paper to show how the Republic has not been ungrateful, and how California has in turn been rescued. And, first, it will be in order to inquire, at considerable length, into that condition and prospect of affairs from which, by an agency hereinafter to be set forth, this noble State was delivered.

In the winter of 1869-70, following the completion of that railroad which many a man had looked forward to as about to restore, in some inexplicable manner, the “flush times” of 1850, everybody was asking, “ What ails California?” In many a mountain mining town, which once resounded with the blast of the powder, the clank of the quartz-mill, and the merry click of the pistol, the doors were shut in the streets, and the sound of the grinding was low. The silver-mills were dry, the gold ran thin in the sluices, in many places the harvest had been shortened, and the “ blanket - men ” were abroad in ominous numbers. The mortgages on real estate in San Francisco crept up to the alarming figure of $ 30,000,000. The immigrants did not arrive in the multitudinous hosts expected. The interior real estate which the sharks had grabbed by leagues and townships did not appreciate, but tumbled far down, and the weight of their borrowed money, at a frightful interest, was sinking them daily deeper than ever luckless digger floundered in the wintry “ adobe ” bogs of Salsapentos. Three thousand hungry men marched in procession through the streets of San Francisco, demanding work or bread, − a worse earthquake than ever rumbled up from the regions of grim Pluto, but, happily, one which can more easily be managed.

Sü, the venerable and godlike, says: “ Every good and bad action will in the end receive its merited recompense ; fly high or run far, still will it be difficult to escape.” Wherein had California sinned, that her misdeed found her out so swiftly and so certainly ?

Capital. The Chinaman performs as tidy scrubbing and cooking for $ 20 or $ 25 a month as Irish girls do for $ 30 or $35. He is tractable, patient, and obedient.

Labar. He buys the least possible quantity of home produce and manufactures on which he can keep body and soul together, bringing even his wretched clothing and his rice from China ; therefore, he starves the butchers, grocers, bakers, etc.

C. It is his deft and nimble industry that gives us washing at half price and woollen blankets cheaper. Without him we could sustain no manufactures at all on this coast, against your obstinate and senseless strikes and eighthour rules, to say nothing of Eastern competition ; therefore you are benefited in spite of yourself, through shoes reduced and clothing lower.

L. He carries away with him all his earnings to China ; makes no improvements, except the vilest huts, which were better burned ; and will not even enrich the soil with his miserable body, but gathers up two car-loads of bones all along the Central Pacific, and ships them home. He has carried away millions which ought to have gone to encourage our artisans and grocers.

C. Look at the improvements for which we are indebted to his cheap and supple utility ! But for the Chinese, the Union Pacific, with its easier grades and swarms of Irishmen, would have outstripped the Central Pacific, forced the point of junction far westward, and so have thrown the vast trade of Utah, Idaho, and Montana into the hands of Chicago. The Chinese rescued the commercial future of San Francisco.

L. The Chinamen labor for such pitiful wages that they undermine Caucasians, degrade the standard of wages so that no white labor can live with any decency or self-respect, and so drive thousands of men with families into downright beggary or thievery,

C. Every man has the right to employ what color of labor he will. If you are not content to labor for such wages as we, in the present universal depression, can give, you can go hang.

L. We will burn before we will hang.

And so burn it was. From a church in San José, which dared teach Chinamen the Catechism, to a railroad owned by a company which dared employ Chinese conductors on Chinese trains, the smoke went up, and only ashes were left. For months the larger cities were in a fever of alarm, and the police hunted incendiaries like dogs.

Most of the above discussion is of the very wretchedest and most superficial quality, and the cancer must be probed deeper.

Imprimis. The mineral wealth of California has had a very unfortunate effect on large masses of the population in a twofold manner, illustrating the remark of Humboldt, made long before this El Dorado was known, that the influence of mines on the progressive cultivation of the earth is more durable than the mines themselves. First, they infected men with that mobility fever which seems to cling to most Californians till they make their last little entry of real estate. Second, many miners were attracted by the admirable adaptation of the Sierra Nevada foot-hills to vine culture, and gradually beat their picks into mattocks and their long - handled shovels into ploughs. But, most unfortunately, they never could get titles to their little vineyards, because the government, until very recently, held the land as “ mineral land.” A writer who has lived in these equivocal regions says : “ Twenty years of one’s life thus spent, without an anchor for hope or a certain haven ahead, will do much to undermine and demoralize the most stable character. Thousands of our earlier pioneers have suffered from the first, and are suffering to this hour, from that insecurity in their landed possessions which robs life of all its noblest incentives..... In this uncertain condition of things almost a generation has gone by ; families have been reared and children have grown up without any noble aims in life ; the instability of their condition woven into the life-threads of their characters...... A dispirited band of idlers, robbed of a purpose or legitimate pursuit in life, comes pouring into the large cities. San Francisco is overrun with them at this very moment.”

The government is setting about the survey and sale of these mineral lands, but already great and irreparable injury has resulted from the delay. The amount of “poor white trash ” (I beg the reader’s pardon for using this mean phrase, but to Americans it is more expressive than any other) which this delay has created is melancholy to contemplate.

Another most fruitful source of this fatal class of population is the infamous fraud of the old Spanish grants, pseudo and genuine, together with the iniquitous avarice of speculators. To liken great things to small, there is here something like that old monopoly, the Roman Empire, as it was in the third and fourth centuries, when the hordes of the savage and homeless tribes began to surge against its borders, and strain their bloodshot eyes across its walls toward the riotous opulence within. A man in Tulon valley owns a million dollars’ worth of land for his herds to roam upon ; yet he comes up to Sacramento, stands up in his place in the legislature, and fights like a villain against a projected railroad, because, forsooth, it would cleave his principality and induce settlement ! And for want of that railroad the farmers pay half the value of their wheat for transportation. Another in Kern valley owns 230,000 acres, but sixty families go home to Texas because they can find no useful land. Another, near Santa Barbara, claims 247,000 acres, and the people of that city hold an indignation meeting, because no farmers can colonize near them, and that one ranch is throttling them like an African boa. And even mutton is not cheap. Another in San Luis Obispo owns 63,000 acres, so selected with reference to springs, ranges, etc., that he has absolute control of 40,000 acres of government land around him. A dozen poor men could live on this land, each keeping a few hundred sheep, but this man can crush them all by “ pasturing them out,” and refusing them access to his springs.

What are the consequences ? In crossing the continent, I passed on foot through the whole length of Southern California, and I was sickened and saddened beyond expression at the evidences of the rapidity with which this section is filling up with " poor white trash.”Anywhere among the hills, all softened with a film of tender, lilac, chiaroscuro haze, brightly green on the north side with the chamiral, but on the south side nibbled bare and dusty by the flocks of some great shepherd lord, you shall find these families in abandoned shepherd’s huts or cottonwood cabins. They are each a lank and sallow couple, with the unmistakable Pike County twang, and seven white-headed girls. A spring of water is hard by ; under the overshadowing live-oak hangs a half-eaten carcass of venison ; in the cabin there is a kerosene-can full of wild honey. That is all. This class is created by Chinese competition, by the old Spanish and speculative infamies, and by that ingrained vagabondism which never will be stamped out of California until placer mining gives place to the steadfast industry of deep mining.

Come north and look again. On these vast plains of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, in the midst of a boundless contiguity of wheat, the equal of which does not wave on earth, stands a mean, unplaned, unshaded shanty. Starr King says, “The farmer is king”; but in California he abides in a hovel, though he may own thousands. For days and days together the whistle of the steam-thresher can be heard, to-day here, to-morrow there, but always on this one man’s ranch. The gang of laborers, almost black with dust, follow the machine through the season ; for these six weeks of threshing are their principal labor and “job” of the year. When the summer is past, and the wheat sacked in the field, they flock into the towns, and as soon as they and their coin have parted company they sally forth again, aimless, hopeless, incurable “ blanketmen.”

These iniquitous monopolies ought to have been broken up long ago, and a portion tossed out to every honest man who would work and save and pay. Californians have pointed over and over again to the land monopolies of Michigan and Illinois, and predicted that theirs would be dissolved in the same manner. But they forgot that those Stales had no Chinese. The evil influence of the Chinese in perpetuating these monopolies has been, not that they bought land themselves, but that they scared men away. Mongolophobia has the same effect in California that negrophobia has in South Carolina. Hon. F. M. Pixley (Republican) declared in a lecture that the Chinese had scared away thirty thousand men from California.

The bane of California has always been that it had an excess of hirelings, bachelors, and a lack of families ; and the Chinese have perpetuated this evil in a double manner. They sat up no household Lares and Penates themselves, and they frightened away men who would. They are the worst possible hireling element that could go on the farms, for they dislike to labor for small isolated farmers, but prefer to drive business in gangs ; hence they have helped to ruin the hard-fisted yeomanry who are the sheet-anchor of any country, and assisted to build up the ranches already too great.

California was unfortunate in the first construction of its society and business. With the discovery of gold there drifted rapidly upon these shores wave after wave of splendid and adventurous humanity, mingled with the baser froth and spume ; and thus a fortunate and energetic few, by the mere fact of their presence, waxed rich and mighty in the land, willy nilly. They could not help themselves ; they had “greatness thrust upon them.” The State has had but two Governors, and the metropolis but two Mayors, who did not “come here in ’49 or the spring of ’50,” as the old pioneers are so fond of phrasing it. Thus, what with the Spanish land grants, and the immense grabs which were made in that famous year into this waste and unhandled wild, we have here something bordering hard upon English primogeniture, with all its train of evils. There are these energetic or fortunate few, inter pares primi, under whose magic touch everything has turned into gold. They are strong and great and happy. They have the banks, the express and stage companies, the ranches, the steamboats, the railroads. “ Opposition ” in this country means “ the second son,” it means a losing game. These men are anxious to see California grow, partly because of a commendable public pride, partly because its growth is their wealth. It irks them to see “ enterprises of great pith and moment ” languish for want of laborers. Many of them are parvenus, and hardly brook the lordly uses and the arrogance of the sometime miners and speculators, who have drifted down from loss to loss, and lodged at last, as common laborers, with soured tempers and broken bodies, in this soft and sunny clime.

At this point step in the Chinese. I do the employers the justice to believe them when they affirm they prefer white laborers. Even the Central Pacific managers struggled on for years with white labor alone ; and it was only when the Union Pacific was gaining fearfully on them, and was likely to push the junction point back nearly to California, that they reluctantly took Chinamen. For this they were so violently attacked that, in defending themselves, they naturally overshot the mark, pushed the defence into a matter of supererogation, and became, in some sort, the great Chinese champions. It is all the more lamentable that the white laborers, by their absurd and infamous arrogance, have wrought their own harm, and badgered employers into replacing them with Chinese. It seems as if, almost in proportion as white laborers in California are worthless, in that same proportion are they outrageously dictatorial. The Chinese are a tame and feeble folk, docile, exceedingly imitative, and, in certain small and nimble labors, remarkably industrious. In the hot and heavy work of railroads and farms, however, they are admitted and notable failures ; yet, by grouping them in masses, the contractors could make them do something by main strength and awkwardness.

Thus it was the Mongolians were supplanting the vagabonds, “ those unfortunates, the Helots of mankind,” of whom the mines supplied so many, − which was well enough, − but were gaining such a foothold as to scare away a better class, − which was evil and only evil. California was sailing down a glittering track of prosperity toward hideous moral and social ruin. Of all desirable things, this State most needs, and will have the greatest trouble in securing, a hard-fisted middle class, to redeem her from the infamy of money-jugglers and of vagabonds. If the Chinese brought their wives and stayed for life, their remarkable imitativeness would soon have turned them into the best of citizens ; but, as it was, they were only making California hollow. There is no health for the State, so fond of city life, except in making what voting population can be induced to stay in the country as numerous as possible. And it was the Chinese who were rooting out this priceless yeomany, as the slaves of Italy, in the time of the Roman Empire, rooted out the independent peasantry.

Now that the crisis has passed, and Chinese immigration is in rapid decline, it may be well to give a few figures, to show whither we were tending, In the decade ending with 1850 only 35 Chinese arrived ; in that ending with 1860, 41,396 ; in that ending with 1870, 67,466. But the significant fact was that, while the rate of Caucasian immigration was decreasing, that of the Mongolian was increasing, and these two facts stood partly in the relation of cause and effect. Thus, in the first five months of 1870, when the Chinese immigration was about at highwater mark, the Caucasian gain of San Francisco was 6,637 and the Mongolian was 5,109. In the month of May, 1870, the Caucasian gain was 1,716, while the Mongolian was actually greater, being 2,854 ! That was not a happy circumstance. In 1860 the population of San Francisco had only 4.07 per cent of Chinese, in 1870 it had 7.7 per cent. True, the actual number of Caucasian arrivals in the State was always much larger than that of the Mongolians; but the steady gain of the percentage of the latter over that of the former was not an auspicious portent.

As to the Chinese themselves, no man with any heart of human pity in his breast could harbor any malice toward these poor, cowering souls, braving the perils of a vast ocean and the accursed barbarism of the “ superior race ” after they arrived, in the hope of being able to carry back to their wretched homes some poor little remnant of gold for their families. If they had come in families, that they might have been built into the nation, no sensible man could have done other than welcome them ; but coming only as slaves to their companies, and dwelling apart, with their hideous and unnatural customs intact, an imperium in imperio, they were rotting out the heart of the people.

And one of the most deplorable elements of the social and moral condition of California which this unhappy question of the Chinese introduced was the ignoble and belittling tyranny of party which it brought.

On one side the mean and pitiful necessity of defending that against which a man’s secret best convictions revolt; and on the other, the brutal demagoguery and pretended assent to the infamous propositions of the mob. In all those years while California was slowly filling up with these wretched slaves, the best and most influential voices, those which alone could be heard in Washington, were smothered and silent as ever the press of the South was in the days of the oligarchy ; or else, goaded by the wretched ravings of the anti-Coolie organs or the infernal atrocities of the mob, they sallied out and besmeared the Chinaman’s wounds with the balm of protestations to an extent which was offensive. The press of California is more nobly independent in politics than that of any other State, but it was as absolutely bound hand and foot in regard of the Chinese question as ever were the organs of Louisiana touching slavery.

“ If society must have ‘ mudsills,’ it is certainly better to take them from a race which would be benefited by even that position in a civilized community, than subject a portion of our own race to a position which they have outgrown.”

The above is an authoritative and representative utterance, and how much it sounds like the old ante-bellum reasoning of Governor Hammond and Debow’s Review, by which it was demonstrated that the presence of the negro was the elevation of the white man. And the “ poor white trash ” are the answer.

“The clear-headed capitalist rejects the present one per cent for the future five per cent per month for his capital, and adds thereto the gratification of having done his part in forwarding the interests of all mankind.”

This is from the same authoritative source. It was not often that more arrant and arrogant foolery was uttered by the South in the palmy days of King Cotton. It was getting to be high time that a way should be found for introducing into California a pretty good supply − enough that every citizen might have a portion − of the notion that one per cent per month is a good deal better than the sulks and nothing per month.

And now, after this somewhat detailed examination into the condition of California, it remains to set forth the agency by which were exorcised these evil notions and these evil janglings. In May, 1869, the overland railroad was joined on Promontory Mountain, and the two locomotives moved up and rubbed their snouts together, in symbol of the friendly salute of their owners.

That was the signal for the dismissal, by the Central Pacific alone, of an army of sixteen thousand laborers, of whom one half were Chinese. This great multitude, surging back toward California, swamped the labor market in a twinkling. The hundreds of butchers, bakers, grocers, and millers who had supplied them were suddenly without customers. The golden stream of a million dollars per month, which had flowed from the coffers of the Central Pacific, ceased to pour. The fifty ships per month which had sailed up the Sacramento, laden with materials for the mighty work, now bumped their grass-grown hulks idly against the San Francisco wharfs. Real estate suffered a disastrous collapse, tumbling from the top of a ladder of extraordinary inflation down to the fourth or fifth round. The drummers and runners of Chicago swarmed in the land like the locusts of Egypt, while the merchants of San Francisco sat in their office chairs, cocked up their heels on the “ great resources,” serenely smoked the cigar of the “laws of trade,” and saw the interior merchants walk off arm in arm with Chicago. Hundreds of merchants, wagon-makers, grocers, etc., barely escaped bankruptcy by dismissing their hands and cutting down expenses, while scores sold everything at a ruinous loss, and with the wrecks bought a piece of a ranch. The in-rushing of Eastern goods and Eastern competition was more than California could hold, and the whole bottom dropped out, temporarily. An extraordinary and ominous number of “ blanket-men ” were abroad, and that winter the streets of San Francisco shook to the tread of thousands of marching men clamoring for work or bread.

Never since the day when Babel heaved its ambitious walls in the face of heaven, have men more thoroughly accomplished the opposite of what they sought. It was expected that the railroad would bring the starving East and Europe to California for land ; but the first and greatest thing it had to do, was to carry homesick California to the East on a visit. It was confidently expected that it would restore the ever-lamented “ flush times ” of 1850 ; but, instead of that, it sunk California, temporarily, to the profoundest depths of depression. It was amusing to see the commercial grimaces and wincing with which it was at last reluctantly admitted that the railroad “was not an unmixed good,” and to hear men proclaim themselves lustily against it (in fact it bore itself pretty haughtily) and take up the championship of the stage-coach. In fact, California had fallen into a deep and refreshing slumber, lulled by the pæans of her own invincible greatness. The minds of men in trade were provincial, colonial, narrow. The first through train, laden with the belated thunders of Gettysburg, and the big, hoarse music of the noisy and jostling East, was as if a six-cylinder press had suddenly been heard clanking in the Happy Valley of Rasselas and Imlac.

And now, for the first time, it went hard in good sooth with poor John Chinaman. Who killed Cock Robin ? The Central Pacific, his best friend. It was a new thing under the sun to hear a Chinaman complain of “ hard times.” And not long after, it was “Californee alle same Chinee now”; and then again, a little later, “ Chinee better Californee ; vellee hard times now.” And then there came, in the summer of 1870, the famous manifesto of the Six Companies, which was posted on all the dead-walls of the Celestial Empire, warning their countrymen to remain at home. In due process of time those superb steamers of the Pacific Mail no longer staggered wearily into the Golden Gate, after their long, long flight, with nine, ten, eleven hundred yellow faces staring out from their decks upon the fabled shores. They arrived with only a hundred, seventyfive, fifty, but went away reeling under hundreds upon hundreds. Thousands who had gambled away all their earnings in the prodigal years when the Central Pacific was building, now circumscribed all their ambition to the one little purpose of saving enough gold to carry them home.

Those two car-loads of Chinese bones, digged up in the Nevada desert along the Central Pacific, were the vanguard of the final exodus.

“ And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him : for he had straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you ; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you.”

And, after their hard labor and bondage in the desert, let them depart in peace. Let them spoil us, the Egyptian task-masters, if they will, and carryhome their poor little remnant of gold, and their silver. They have earned it well.

With the departure of the Chinese will come the long - expected immigrants. With them will come the just partition of the soil. With that will come white competition in labor, to which the workmen need no longer scorn to yield. With that will come cheap capital, busy to seek out the development of the land, instead of hoarding itself in bank, or throwing itself away on those infamous money-juggles of lying speculators.

Thus, at the last ringing stroke of the sledge on the golden spike of the junction, all this provincial narrowness, and these false ideas and false systems, vanished like the gibbering ghosts at cockcrow ; and a new and true foundation was laid whereon to build the future of this peerless California. Not less auspicious for America was the hour when those locomotive pilots touched together, on Promontory Mountain, than was for Europe that day when Charles Martel smote hip and thigh of the Saracenic hordes before the walls of Tours. Alexander Dumas says Africa begins at the Pyrenees. We did not want Asia to begin at the Sierra Nevada. Thanks to the overland railroad, it shall not.

Stephen Powers.