They had eyes but for the one thing; and gold blinded as well those who never found it as those who did. California for goldsomewhere else to spend it.

But many did not get rich enough to be quite ready to "get out;" and many, when they got rich, found that, after all, they did not wish to get out; and others staid to "do business" with them; and around the various rocks and drift lodged all other sort that floats. For commerce' sake, for independence, for excitement, for speculation, the city of the mirage gradually became real. It was still San Francisco, still the Ishmaelite of cities the liveliest, maddest, most generous, and most Godforsaken in the world, but already with a faint fore-twinkling of the day to come when (more or less repentant and proportionately forgiven) it should be called to sit upon a throne.

CAHUENGA PASS.

And even yet there was no dream that the real wealth of California lay no deeper than the tickling of a plow. Air and freedom were perceived and appreciated, but the third physical necessity of a complete home was not yet found there. With all allowances for "haste and a bad pen," it must seem curious to us now that Americans could have been so unforeseeing. For eighty years already the Franciscan missionaries had been making little walled Edens of grape and palm and rose, and gathering such crops as astounded even Humboldt.* Sutter, the SwissAmerican, who was first seen and most widely-known by ninetenths of our pioneers (and the father of gold), harvested 75,000 bushels of wheat in 1847, to say nothing of 150,000 hides and

Essai Politique.

187 tons of tallow. But no one noticed a little thing like that, except some, who mentioned it and went on gold hunting. It was admitted to be a good cowboy State. Colton, Revere, Bryant, and other travelers dwell on the cattle as the finest they had ever seen-though not one of them dreamed what scrubby little stock this climate had bred those same wild cattle up from. For sixty years the Spanish Californians had been living by cattle, and Dana and his less-lettered peers had been coming from Boston round the Horn for hides and tallow. Their skin game-this would be an ill pun, but is fair history-was better than a gold mine for them, when the Don wore 200 steers or so on his back, and was not staggered by such a price for broadcloth.*

But what of it? Gold and cattle and gambling, barefaced or respectable that was "all the country was good for" through a generation of as shrewd and tireless Americans as ever whittled a wilderness. It was only by slow, sporadic, empiric stages that they found the soil was not such a fool as it looked. Perhaps we should not be too hard on them. Unto this day the observant Easterner finds it a serious wrench to learn that color is not all of chemistry; that these gravel beds of disintegrated granites are richer than the blackest bottoms of the Scioto or the Kaw or the mellowest meadows of the Connecticut. The genesis of such agriculture as now puts California in a class by itself came of recent years and almost at a jump. But that belongs with the story of the new Argonauts, of which I must attempt the telling later and by itself; for it is a spacious theme, and perhaps the most interesting in all the history of man's wanderings. Yet I cannot forbear toeing-in just here one sample nail, to hint what a change has been since California was not the country an agriculturist would select." One small Southern California city† has received in its best year $300 to every man, woman and child for one year's crop of one kind of fruit. A gold bonanza might rival the output, but never the

distribution.

But we must not forget to reckon with our hosts, the first Californians-a social climate which so much mitigated the rough invader half a century ago, and so intimately (though less consciously) colors our third civilization, so radically unlike either predecessor, yet so appreciably influenced by both.

The patriarchal life had here its most perfect type in America, for it had more genial environment even than its peers in Mexico or Peru. As law-abiding (if with laws less onerous to abide)

* A $75 suit, Boston price current, for 250 hides at $1.50 each. Bryant, What I saw in California, p. 287.

† Riverside.