THE SUNSET LAND.

THE CLIMATE, SOIL, AND NATURAL PRODUCTIONS WHICH MAKE CALIFORNIA WHAT IT IS.

CALIFORNIA is a study. On visiting it, the stranger is, at first, utterly bewildered, finding everything so entirely different from anything he expected or ever saw before. He seems to have alighted on some new planet; the points of compass seem to have swung wrong, and the winds, the trees, the shrubbery, the hills, and valleys, all conspire to confound and mock him, and to enjoy his confusion.

It is on account of what I deem the great FUTURE before California, and the vast 6 10 problems there to be solved, that I desire to have my reader understand what Nature has done to make this State so peculiar, and to give her a position of so much importance. How different in all respects from our New England! Here the winds hurry, and scurry, and change, often many times a day; there they unchangingly blow in one direction for six months, and then the opposite for six months. Here the earth rests in winter; there they have no winter, and her rest is in the summer. Here we have storm, and heat, and cold; there they have no storms or rain in summer, and only rain in winter. Here our trees shed their leaves; there they wear their varnished covering the year round, while some of them, like the bronzed madrona, shed their bark annually, and keep on their bright, green, waxen leaves. Here the woodpecker goes to the old tree and knocks and wakes up the worm, and then pecks in and gets him; there 7 11 the woodpecker bores a thousand holes in the great pine tree, into each of which he thrusts an acorn, into which the miller deposits her egg, and which the woodpecker calls and takes, after it has become a good-sized worm. The blue jay is arrayed in a strange dress, and chatters in notes equally strange. The lark sings in sweeter notes, but they are all new. Here the owl lives in the hollow tree; there he burrows in the ground with the strange gray, ground-squirrel, or in the hole of the rattlesnake, or in that of the prairie dog.

Here the elder is a bush; there I have seen it a tree whose trunk is a foot in diameter. Here the lemon-verbena is a flower-pot plant; there it is a bush nine feet high. Here the mustard-seed yields a small plant; there it is a tree, often seventeen feet high. Here we have a few grape-vines in a grapery; there you will find five thousand acres in a single vineyard. Here you will see a single oleander 8 12 beautifying a single parlor; there you will find a hundred clumps in full blossom in a single yard, amid what looks like showers of roses. Here we make the Ethiopian calla bloom in the conservatory; there it blossoms in every graveyard, and at the head of almost every grave. Here we have the thick green turf on our soil; there they have no turf, and not a dandelion, daughter of the turf, grows in all California. Here the sun paints the grass green; there he turns it brown. Here you see the farmer carefully housing his hay, and little patch of wheat; there he cuts no hay except to supply the cities, and reaps and threshes his wheat in the fields, and throws the bags down to lie all summer, sure that neither rain nor dew will hurt it. Here you have scores of trees out of which you make your tools; there you have no tree out of which you can make a wagon-hub or spoke, a plough, a harrow, an axe-helve, or a 9 13 hoe-handle. Here everything is small; there the trees and all the vegetable world are so large, that you are tempted to doubt your own eyes. Now, what makes the climate--the creator of all these strange things--so peculiar? Be patient a few minutes, and I will try to tell you.

California is a little over eight hundred miles long and over two hundred wide--a territory out of which you could carve Massachusetts twenty times. Full two thirds of all this is mountain. For our purpose at the present time, we may say the State lies north and south.

As you go from the valley of the Mississippi west, you rise till you cross the Rocky Mountains, over eight thousand feet above the ocean, at the point of crossing. This is the back-bone of the continent. You then come to a desert of some four hundred miles. Then you meet the Wahsatch Range of mountains, parallel with the Rocky Mountains; 10 14 then another vast desert, much larger than the first, and then the Nevada Mountains--the eastern boundary of California. This is the Sierra Nevada, running the whole length of the State, nowhere less than four thousand feet high, up to fifteen thousand feet, with a hundred peaks, each of which is over thirteen thousand feet. For two hundred miles along its northern part, there is no spot where it could be passed under eleven thousand feet altitude. The width of this range is eighty or one hundred miles, --running nearly in a straight line, --and the whole ridge is covered with snow over eight months in the year.

On the west side of the State, holding the old Pacific in its place, is the Coast Range of mountains, still parallel with the Sierra Nevada; or, rather, several ranges of these mountains, parallel with one another, as well as the Nevadas. This Coast Range, or ocean-barrier, is from say twelve hundred to ten 11 15 thousand feet high, and about forty miles wide. Between these two great ranges of mountains lies a great valley, made by two rivers, the Sacramento and San Joaquin, --the first running south and the other north, --meeting and emptying in a bay in about the middle of the State, and forming a great valley, --though usually called two, --about five hundred miles long and fifty miles wide. This great basin was evidently once a vast inland sea, which, by some convulsion of nature, broke through the Coast Range of mountains, in the centre of the State, by wearing a channel into the ocean about a mile and a third wide. This outbreak is the "Golden Gate." Out of this great valley there were little bays and coves between the spurs of the Coast Range. These are now beautiful little valleys, about fifty in number, and from five to a hundred miles long. Among the most beautiful of these--and upon more 12 16 beautiful the sun never shone--are the Napa, the Sanoma, the Russian, and the Santa Clara valleys. As you stand on the mountains, and look down into these valleys, they look like lakes turned into land. Now, leave the land a moment, and look at the ocean.

Near the equator, in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, starts a stream or a river in the ocean. It runs along up the coast of China till it reaches Behring's Straits. Into those straits it rushes, meets and melts the icebergs, so that there are no icebergs in the Pacific. In doing this, it gets immensely chilled, and turns down towards our coast. It strikes the Aleutian Islands, and a part is deflected and makes towards the Sandwich Islands, carrying cool waters to make temperate what would otherwise be uninhabitable. A part of this now cold river comes down along the coast of Oregon and California, the cold water, of course, down on the bottom, wherever the water is blue.

As the waters come near the shores, they become shallow and green, and the cold waters are forced up to the surface; these chill the vapors hanging in the air, condense them, and in the night create a heavy fog, which hangs along the whole coast of California. Now, why does not this sea-fog roll over all the land, and cover it? I reply, it never rises over one thousand feet high, and as the Coast Range of mountains is higher than this, they shut it out. But at the Golden Gate, where it has a chance, it does pour in every day, and envelop the city of San Francisco from about four o'clock in the afternoon till about nine in the morning. There is another reason why the fog does not cover the land. The great valley, of which I have spoken, is the great laboratory of the State. There the sun pours down his strength, and the heated, rarefied air rises up, and drinks up all the vapor which the ocean can send inward, long 14 18 before it can become a cloud. Owing to the position and the rotation of the earth, the winds from the Pacific blow from the west, one half of the year, towards the east, and the other way the other half. This would be easy to explain, were it not the explanation would be too long. The heat of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valley, often 110° to 120°, would be intolerable, were it not for these unseen mists that flow over them from the ocean. These meet the cool streams of air which every night pour over the snowy Nevadas, and they drop down, not in rains or dews, but in coolness; so that the nights, through the State, are always cool, requiring the same amount of bed-clothing in summer and in winter. Man and beast are refreshed by the cool night.

The atmosphere is so dry during the day, that the moisture which would otherwise be perspiration on the body, is at once dried up, and both man and beast can endure more and 15 19 do more work than in any other climate I ever knew.

I saw a team which had been driven over lofty mountains, a distance of twelve miles, three times, or thirty-six miles, in a single day, and not apparently especially fatigued; and I saw a man (Foss, near the Geysers) who drove a stage one hundred and sixty miles in a single day--with relays of horses of course--this summer. The horses have a speed and an endurance that amazes a stranger. You would think these rich, deep-soiled, fertile valleys would abound in fevers. Nothing of the kind. I doubt whether on the face of the globe there is a healthier region.

On inquiry as to the healthiness of a particular village, they said it was so healthy that when they had finished laying out their new cemetery, they had to kill a man to put into it!

In the summer these valleys are so turned 16 20 up to the sun, that everything matures and ripens quickly and early. They were gathering in their crops in the middle of May. But the gentle winds that climb over the Coast Range of mountains go over the valley, and fan the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevadas. From May to November there is no rain or dew in California. The wheat, the barley, and everything has ripened. The grass has dried up, all seeded, and still making rich pasture for the cattle, --and there is no part of the year when the flocks fatten so fast as when they eat what we should call the dried-up grass in the fields, good for nothing here, but full of seed and nourishment there, --and the ground on the surface parches, and cracks, and wrinkles, and rests till the fall rains. The beautiful green of field and meadow, of landscape, hill, and dale, which makes New England so lovely, is all gone. You must wait till next winter, when we are covered 17 21 with snow, to see their creation all fresh and green. February is their month of beauty and of glory, as June is ours.

I have spoken of the great ranges of mountains. At the base of these, are smaller mountains, called foot-hills, in all shapes and of all sizes, mingled and joined together by spurs, very much as the bars of pig-iron are in the furnace. As you stand on one of these, you see gulches scooped out on all sides, and the spurs running in every direction. It is easy to see that from these gulches came the soil which has been washed down and made the valleys, which everywhere push up among the foot-hills and spurs. You cannot climb a mountain by a railroad, as you would one of our mountains, by gradually going up its side; for you would find that you would have to go round one spur and gulch, and far in round another, only to meet, perhaps, a dozen more, jutting out or drawing in, in all 18 22 directions. In one instance I noticed the Central Pacific Railroad went six miles to get round a gulch, in order to gain one mile.

As there are no clouds, so, of course, there is no thunder in California, --at least none above ground. In the midst of this great valley, or land lake, the Bay of San Francisco sets up directly east as it passes through the Golden Gate, and then, turning south round the peninsula, at the end of which the city is built, making a harbor of sixty-five miles in extent, and deep enough to receive all the ships of the world.

It was a long study before I could make up my mind what caused the narrow gorge from the bay to the ocean to be called the "Golden Gate." It had nothing to do with the gold of the land, for the name was given before the discovery of gold. The theory I adopt is this. As you approach the coast from the ocean, the entrance seems to open 19 23 like a gate, and as you look in through the fog, you see the yellow sun-light resting upon this fog, bright and golden, just about the narrowest part of the channel. Here the fort stands, and hence the name "Golden Gate." It often looks like a pillar of fire hanging over the gate.

I have said that the summer is so long and dry, that the wheat--the finest the world ever saw--is left in sacks, in the fields, for weeks. As a fact, it becomes like kiln-dried wheat, and the only difficulty with it is, it is too dry to grind. The English millers carry it to England, and mix it with their damp wheat, and it grinds admirably. In California, they dampen it, either by passing it through a kind of screw, like the perpetual screw of a propeller, letting in a little stream of water as the wheat enters the screw, or they let a small stream into the hopper when grinding. If you ask how big the stream 20 24 should be, the answer is, that must be decided by the judgment of the miller. But as every pound of water he uses adds just so much weight to the flour, it is to be hoped his judgment and conscience will both be good.

As to the natural scenery of California, it is so peculiar that art injures it. If you want to see it in its beauty, look at it before man touches it. In no spot in the State can you stand without seeing mountains, near or remote; and very few where you cannot see the long, western, snow-capped ridge of the Sierra Nevadas.

Now, let us once more take our stand on the Nevadas, and look around. At the east, lie the great alkali deserts, --once the bottom of a great, inland, salt sea, but, at some remote period, heaved up by volcanoes with this range of mountains. As you look north or south, you see the ridge and the jagged peaks along which a hundred volcanoes once 21 25 blazed. Here are twenty thousand square miles most plainly of volcanic origin. These mountains bear up great forests, without which the railroad could never have been built. East of this ridge lies Silver Belt, beginning far up, perhaps in Alaska, and running down into Mexico and South America. It is as much as three hundred miles wide, certainly, at times. Now let the eye turn west. You see a narrow strip under the brow of the Sierra, of not much account. Then comes a strip, or belt, twenty miles wide, of most magnificent pine forests. Here, in this belt, stand the sugar pines, often full three hundred feet high, and the Sequoia gigantea, or "Big trees," still loftier. No finer pine timber than that which grows on this belt need be desired. Then comes a belt, about forty miles wide, beginning far north of Oregon, even in British Columbia, which may be denominated the auriferous or Golden belt. It has gold under the 22 26 soil, and the most wonderful fruit-bearing power above the soil. Here the fig yields her three crops a year; here the pomegranate and the almond, the nectarine, the peach, the cherry, the apple, the pear, and, above all, the grape, have their home, and grow with a rapidity, and bear with a profusion, that is almost beyond belief. I do not believe a more wonderful belt, of the same extent, can be found on the face of the globe. I shall, of necessity, have to touch upon this topic again, when I come to speak of mining.

As you pass through these belts, you see the mountains and hills dotted and spotted with pines, with cattle-paths on their sides, just far enough apart to let these natural engineers crop every handful of wild oats; or if you look into the valley, the bright, green, live oak stand just near enough to look like a park of a very tasteful gentleman. On these hills grows that peculiar bush, the manzanita 23 27 (or little apple), whose fruit the Indians have for generations gathered, to give a kind of zest to their poor acorns. The winds that come over the mountains, leaving the fogs behind them, fan and cheer all.

Then come the great valley of the Sacramento (you are moving westward, remember), and the little valleys, and the Coast Range of mountains. Pass over them, and you find the Ocean kissing their base, save now and then a little clipping out of the mountain, to create a little valley. On that western side of the mountain, amid the fogs, grows that remarkable tree, the "redwood," often yielding boards six feet wide. It is a species of cedar, and is more used in building houses than all other woods put together. Still south is the other half, or Lower California, Los Angeles, --the Land of the Angels, --where are the fertility, the beauty, the fruits of the tropics; where enterprise will find a thousand sources 24 28 of wealth; where wealth may sleep in the lap of beauty--a vast region hardly yet taken into account, but which is to be inferior to no part of the State.

Still beyond, are quite a number of islands, some covered with birds, from which millions of eggs have been brought to the city; others inhabited by the sea-lion, a species of seal, weighing, when grown, from two thousand to five thousand pounds. On the rocks near the shore we saw perhaps a hundred of these awkward, tawny creatures, one of which they have named after a member of Congress-- why , I did not ask; but I noticed that he was very pugnacious, very arbitrary, very noisy, and that he made a great splashing when he dove. On some of the islands are thousands of sheep kept, yielding the choicest wool. One man has a flock of two hundred thousand. There is one great fact, not hitherto noticed, and which is yet to have a great influence on 25 29 California; and that is, the want, the necessity, and the use of water. During the long, dry summer, without water, the gardens, the flowers, and all vegetation die. With water, you have a fertility, a beauty, and an abundance, hardly to be conceived. Hence a ranche, with a stream of water running through it, is of great value. Hence the windmills everywhere, near almost every house, drawing up water for the family, for the cattle, and for the garden. It should be noted, however, that all vegetables and trees have a long tap-root, which pierces the soil deep to find moisture; and also, that it is the top of the soil that is so dry. But, after all, irrigation must and will come into use more and more.

Now, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains God has provided for all this. There are over two hundred lakes and ponds, natural reservoirs, where the waters are stored up, --enough to turn a vast territory into a 26 30 garden fair as Eden. These waters have hitherto been used almost solely in mining, but in time they will be led, in little channels, far and wide, and be a source of wealth far greater than what the mines yield. The power of water as a fertilizer is beyond anything that we, in this land of clouds and showers, have ever witnessed. For thousands of years this power has made Egypt the garden of the world. I shall have occasion to refer to this again, when I come to speak of Salt Lake City. But in these reservoirs there sleeps a power which will one day drive mills and factories, and then spread over the soil, and create plenty and beauty of which this generation little dream.

In looking at the scenery of California, we must not forget the can˜ons. When a gorge is so deep and so steep that you cannot climb up the mountain on either side, it is called a "can˜on." If you can climb up on one side, 27 31 and not the other, the impassable side is called a bluff. If you can climb up both sides, it is called a gorge. Sometimes the English word "valley" has superseded that of can˜on. Thus the wonderful Yo-Semite can˜on bears the name of valley.

Before the railroad was opened, the course of the emigrants was over the arid deserts for months; and then, when over the Nevada heights, through some one or more of these can˜ons. Death's Valley, whose bottom is nothing but soft alkali mingled with sulphur, --whose bottom is also one hundred and fifty feet below the level of the sea, --whose length is from forty to one hundred miles, --is one of these can˜ons. It received its name from the fact that no living thing is to be found in it; and also because, a few years since, a party of emigrants got in it, and from which not a man or a beast ever came out. Their wagons and kettles were found strung along 28 32 on the sides of the can˜on, as were also their bones, where they fell, in their vain endeavors to get out.

The highest pass through which the emigrant went is ten thousand seven hundred and sixty-five feet above the ocean; and there are several small lakes, also, not less than seven thousand feet above the ocean. Such is Lake Mono, fourteen miles long and nine miles wide, slumbering among the tokens of volcanoes, and inhabited only by myriads of the most noisome flies.

Lake Tahoe, fifteen miles from the railroad, is already becoming a favorite resort of the Californians in the summer. It is twenty-three miles long, fifteen wide, six thousand two hundred and eighteen feet above the sea, walled in by mountains from one to four thousand feet, and in places, the lake is sixteen hundred feet deep. Its waters are pure as crystal, and it is a place of unsurpassed beauty.

As the traveller emerges from the tunnel on the Sierra Nevada, looking from the cars, in their ascent eastward, on the left hand, he will see a charming little lake, fifteen hundred feet or more below him, calm, blue, and beautiful. It is about five miles long, and one mile wide. It is "Donner Lake." And who has not heard of Donner Lake? A little over twenty years since, an emigrant train of fifty men and thirty women and children encamped on the borders of this lake, late in the season, under the leadership of a Captain Donner. A heavy snow, of twenty feet in depth, shut them in the can˜on, and prevented their advance or retreat. Their cattle died, and they ate them to the very last string of their skins. Then famine came upon them, and hunger and starvation stared them in the face, --nay, pressed upon them with maddening power. They could hardly wait for one another to die before they consumed the body. They would 30 34 kindle their night-fires in their several little huts, crouch around them, creep toward each other, and glare into each other's eyes with a maddened glare, like that of starving wild beasts. From hut to hut exchanges of limbs and parts of the human body were carefully made, payment to be made when the next one died. One man boiled and consumed a girl, nine years old, in a single night. One girl made a soup of her lover's head. A woman is still living who ate her own husband. A young Spaniard confessed that he "ate baby raw, stewed some of Jake, and roasted his head." I have seen one who was in that horrible party.

In the mean time, as we are told, there lived in the Napa Valley, not far from San Francisco, an old hunter by the name of Blount. He dreamed that there was such a party suffering and dying in the mountains. So deeply was he impressed with the dream, that in the 31 35 morning he went twenty-three miles to see another old hunter. In describing his dream, he drew a picture of the can˜on so plain that the hunter recognized it as the can˜on of Donner's Lake. Immediately they set out, organized a party, waded through the deep snows, found the Donner party, and ultimately, thirty out of the eighty were rescued, though many of them frost-bitten and crippled for life. But the most awful part of the tragedy was, that during these dreadful weeks, they became so besotted, that when found, --filthy beyond description, with parts of their undevoured friends around them, --they were so maddened, like wild beasts that have once tasted human flesh, that they had to be literally torn away from this food, and most reluctantly ate the food which their deliverers brought. One German, still living, was found, after being supplied, cooking human flesh, all smeared with its blood. It was thought that this 32 36 ghoul had actually committed murder, in order to have one more feast!

Among the foot-hills of the Nevadas, I found a Minister laboring among the scattered sheep, who was eleven months in getting over from Illinois. He and his wife, and a little child four years old, having lost their cattle, and all the rest of the party leaving them, actually walked five hundred miles before they came to a human habitation. They are all now living.

I have attempted, thus far, to help you to look over the landscape, and see California as God made it. I have thought that this introduction was necessary in order to show you, in filling up the picture, where and how everything has its place. In the vast and lofty mountains, in their round, beautiful foot-hills, in the bewitching valleys, that sleep in beauty through the country, in the peculiarity of climates, in the gorgeous drapery of trees 33 37 and flowers, in the sleeping gold and silver yet unfound, in the fertility of soil and the great wealth yet to come from it, in its relations to the Orient, --not yet touched upon, --I see a future for this part of our land, great in results, wide in their reach, fearful for good or for evil to the human family, but all, all under the orderings of a God infinite in wisdom.

MINES, MINING, AND THEIR EFFECTS ON THE WORLD.

BEFORE the Mexican war, California was an unknown land-- terra incognita . The various tribes of filthy Indians occupied, but neither improved nor enjoyed, her beautiful valleys: the wild horse and cattle, the elk, the deer, and the bear, roamed unmolested. The mountain-quail called to his mate, and the valley-quail heard no gun: the mourning dove cooed in his loneliness, and the rattlesnake basked in the sun, without fear. The forests stood as if listening to coming footsteps, and beauty and plenty seemed to be waiting for the tread of destiny. The indolent Mexican had his rancho, of almost unlimited extent, his cattle, 35 39 which he killed only for their skins, and a few beans for his soup.

The Missions established by the monks had partially tamed a part of the savages. These missions were strong in cattle, in the labor of the Indians, and in the rude abundance of a very rude state of society. But a stronger race was on its way, whose indomitable energy was to sweep off imbecility, and drive out everything that could not compete with it. After Mexico became independent of Spain, she plundered these missions, took their property, and destroyed them forever; and, for evil or for good, Mexico alone is answerable for the wreck of all the Catholic Missions in California.

While the Spaniards held possession of the country, wanderers on the ocean, weary of wandering, fur traders, trappers, and adventurers, gradually came in; and though the Mexicans made repeated attempts to drive 36 40 and keep them out, they might as well have attempted to drive away bees from the honey which they could not cover up.

Captain Sutter had a large Spanish grant, on the Sacramento River, and there he planted himself, built a fort, and called it New Helvetia. The fruit was ripening, and was ready to fall into the hands of those who were ready to catch it. In 1845, Congress declared (Mexico owing Jonathan some millions of dollars, which she could neither pay nor repudiate) Texas to be annexed to our country. The war which followed clinched the nail, and the American flag was planted in California. But not until terrible battles had been fought, and vast wisdom and courage had been shown by John C. Fremont and Commodore Stockton, did the land have rest.

No novel could be more thrilling than the history of the fearful struggles to decide the question who should own California? In 1845, 37 41 it was estimated that the population of California was eight thousand whites, perhaps ten thousand domesticated Indians, and from one to three hundred thousand wild Indians. In 1847, the emigrating wagons over the mountains had poured in a great stream, while confidence in the safety which the American flag gave, had drawn in people from all nations till the population had increased to twelve or fifteen thousand in the whole State. But now an event was to take place which, beyond all others unparalleled, was suddenly to change the face of a country, electrify the world, and jerk forward the progress of civilization, at the rate of a century in a few years.

In the winter of 1847-8, Sutter was building a saw-mill on the south branch of the American River, a branch of the Sacramento. Mr. James W. Marshall, the contractor to build the mill, one day let water into the tail-race, in order to deepen the channel. The 38 42 water carried sand and mud, which it soon deposited. On looking down, Marshall discovered something bright among the sand. At once, on feeling of its weight, he was convinced that it was gold. Eager with excitement, he hastened to tell Sutter. On seeing his excitement, and hearing his story, Sutter thought he had gone mad, and kept his eye on his loaded rifle. Marshall tossed an ounce of gold on the table, and they were equally excited: they hastened to the spot, vowing secrecy. But as they continued to search under an excitement they could not conceal, a Mormon soldier watched them, and soon possessed the secret. He told his companions, who had been with him in the Mexican war; and now the cat was fairly out of the bag. Warm rumors flew in every direction, --exaggerated, of course. Gold--gold was to be had for the picking up, on "the Rio de los Americanos." The population rushed in 39 43 a swarm. In a few days, more than twelve hundred people were at the saw-mill, digging with shovels, spades, knives, sticks, wooden bowls, and everything else. Infants were turned out of cradles, that the cradles might be used for washing gold. The husband left his wife; American, Spaniard, and all rushed, helter-skelter, to the diggings. Towns were depopulated, ships left sailorless, --everything thrown away--all feeling sure, if they could only reach the diggings, they would return millionnaires . In the mean time, other streams and gulches were found to contain gold. It seemed as if the whole Nevadas might be only a thin crust over mountains of gold. A few ships got away, and letters and gold dust went with them: the excitement widened its circle. On rushed the nearest people, the Mexicans; then all the nooks and corners of California poured out their population. Oregon on the north, the Sandwich Islands on 40 44 the west, Peru and Chili on the south, poured in their eager diggers. Then China felt the thrill, and her people flocked over. Australia sent her convicts and rascals; and adventurers from all parts of the earth, having nothing to lose, flew to California. The Mexican war had just been closed, and thousands of young men from the soldiery went to the land of gold. The East caught the fever, and emigrant wagons uncounted, hastened over the deserts, leaving the bones of men and of animals to bleach along their path.

On--on to the land of gold! Ho! for California! Ships went tossing round Cape Horn full of young men. England, Germany, France, and Italy sent multitudes. At once the East was aroused, and sent fifty thousand a year, for five successive years, and invested ninety-two millions of dollars before any return was made. In a time incredibly short, there were at least a quarter of a million of the 41 45 wildest, bravest, most daring, and most intelligent young men digging gold. There was no female society, there were no homes to soften or restrain, no laws, and no magistrates. From the lakes of the north to the Gulf of Mexico, from the lumber-mills of Maine to the settler on the Indian territories, the whole land was moved.

It was a far-off land, where there were neither houses, nor clothing, nor food. As a rare luxury, a saloon, composed of cloth only, could now and then hang out the sign "potatoes this day;" and it was crowded. Apples sold at five dollars apiece in gold. Everybody had a flush of gold. Fortunes were made in a day, and lost in gambling at night. It was mean not to spend all as it came. Every man was loaded with gold, revolvers, and bowie-knives. Nothing was valued; nothing was sacred. It will be readily seen how it was that this mining population could be so 42 46 easily excited by rumors of new and rich diggings. Tell them that at such diggings every man can obtain, at the lowest mark, five hundred dollars a day, and all would rush thither.

At one time, gold was discovered up near Oregon, in the black sand on the sea-shore. Letters came saying that every pound of sand would yield from three to ten dollars. One gentleman, who had been sent to view it, wrote that their claim would yield them forty-three millions each! In two days eight vessels were advertised from San Francisco to the Gold Bluffs. But the excitement died at once when thousands had been disappointed.

At one time, led by false reports, a great current set down to Peru--to find nothing. At another time, the report declared that wonderful deposits were found on Kern River, and at once five thousand were on the spot, and five thousand more were ready to follow. It lasted a few weeks--but long enough to ruin hundreds.

Who has not heard of the Fraser River excitement? This river was more than a thousands miles away, up in British Columbia. No matter. The miners were spoiling for excitement. In March, the account of the mines was published; by the 20th of April, five hundred were on their way, two thousand in May, nine thousand five hundred in June; and in three months from the first notice, eighteen thousand had arrived, by the aid of nine steamers and twenty sailing vessels. Every sixth voter in the State had gone. Real estate fell from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent. Lots that had been sold for fifteen hundred dollars, could be bought for one hundred. After one steamer had been wrecked, and millions of money lost, the miners, too late, found nothing worth staying for, and so, in the course of the season, nearly all found their way back to "God's land," as they called it. In 1860, the mania for silver mines began. 44 48 On one mine, --the Washoe, --buying rights with no titles, sending out men who knew nothing about the business, jumping to conclusions by seeing a small sample of ore, hearing great stories of the richness of the mine, led the population to be almost crazy. Thirty millions of dollars were sunk and lost in this one excitement. Thousands of families were reduced to poverty; but as a few were made rich, and the city which furnished the supplies was, on the whole, a gainer, I do not see why the same experiment may not be repeated again and again.

In mining, the first requisite and essential, after finding evidences of gold, is water--water to wash out the soil and sand, leaving the gold behind. When they first began, they carried the earth on their backs, or on pack-horses, two or three miles to the nearest water.

You are a miner, we will suppose, of the 45 49 poorest and simplest working power. In that case, you have a pan in which you shovel the earth, and then wash it till the soil is out, and the gold left on the bottom. But the gold, for the most part, is very fine. It is mere dust. Then you put quicksilver in the bottom of your pan; that attracts the gold, and forms what is called an amalgam. If you have got beyond the simple pan, you have the rocker, --a larger vessel, round on the bottom, and long, like a hollow log split lengthwise; this you put under running water, and while one shovels in the earth, you rock and wash it. Or, you make a trough, with little slats nailed across the bottom inside. Here, above the slats, you put your quicksilver, and let in a stream of running water, while you shovel in the earth. All the day long you do this, and at night gather out your amalgam. Now, the gold is scattered through all the gulches of the foot-hills, and the necessity of 46 50 running water has created Water Companies, who bring it along on the sides of the mountains in ditches, and across ravines in troughs held up on trestle-work. Sometimes this water is brought one hundred and forty miles, and the right to use it is sold to the miner by the square inch. A more productive way is what is called the hydraulic method. This is now the most expensive, and for the placer mining the most profitable.

Suppose you are to get the gold out of a hill or flat where the soil is sixteen or twenty feet deep before you come to the bed-rock, which underlies all the hills. You bring water from any distance, however great, and let it fall, say fifty feet, through a hose six inches in diameter. This hose must be encased in iron rings, --rings, so that you can bend it, --and very near each other, to prevent its bursting. Or, better still, in place of the hose, you have iron pipes, through which the water 47 51 rushes, and which is safer than the hose, which is apt to "buck," as they call it; i.e., twitch and jerk as would a live buck, if held by the hind leg. Let in a stream through your pipe, as big as your wrist, upon the bank, and it washes it down with amazing rapidity. Being dissolved, it flows through the long trough, where the quicksilver lies in wait to court and embrace, and retain it. The more soil you can thoroughly dissolve, the more gold you get. After all, with your utmost skill, you lose at least thirty-three per cent. of all the gold you move in the soil.

At some remote period, when all the rock under the soil was melting, the gold seems to have been melted and mingled with the quartz. Some of this quartz is very hard, some very soft. From this soft, or "rotten quartz," as they call it, this detached gold comes sometimes in nuggets worth from twenty dollars to fifteen hundred, but more 48 52 generally in very fine particles. It is the fine dust that escapes in the water running through the trough, and is lost. I have seen nuggets worth from fifty to one hundred dollars each. These pieces of gold are found in the sands and beds of ancient rivers, and are as plainly washed and rounded by the action of running water for ages, as were the five smooth stones which David took out of the brook for his sling.

Follow up one of these beds of an ancient river, and very likely you will find a mountain heaved up and thrown directly upon it. Then, up and over that mountain, very likely, you will find the river-bed running at right angles with its old channel.

Although it seems as if every gulch and ravine had been explored, yet doubtless a multitude of unknown deposits, remain yet to be found. As thirty-three per cent. of all the washings is lost, the Chinese, indefatigable 49 53 gleaners, come after all other miners have left, and make it a profitable business to gather what remains.

Nothing can be more dreary than a territory where the soil has been washed out as low as the water will run off. Ten thousand rocks of all shapes, and forms, and sizes are left; acres and acres, and even miles, of the skeletons of beauty, with the flesh all gone, and nothing but hideousness remaining. I have heard it asserted, that the placer mines are about exhausted, and that, hereafter, nothing but the rich companies, who have great mills to crush the quartz rock, can gain a living. I do not believe this is true. While capital and skill can gain much faster in quartz-mining, I have no doubt that it will take generations, if not a thousand years, before the gold is so washed out of the soil of California, that mining will not be a paying business. In the quartz mines, a very huge water-wheel, made to turn 50 54 by the smallest amount of water possible, pumps the water from the mine as fast as it accumulates; the ore is then dug or blasted out, broken into pieces about as large as the fist, then put into an iron mortar, and stamped with iron pestles, till it is so reduced to powder, that water will wash it out in the trough, where the quicksilver lies in wait to catch the gold. This amalgam, quicksilver and gold, is next put into a covered retort of iron, with a a pipe allowing the fumes of the quicksilver to escape, which pipe is cooled by passing through cold water, till the quicksilver fumes are condensed, and it drops down, the pure metal it was, leaving the gold in the retort. In this process, about twenty-five per cent. of the quicksilver is lost. There are about four hundred and fifty quartz mills already in operation in the State, and the number is constantly increasing. In the placer mines the poorest man may go to work, only paying for 51 55 the use of water. In the quartz-mining, vast capital can and must be employed. When the little claims on mining land have been staked out, the spirit of speculation comes in to buy and sell these claims. I have seen many houses bought for the sake of the soil that might be dug out under them. The useless house is left standing on sticks.

As I have mentioned quicksilver, this will be the proper place to lead you to its source. Leaving San Francisco, and going south in the Santa Clara valley, nearly seventy miles, you come to the Almaden mines, the largest quicksilver mines in the world. It is a wild, weird-looking place. Up, up the round hills, three miles from the gorge, are the mines, nine hundred and forty feet perpendicular height.

The history of this mine is curious. In 1845, a Mexican officer met a tribe of Indians, with their faces painted with vermilion, which they had obtained from the cinnabar or 52 56 quicksilver ore. By bribery he induced the Indians to show him the place. The mines are on a spur of the Coast Range of mountains. The Indians had dug fifty or sixty feet into the mountain, when first discovered by Captain Castellero, with their hard-wood sticks. Probably they had known the mines for many generations. A quantity of skeletons were found in a passage, where life had undoubtedly been lost by the caving in of the earth. Up the mountain, and near the mouth of the mines, are the cabins of the miners--all Mexicans. For a time after the discovery, it was supposed the ore contained gold, or at least silver; but a gentleman who procured a retort, and applied fire at the bottom, soon found, by the pernicious effects of the fumes on his system, that he had caught a tiger.

A company was organized, but up to 1850 they had expended three hundred and eighty-seven thousand eight hundred dollars over all 53 57 receipts. It was then that a blacksmith, named Baker, introduced a new process of separating the metal from the hard stone in which it is imbedded.

Suppose you want to get the quicksilver out of your ore. You will build a brick building, two hundred feet long, the rooms of which are divided by thick walls, each room eighteen feet high, and fifteen wide, and thirteen in number. In the first room you pile in your ore, fifty little car loads, of three hundred pounds each, or seven and a half tons. Outside of the ore you have your furnace, with holes, many in number, through which the flames are drawn, so as to heat every pound of ore. The fumes, which are quicksilver, rise to the top of the room. There they find an opening of about a foot, the whole length of the partition. They then drop down into the second room, to find an opening at the bottom of the next wall. Through this they rush, alternately, going 54 58 over one wall and under the next, through all the thirteen compartments. By this time the fumes are cool, and drop on the bottom of the room, out of which, on the floor, a little inclined to one side, the metal rolls, through holes, into a trough, which conveys them into a great iron kettle, holding probably a ton. Out of this it is dipped into strong iron flasks, containing seventy-six and a half pounds each, and the flasks weighing thirty-six pounds each. Each flask must have an iron cap or stopper strongly screwed on; and the flask must not be full, else, on exposure to the sun and heat, the quicksilver will ooze through the iron. This is now ready for market, and you send it all over the world. Much of it goes to China, and comes out again in vermilion paint. While you have this furnace and set of chambers cooling off, which it has taken you ninety hours, without ceasing, to burn, you must have a second set of 55 59 chambers in the process of burning. The chimneys must be two hundred feet high. After all, the fumes will be so penetrating and pervading, that your men often sicken, and must stop, and new men take their places. With four hundred men at three dollars each a day, to mine and run the ore down to the valley on a little railway, and to burn and bottle, you make two and a half million pounds of quicksilver, at forty cents a pound, wholesale. This gives you an income of one million dollars annually. The ore contains from fourteen to forty per cent. of metal. Your monthly payments are forty thousand dollars. As the ore bed is two miles wide, you have no fear of exhaustion. In the dark chambers of the mine, running in all directions like the streets of the city, you want sixty pounds of candles daily for your workmen; i.e., for twenty-four hours, for so you keep the work going, and it is always night there. A pair 56 60 of trousers, a felt hat or cap, and leathern sandals tied about the ankles, constitute the clothing of your miners. Each man makes about thirty trips a day down into the deep, deep chambers of the mines, bringing up about two hundred pounds of ore on his shoulders, held there by a strap over the forehead, whilst his hands grasp the ladders that he must climb or descend, in order to get his ore to the little cars that go singing off down to the smelting-rooms. From this greatest of quicksilver mines comes the metal that enables the miners to gather the silver and gold all through California and Nevada. There are several other quicksilver mines in California, the united produce of which was, previous to the last year, six hundred thousand flasks of seventy-six and a half pounds each, and in the aggregate worth over eighteen million dollars at wholesale.

The silver mining is of more recent date in these parts than the gold. The silver belt 57 61 lies on the east side of the Nevadas, commencing, probably up in Alaska, and running south, down through Mexico, and into South America. This belt is about three hundred miles wide, and may be two thousand, and even more, in length. It is quarried, broken, and crushed very much as the gold quartz. Like all that is money, it is very uncertain. You may have a claim to-day, that is rich and promises well, and you could sell it for a hundred thousand dollars; but to-morrow the rock may stop, or you lose the lode. You may find it again after you have excavated your mine one hundred or three hundred feet, and you may never find it. In seeking for it you may expend all you have in the world, and never find it, and you are a poor man. You rush to find another claim, but you may try twenty and not find silver. So you buy claims, and probably not one in hundreds is of any possible worth. Indeed, those 58 62 who understand the thing--and there is scarcely a man in California who does not understand it by bitter experience, first or last--say that it is like a lottery where there is one prize to about five thousand blanks.

As to the amount of precious metals that have been dug out of the soil of California during the twenty years, it is difficult to form an estimate on which you can rely. As near as I can judge, I should put the gold at one thousand millions of dollars. This, if all brought together, would weigh just about two hundred tons. The silver mining is now in its infancy, but the yield is enormous. You go into the express office on the arrival of the daily steamer, and you are amazed at the enormous amount of huge silver bars that have just come in, --sometimes three tons of these in a single day! These are almost all sent off in the bars to China, and other parts of the world.

The amount yet to be obtained will be, I have no doubt, prodigious; and yet I would advise every one to let mines alone, unless he is thoroughly acquainted with the business, unless he is on the ground, and also, unless he can stay and watch it, with a great capital to invest, and has a faith that makes him willing to run great risks. The first opening of the silver mines, and the haste with which the Californians plunged into the excitement, cost them thirty millions before they had learned the business. Of course, disappointment, and poverty, and suffering, wide and deep, were in the path of such a sinking of property. The effects of mining are most sad on the miners. In their commencement they had to associate with the greatest number of vagabonds, hardened villains, and consummate rascals, that were ever assembled together. They had to associate with such, away in a new land, away from all the restraints of home and 60 64 of civilized life, --where they had no inducements to save their money, --where comforts and luxuries were rare, and all combined to make them esteem money as of no consequence beyond the present hour, and hence they recklessly threw it away in gambling and drinking. They were mean in each other's eyes unless they spent all. Hence they, as a class, are poor, and I fear always will be poor.

In the period of the greatest excitement, it seemed foolish to value money, when you had to pay three dollars apiece for eggs; for poor sugar, adulterated tea and coffee, four dollars a cup; for laudanum a dollar a drop, and forty dollars for enough to put you to sleep; ten dollars for a single pill, and from thirty up to one hundred dollars, if swallowed by the advice of a physician. Even toothache was expensive, when the luxury of having it taken out cost you fifty dollars at least. Shovels were fifteen dollars each, and a common tin 61 65 pan eight dollars. No man would help another for ten minutes under five dollars, and a day's work was valued at thirty dollars. Is it any wonder that the poor miner made little effort to save anything? They can have no homes, because, as they exhaust one mine, they must move off to another.

In Nevada the County town and place of holding the Courts may be here to-day, and next year this town may be deserted, and the County town be a hundred miles off. The County officers and lawyers all follow. It is not strange, then, that the miner has little inducement to lay aside any part of his earnings.

One of the greatest blessings that could be conferred on the miners, would be to have a kind of missionary, in whom they could confide, reside among them, and induce them to put their money in a Savings Bank.

It is a curious indication of the state of society, to look over the names which the 62 66 miners give to their towns and mining camps, some of which have been abandoned, and some still occupied. I select a few specimens of the names actually given to mining towns, viz.: Yankee Jim, Red Dog, Loafer Hill, Gouge Eye, Garotta, Last Chance, Ragtown, Git-up-and-git, Puppytown, Nary Red, Paint-pot Hill, You Bet.

If I be asked, Has not all the gold cost, in time, labor, and tools, all that it amounts to, dollar for dollar? I reply, Not unlikely; but suppose it has; the time and the toil of these tens of thousands have been turned into permanent property. It is all in existence; the world is just so much richer for the mines. I might say here, that though the miners are usually, or too often, awfully profane, yet I received nothing but most respectful and kind treatment in my intercourse with them.

Nor is it to be disguised, that the natural result of an unnatural state of society, the 63 67 unnatural creation of property, is to make a people nervous, active, excited, wanting and determining to make money fast, ready to speculate, to run risks, and expect to fall and rise, and rise and fall. If they don't speculate in mines, they are tempted to do so in stocks, in real estate, and in anything that gives them an opportunity. At the same time, it naturally creates a generation of men whose activity is a marvel, whose impulses are all generous and noble, who share their last dollar with distress, and who, rightly directed, will give way to nothing short of the noblest emotions of the human heart.

Now, then, let us look at the opening of these great, golden deposits, in the light of an overruling Providence.

The quicksilver mines were discovered and worked just in season to be ready for the opening of the gold mines. Without this, the gathering of gold and silver had been vastly 64 68 retarded, and the percentage secured very small.

Then came the news of the discovery of gold, and what had been called the Golden Gate was now really the entrance to untold treasures. The news rocked the continent. The rush for the mines was without a parallel. In self-defence, to protect their own lives, they formed a provisional government; and before the infant had time to pass through childhood or youth, it stood up a full-grown man, and knocked at the door of Congress for admission. It had not had time to be a territory. California came, the daughter of the sunset, with her garments bright and heavy with gold, and asked to be admitted into the sisterhood of States; and who could refuse her? The first result, then, was to create a new, strong, noble State, and to stretch the dominion of the Republic from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

A second result was, that the productions of these mines did very much to steady the nation, and carry it forward during a war, unprecedented in the annals of the human race, look at it from any point you choose. While Government had to fly to paper money, stretch its credit to the utmost limits, and pawn the property of posterity, to enable it to move on to victory and triumph, and while I know how much we owed to the mowing, the reaping, and the sewing machine, and to our factories with their machinery, --equal to the labor of a million of men, --to carry us through the war, and without which we could never have succeeded, still, there was the great fact before the minds of all, that there was an enormous amount of gold in the land, above ground and beneath the ground; and these mines were a Confidence-bank, that did much, as it seems to me, to hold the nation quiet, when the very foundation-stones of the 66 70 Government seemed to be torn up by the awful convulsions of war.

Again, at this very hour, when the confidence of the whole world is every day becoming stronger, that we shall pay every farthing of our national debt, we must feel, that this confidence rests very much on the fact, that we have so much gold in our vaults, and can dig it and coin it almost without limits. Steadily the old ship moves on, amid squalls and storms, because she has so much gold for ballast. Every man in the United States is the richer for the confidence, now strong and universal, that we shall never repudiate our debt--an event which, were it to take place, would fill the world with misery; and all this security rests very much on the mines of California.

Again, that Railroad that has climbed and laid the Rocky Mountains under its feet, that spans the continent, that brings China and 67 71 Asia to be door neighbors, of whose influence I am yet to speak, could never have been built, would never have been built, had it not been for these mines. The people had not been there, the energy and mind had not been there, nor had the means with which to achieve that stupendous work. That is not to be a pleasure path for the summer tourist, nor a highway for enterprise and commerce, merely, but a pioneer for inaugurating a system of influences whose greatness we cannot yet begin to comprehend.

The discovery of gold, and the amount obtained, have given a stimulus to commerce, to agriculture, to every department of life. They have created impulses that have advanced civilization, and shaken up nations, and poured one country into another, till we hardly know what will be next. The arts have advanced, architecture has made new discoveries in applying its skill, manufactures have been called upon 68 72 to supply more people, and with better garments; and if a few have played the fool by sudden riches, the great mass of the people have been greatly benefited. If it be said that the silver and the gold have made us extravagant and vain, --and it undoubtedly is true, --yet things will come right of themselves in a little time, and when silver dishes in our houses become as common as pewter were in the days of our fathers, we probably shall be no more vain of them than were our fathers and mothers of their pewter. It is already vulgar to consider these things as marks of gentility or wealth. Since this outpouring of the silver and the gold from the mines, we are every way improved; we have better clothing, better houses, better carriages, better school-houses and churches, and schools and colleges, better books and libraries, better ships and steamboats, better goods manufactured, and everything better. Not only so, but where one used 69 73 to have these good things, ten have them now. The whole plane of human comforts and enjoyments has been raised up many degrees. The last twenty years have seen the world moved ahead in Christian civilization farther than in any century before. Whether all this is for the good or for the injury of this and coming generations, we can't help it. The world is shoved ahead a full century; but I am not to sit down and mourn over the departure of old ways and things, so long as I feel confident that all this is under the Divine direction, and that the wires are all held in his hand, and will vibrate to God's glory. There will be no going back to old prices, and for the simple reason, there is so much more gold and silver in the world. You cannot bury it in the mines again; and thus money will be plenty and everything else dear. There is not a child in the land, nor a woman with her increasing wardrobe, who is not far better dressed to-day than at any former 70 74 period. We may talk of the good old times, but all times are good, if we use our mercies feeling our accountability to God, and to our brethren, the human family.

Can we not see now that the discovery of gold on the Pacific slope evinces a strong evidence of an overruling Providence? There the precious metals were created and laid away in the dark, till the human family had migrated westward from their starting-point in Mesopotamia, till they had a new continent in their hands, till human civilization had advanced, till there was not a circulating medium to move its property and supply its wants, till the world was ready to leap up for a new race in human improvement; then the gold on which the savage foot had trodden for ages, which his taste valued less than the fish-bone ornaments which he strung around his neck, flashed out of its dark hiding-place; and this continent has a new and an awful power 71 75 for good or for evil, a power with which it may roll down woes on unborn generations, or by which it may bless all the families of the earth, and bring glory to God on earth, and deepen and multiply the anthems of heaven to all eternity.

THE BIG TREES AND YO-SEMITE VALLEY.

THERE is a natural tendency to disbelieve the traveller who comes back and reports things which he has seen, that are very unlike our own experience. We think he must have been in a kind of mental fog, in which everything looked large; or he must have been credulous and easily imposed upon; or that he comes home wishing to be a hero, and is therefore tempted to exaggerate. It is also an acknowledgment of our own ignorance and want of enlargement, to own that another has seen what we never saw, and can tell us of things which we cannot deny, but which we can doubt.

I am about to speak of things, which, 73 77 according to what we have seen and known, cannot be true; and all we can do, in such cases, is to shake the head gravely, look wise, and feel that we know it all. Now, I shall not, probably, state a fact which has not been stated before, and which will not be tested hereafter by many of my readers; and yet I shall not be surprised if what I say shall be doubted. But we have no time for moralizing. Who has not heard of "the Big Trees" of California? In 1830 we heard of trees in that land whose height was nearly three hundred feet. These, however, were the common sugar pines of the region; they were not the big trees since discovered, and which no visitor of California should fail to see. Though the name of "I. M. Wooster, 1850," is carved on one of these trees, it was not till 1852 that a hunter, by the name of Dowd, having wounded a bear, which he followed till he came to a group of these huge trees, made them known. 74 78 Forgetting his bear, he gazed in astonishment, and finally returned to the camp, where men were constructing water-works. His tale was received with shouts of laughter and derision. A few days afterwards, having, as he said, wounded a huge grizzly bear, he induced the whole company to go and help him get the beast. Thus he led them over hill and gorge, till they stood among "the big trees," and were convinced, that if Dowd had deceived them in regard to the bear, he had not in regard to the trees. If, then, "Wooster," whoever he may be, first saw them, Dowd was the first to make them known to the world. "The big tree" is evidently a species of cedar, though it has cones like a pine. It also seems to have leaves like the cedar. Its wood is hard and brittle; the heart is red and fine-grained, like our red cedar. These trees have drawn pilgrims from every part of the world, and their fame is all over the globe. 75 79 Noble men and titled ladies have gazed at them with wonder.

There are several groves of them, such as the Calaveras, the Mariposa, the South Grove, the Frezno Grove, and probably many not yet discovered.

About eight miles south of the Calaveras is a grove five miles long, and containing a great number. I have heard seven different groves mentioned by name. In one grove over six hundred of these trees have been counted. I visited two different groves, in each finding the same huge, century-looking minarets, towering up in unconscious grandeur, and impressing upon the beholder the feeling that they must be the relies of some former world.

Among all the groves (and only two or three can yet be visited without great discomfort), the Calaveras grove is the most beautiful. It is about two hundred miles east of San Francisco, and the last fifteen miles is a ride 76 80 over mountains, amid scenery exceedingly beautiful. On reaching the spot, you find a charming valley four thousand three hundred and seventy feet above the level of the sea, and three hundred and seventy feet higher than our Greylock, the highest mountain in Massachusetts. You rise over two thousand feet in the last fifteen miles. The grove is a spot of unrivalled beauty, containing a grand old forest of sugar pines, scattered among which, on an area of fifty acres, you find one hundred and three of these Sequoia gigantea of the Taxodium family. But now you are disappointed; the trees do not look as you expected; they are not as large; their bark is unlike what you imagined; they look as if somebody had stripped off their clothing and left them in their night dress. You wonder what the matter is, and you soon discover that the whole forest is gigantic. The sugar pines shoot up nearly or quite three hundred feet, with trunks 77 81 in proportion. You see a yellow pine cut down near by, out of which, the last winter, they wrought thirty-five thousand feet of boards, clear stuff, and stopped when the tree got down to only four feet in diameter. Thus you find you have no means of comparing. It is like comparing a man six feet six with men six feet five and four. You must walk among them, and around them, and take out your marked tape-line and measure them again and again, before you can begin to get the right impression. It was a matter of amazement to us that they could grow so much in a single night. But the height of enjoyment is to lie down on your back in the twilight of evening or under the full moon, and look up, say, ten feet at a look, till the eye has travelled all the way up to the top--over three hundred feet. We forget, too, when looking at a tree thirty feet in diameter, and wonder why it is not larger, that a pine tree 78 82 with us, which is five feet in diameter, is a monster. I never saw but one of that size at the North. Let us now walk into the grove: the first impression you receive, is, that these giants must be very old; how old you cannot possibly say. By counting the concentric circles in the tree, some will count thirteen hundred, and some near three thousand--making the tree as many years old. For my own part, though I have heard it claimed that they are four thousand years old, yet I should not be willing to certify for more than half that age. You are struck unpleasantly that the names of men, such as modern generals and colonels, should be screwed to trees that have been living and bearing the storms of earth centuries before these men were ever heard of. Why should such names as "Phil Sheridan" be attached to a tree that perhaps saw light before the star arose over Bethlehem, or Titus besieged 79 83 Jerusalem? But there they are, and you may speak to "George Washington," "Abraham Lincoln," "Daniel Webster," "W.H. Seward," and even "Andrew Johnson," and a host of other names; or, if you want to address whole States, there is the "Granite State," "Vermont," "Old Dominion," "Old Kentucky," and, not least, the "Old Bay State," and many others.

Now for measurements: some of these trees, probably a quarter in all the groves, are over twenty-five feet in diameter, scores that are thirty feet, and I know of at least half a dozen that are thirty-two or thirty-three feet in diameter. You see that huge log lying near the hotel, whose stump, close by, has a house built over it; that tree was perfectly sound, thirty-two feet in diameter. Five men worked twenty-five days with pump-augers before they could cut it down. The stump is cut five feet from the ground, and a cotillon party of thirty-two have 80 84 danced four sets of cotillons on it at once, not counting musicians and spectators, who were also on it. Twenty feet in length of this log, which you can mount only by wood steps, twenty-eight in number, and long ones too, would make forty-nine thousand feet of boards, worth, at our prices, over two thousand dollars. But to get an idea of the diameter of one of these trees, take a cord and measure off thirty-two feet, and see who has a parlor as large as the diameter of that tree. "Abraham Lincoln" is three hundred and twenty feet high. The "Mother of the Forest," three hundred and twenty-seven feet high, has had the bark stripped for one hundred and sixteen feet. The bark, in places, was two feet thick. I have before me a piece of it, two feet long and a little over one wide, or deep. The diameter of this tree at the base was thirty feet. Thus one tree, it has been computed, would have made 81 85 five hundred and thirty-seven thousand feet of one-inch lumber. This, as lumber is selling with us, would amount to the modest sum of twenty-four thousand, one hundred and sixty-five dollars.

Near by is the "Father of the Forest," prostrated for generations, half buried in the soil, yet a mighty wreck. His circumference was one hundred and twelve feet at the base, his diameter thirty-seven and one third feet. The first limb was two hundred feet from the ground. This is now a knot-hole, through which I easily crept, and after me my friend, --far more of a man than I am, though I am not sure that he is aware that it was my hand that placed the ladder at the hole, without which neither he nor I could have reached it. This tree was broken by the fall three hundred feet from its roots, and was eighteen feet in diameter at the breach. It is estimated that this tree could not have been less than four 82 86 hundred and fifty feet high! Truly he deserves the name of the "Father of the Forest." Around this fallen monarch stand many other graceful trees of his species, as if they were his children, as they probably are, watching over the great sleeper. I should love to describe to you the "husband" and "wife," each twenty feet in diameter, most gracefully leaning towards each other, as if, in their age, they felt the need of mutual sympathy and support.

Then there is the "Pride of the Forest," and the "Three Graces," and the "Two Sentinels," under whose dome you want to linger. The largest tree yet found in all these groves, is a noble old hero, --charred, bark and limbs gone, yet its upturned base measuring thirty-three feet without the bark. In its vigor, with its heavy bark all on, it must have measured forty feet in diameter, and one hundred and twenty in circumference, and at least four 83 87 hundred feet high. I have before me a picture of the "Grizzly Giant," at least thirty feet in diameter. Straggling hunters report groves where the trees are even of still larger dimensions. I would add that among these groves are a multitude of young trees, not more than five hundred or a thousand years old, and which promise, if nothing happens, some fifteen hundred years hence, to become very respectable trees. Many now standing have been sadly injured by the fires which the Indians, in former years, built against them. It makes one feel almost indignant at a stupidity which could see nothing in these trees but a good back-log for their fires. Nothing in the future is so much to be dreaded, in regard to them, as forest fires. These trees are the only living things that connect us back to ages that are gone. Perhaps before Rome was ever named, and long, certainly, before men dreamed of this continent, these minarets 84 88 of the solitudes, unchecked in their growth by cloudy days or deep frosts, were lifting up their young heads, to be ready and waiting for eyes that could appreciate them, when the men of the nineteenth century should gather around them. "These giant trees, in silent majesty,Like pillars stand 'neath heaven's mighty dome.'Twould seem that, perched upon their topmost branch,With outstretched finger man might touch the stars;Yet, could he gain that height, the boundless skyWere still as far beyond his utmost reach,As from the burrowing toilers in a mine.Their age unknown, into what depths of timeMight Fancy wander sportively, and deemSome monarch-father of this grove set forthHis tiny shoot, when the primeval floodReceded from the old and change´d earth?Perhaps coeval with Assyrian kings,His branches in dominion spread; from ageTo age his sapling heirs with empires grew,When Time those patriarchs' leafy tresses strewedUpon the earth, when Art and Science slept,And ruthless hordes drove back Improvement's stream,Their sturdy head-tops throve, and in their turnRose when Columbus gave to Spain a world.How many races, savage and refined,Have dwelt beneath their shelter? Who shall say

(If hands irreverent molest them not)But they may shadow mighty cities, rearedE'en at their roots, in centuries to come,Till with the everlasting hills they bow,When time shall be no longer."

Groves of Mariposa and Calaveras, farewell! We never before saw ages of time stamped upon a tree; never conceived in what forms greatness that awes, and grandeur that humbles, could be thus embodied; never before stood before living age so marvellous that one wanted to take off the hat, and look solemnly around, to see if the mighty Hand, that has so long upheld these wonders, is not now visibly upon them!

About the middle of the State of California, stands her loftiest mountain, Mount Whitney, fifteen thousand feet above the ocean, and within seven hundred feet as high as Mont Blanc, in Switzerland. Near this central region, also, are some of the most remarkable depressions, gorges, can˜ons, or valleys ever found. 86 90 About one hundred and fifty miles easterly from San Francisco, and about thirty miles from the summit of the snow-covered Nevada Mountains, four thousand and sixty feet above the sea, is the "Yo-Semite Valley," unlike anything else you ever saw, and so peculiar, that probably no attempts to make it understood, without seeing it, can be successful. You will see at once that the bottom of the valley is five hundred feet higher than our Greylock. Other valleys you expect to enter and pass through. To get into this you must climb down three thousand feet, and when you have seen it, climb up out of it again. We will suppose you have come from the Big Trees, have crossed the most curious ferries of the Stanislaus and Tuolumne Rivers, passed through the Chinese Camp, ascended and descended mountains, till you have come to Harding's ranch, where you must take the saddle. You will mount a lean, hard-going, 87 91 but most sure-footed animal, and if you can fortunately have Hutchings--one of Nature's noblemen--for guide, you enter the forests, ascend vast mountains, go down long ridges, gaze at myriads of the most glorious pines the eye ever saw, pass over snow-drifts on the mountain for perhaps a couple of miles, and which you are ready to take your oath are at least four miles, --the trail sometimes plain and sometimes lost, --baiting your poor horse at a little green spot on the top of the mountain, taking a lunch out of Hutchings' capacious saddle-bags, which he took care to provide at Harding's, --laughing as the Old Bachelor from New York takes out his little flask of brandy, insinuating that it is very superior, and Hutchings, wearying the poor flask, declaring that if ever he " did allow himself to touch a drop, that was just the very time."

So we move on, seldom out of a walk, till, at the end of the twenty-five weary miles' ride, 88 92 we look down from the brow of the hill three thousand feet into a valley. You pause and hold your breath. You are looking down a can˜on, whose opening at your right hand is only wide enough for a fierce, foaming, roaring river to rush out. You are looking east. The valley looks like the opening made by the parting of the mountains, and you almost expect to see them snap together again. Far up between the rock-walls on either side, hangs a thin mist, as if the falling waters had hung the thinnest possible veil over the valley. This, then, is the "Yo-Semite Valley."

You begin to descend the bridle-path, so steep that it must be zigzag, and so fearful that you must get off and walk most of the way, --the path now crossing a mountain torrent, and now on the very brink of a precipice, where should you go over, --and I think a foot out of the way would often do it, --you will go fifteen hundred or two thousand feet 89 93 before stopping. Add to this--if your experience is like mine--you have, in going down, to pass a great number of the hideous, naked, horrible Mono Indians, frightening the very horses you are leading.

In two and a half miles you have come down three thousand feet, over rocks, and ledges, and water, and where you wanted the poor horses' legs insured. You are now in the valley, --eight miles long, and from half to a mile wide. Through it runs a river seventy feet wide, pure and clear, and about twelve feet deep. It is the "Merced," daughter of the snows, and falling about fifty feet during its course in the valley.

Now, how can I give you any idea of what we see? You will just forget our valley, come back to the place where you now sit, and turn your face to the East. Now, draw a line at your right hand, a quarter of a mile off, from east to west, eight miles long. Now, 90 94 a quarter of a mile at your left, draw another line, of the same length. Now, go a mile north and south of these two lines, and draw two more lines. You have now three spaces, one, the centre, half a mile wide, and the outer spaces a mile wide each, and all, eight miles long. Now, turn all this into rock, solid rock. Next, lift up these two outside spaces perpendicular, a mile high, and also a rock, at the east end, equally high. You have now a basin, eight miles long and about half a mile wide, and a mile deep. Now, raise all the country outside of these walls as high as they are. Now, let this great, solid rocky basin lie for ages, and slowly form. At the head of the basin, on the mountains around, snows annually fall and melt. The waters wind and wear a channel till they find the head of our basin, and then hurl themselves down into it. On the sides of this great basin other rivers are formed, and also push away the barriers 91 95 and leap over. Then the rains and the frosts work with the water, and wear away the rocks on all sides of our basin, till the hardest parts are left perpendicular, or are rounded off into domes, or left standing up in pinnacles, like those of a cathedral.

In the course of time, this debris of the rocks washes down, leaving a pile at their base some four hundred feet high, and making a soil at the bottom of the basin. The basin is gradually filled up, the river is raised up, trees are sown and grow up; and so, in 1869, we find it the walled, beautiful valley, whose sides are all rock, averaging not less than three thousand five hundred feet high, --three quarters of a mile, --while some of the domes and pinnacles are much higher than this.

And now comes the trial. There is no way by which you can make yourself realize the wonders on your right hand and on your left. You are told that if these rocks should 92 96 fall, they would reach across and cover the valley; but you cannot realize it. You are told that if they should fall at the same moment and meet in the middle, there would be an arch over your head half a mile high; but you cannot realize it. There is nothing but air and the dome of heaven with which to make comparison or measurement. If you look at the trees, on an average two hundred feet high, they look like mere shrubs. You have no measure by which you can tell a thousand feet from four thousand. This is the only disappointment you feel, and this you feel bitterly.

We are now in the valley, just having descended the mountain, and we are looking towards the East. The river is on our right, the waters meeting us. We find eight or ten high summits on the sides, prominent, dissimilar, and peculiar. We find, also, five or six rivers, or streams, pouring down in different places, 93 97 besides smaller streams that come down like ribbons. It is the first of June, when the snows are melting, the streams the fullest, and the falls the largest and the grandest of any part of the year.

As you now move east, the first thing that strikes is Lung-oo-too-koo-ya--"Tall and slender Fall," or "Ribbon Fall," which pours, and creeps, and rushes over the face of rocks to which it seems to cling, three thousand three hundred feet. You look at the ribbon on the rock, and then the brook you cross, and are amazed at the quantity of water that came down as that ribbon. As you go along up the valley, you see a mighty buttress rising up on your left. You are close to it, and yet you do not reach it. That is "Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah," "Great Chief of the Valley," --English, "The Captain," --three thousand three hundred feet high; top nearly flat and bare. You stand at its foot and look up, and the last fifteen 94 98 hundred or two thousand feet are perpendicular, and you feel that the great mass is falling on you. You gaze upon it, --so great, so high, so bare, so solid and hard, that you feel it might be the corner-stone of a world. Nearly opposite, on the other side of the river, and on the south side, you see the "Po-ho-no" Falls, "Spirit of the Evil Wind," --English, "Bridal Veil," --a sheet of water most exquisitely beautiful, falling nine hundred and forty feet, thundering and foaming, waving and shooting out great showers of snowy rockets, as it falls into a great caldron, surrounded by huge bowlders. Well may it be called the "Bridal Veil," from its waving, feathery, gauze-like veil, as if trying to conceal the face and form of beauty. The stream is forty feet wide, and out of the mighty spray that rises upon the bowlders on which it is dashed, the sun constantly weaves and hangs rainbows over the abyss. The river that ends in Po-ho-no Falls, rises from 95 99 a lake about thirteen miles off, and as the winds there draw around the great rock that rises out of the lake, thus making it rough, and having caused several Indians to lose their lives there, and as an Indian woman, in gathering herbs on the banks of the river, fell in, and was carried over these falls, and never seen again, so the Indians have a superstitious dread of them. "The Spirit of the Evil Wind" resides there; and they will never pitch their camp, nor could they be induced to sleep, within sound of its waters. To point the finger at these falls is certain death--as they believe. They hear the voices of those who have been drowned there, whenever they hear the sound of these Falls.

A little to the west of Po-ho-no, are the rocks called Wah-wah-le-na, the "Three Graces"--huge masses shooting up far into the sky; and still farther on, the "Cathedral Spires," that look not much larger than men, albeit 96 100 they stand up naked hundreds of feet. Then come the Great Cathedral Rocks, --"Poo-re-nah," "large acorn eache;" i. e., "hiding-place for acorns," --looking like the ruined spires of some vast edifice.

Farther east still, and you come to Pom-pom-pa-sus, "Mountains playing Leap-frog," --English, the "Three Brothers," --three remarkable summits, which cannot be described, but which will never be forgotten, if once seen. Directly opposite are the "Three Sisters," graceful in beauty.

You are now in the centre of the valley. Still looking east, on your left are the Yo-Semite Falls, or rather three falls, --the first sixteen hundred and fifty feet perpendicular, the second four hundred and thirty, and the third six hundred and fifty feet. "Yo-Semite" is the Indian name, now given to these Falls, and to the Valley. "Yo-Semite" means Grizzly Bear.

Directly opposite these falls is "Sentinel Rock," three thousand two hundred and seventy feet high; Indian, Loya. It is said that a lady (I wish I knew her name) once actually climbed to the top of Sentinel Rock, on a Fourth of July, and there, alone, took her lunch! Just at the foot of that wonderful rock is "Hutchings' Hotel," where you stay, and where you hear, day and night, the roar of the mighty waterfall. You get up at night to gaze upon it. You never weary of it. I am told that in the winter, the spray from these falls freezes, and piles up and freezes again, till there is a hollow pillar hundreds of feet high. Into that pillar the waters pour, and bound up like silver balls.

In the Spring, there is a moment when the roar of the cataract ceases, and the few people rush to the door to see what the silence means. Shortly as it appears, the floods have undermined the pillar, and are preparing to wrench it 98 102 from its foothold. It is giant struggling with giant. The wrestling is not long; for suddenly the ice gives way, and is tossed up high in the air, in ten thousand fragments, to glisten for a moment high up in space, when it falls and is gone, and the cataract again takes up its loud song for another year. This white river thus pouring down, the first leap nine times the height of Niagara, seems to the eye to be about two feet wide at the top; but Mr. Hutchings, who has been on the mountain over which it leaps, assures me that it is at least forty feet wide at the top. At the time I visited it, the river made by it in the valley was, at the bridge, forty feet wide and seven deep; but the wasters were abundant at that time.

Let us pass on towards the head of the valley. Up near the head, the valley forks into two short can˜ons, into which the two branches of the Merced pour, uniting just 99 103 below the great bluff which seems to be pushing down the valley between them, but finds itself arrested and chained down. We will take the right can˜on, following up the great branch of the river.

We leave our horses and ascend the side of the very steep mountain, afraid every moment lest the foot slip, and we are pitched into the boiling, leaping river below. We come into the spray, --the Pi-iwy-ach Falls (meaning "Cataract of Diamonds," --English "Vernal Falls"), and are soon drenched to the skin. Around us are little rainbows, hovering and playing around our footsteps, about six or eight feet in diameter.

We are now at the foot of the Falls, and are about two thousand feet higher than the lower end of the valley. These glorious Falls, the largest of all as respects quantity of water, are three hundred and fifty feet high. Now for the top of them. On the perpendicular 100 104 side of the rock, they have built a ladder, the sides of which are so near each other that only one foot can stand on a round between the timbers. The ladder seems to hang in the air, and you wonder if your nerves will hold out while you ascend. But you climb the slats and mount; the wall being on your right side, and space, and the falls, and death on your left. If you are wise, you will shut up the left eye, and keep the right eye fixed on the wall. When you get to the top, you breathe easier, and can now go to the very brink of the precipice, and where your feet touch the water, can lean on a parapet of rocks, which seems to have been thrown there on purpose. You can look straight down the falls, three hundred and fifty feet, and see the very mysteries of their power, as the waters plunge into the caldron below.

You may congratulate yourself on your great courage, but don't be too self-complacent; for 101 105 on returning to your hotel, a refined and delicate lady casually informs you that she once went up those ladders alone, except her baby, which she tucked under her arm!

We now go up the river half a mile farther, and we come to the Yo-wi-ye, or Nevada Falls, seven hundred feet; and when the waters are full, as I saw them, I unhesitatingly pronounce it the most beautiful water-view I ever beheld. It unites strength, power, and majesty with every outline of beauty. It seemed to quiver in its own song, as it tossed its myriads of diamonds high in the air, shooting out masses of jewels, as the rocket sends out its brilliant creations in the night. I feel sure that its equal for marvellous beauty cannot be found on the face of the globe.

In the left can˜on is another fall, Tu-lool-we-ach, six hundred feet, having features and beauties, which, anywhere else, would be a wonder.

There are several more lofty "Summits" not yet noticed, among which is the "Cap of Liberty," two thousand feet above the upper falls. "Mount Starr King," and above all, the "North" and "South" Domes. The "North Dome," To-coy-æ (Shade to Indian Baby Basket), three thousand seven hundred and twenty-five feet high. Before it stands Washington's Pillar, looking strong, calm, and lofty. The North Dome is round, smooth, bare, and very beautiful. I believe the foot of man has been on its top. The South Dome is a marvel; it was once a round dome, most plainly in the shape of an egg, the big end uppermost. It is four thousand five hundred and eighty feet--nearly a mile--high. By some convulsion of nature, this solid rock was cleft in two, one half left standing up almost perpendicular, the other half dashed down in the can˜on below, now covered, and buried, and lost out of sight, but undoubtedly damming up the 103 107 river, and making the little lake which we now find, the pure waters of which are Nature's mirror, in which these wonderful mountains are reflected, and reflected with a precision and a beauty which we cannot conceive excelled. It is called "Mirror Lake," and greatly admired. The Indian name of this half dome is "Tis-sa-ach"--Goddess of the Valley.

Now take your stand for a moment in front of this Goddess of the Valley. It is early in the morning, and a thin haze covers the valley, and slowly creeps up the mountain sides; the clifts upon our left are all in deep shadow, the outline of their summits cutting darkly and strongly against the brilliant light of the unclouded sky. Great streams of sunlight come pouring through the openings in the clifts, illuminating long, radiating belts of mists which extend clear across the valley, and are lost among the confusion of rock and foliage forming the de´bris on the opposite 104 108 side. Directly in front of us, and about three miles distant, is Mount Tis-sa-ach, the highest mountain in the valley, as well as the boldest and most beautiful in outline. Its base is shrouded in the hazy mystery which envelops everything in the valley. Numerous little white clouds, becoming detached from the misty curtain, are sailing up the mountain side, dodging about among the projecting spurs, intruding their beautiful forms slowly into the dark caverns, puffed out again in a hurry by the eddying winds which hold possession of these gloomy recesses, and then resume their upward flight, each following the other with the precision and regularity of a fleet of white-winged yachts rounding a stake-boat, and each eaten up by the sun with astonishing rapidity, as they sail slowly past the angle of shadow cast across the lower half of the mountain. High above all this, in the clear, bright sunshine, towers the lofty 105 109 summit, every projection and indentation, weather and water stain, fern, vine, and lichen, so clearly defined that one can almost seem to touch its surface by merely extending the arm."*

On the crown of this dome the foot of man has never been placed. Great efforts have been made to reach its summit, but hitherto abortive. And here is the place to introduce an Indian legend, connecting Tis-sa-ach with the great Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah. I think you will pronounce it too beautiful to be omitted.

A long, long time ago, the children of the setting sun dwelt in the Yo-Semite Valley: they had peace and plenty, and the glorious Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah, their chief, dwelt upon the great rock that now bears his name. One glance of his eye saw all that his people below were doing. Swifter on foot than the elk, he herded the wild deer as easily as if they 106 110 were sheep, and gave his people meat. He roused the grizzly bear from his cavern in the mountains, and sent his young men to hunt him. From that lofty rock so near heaven, the Great Spirit could easily hear his prayer, and send rain upon the valley. The smoke of his pipe curled up in the sunshine that gladdened his tribe. When he laughed, the river below rippled and smiled in sympathy. When he sighed, the pines caught up the sigh, and repeated it from tree to tree. When he spoke, the cataract hushed his voice, and listened. When he whooped over the bear that he had slain, all the mountains echoed the shout from summit to summit, till it was lost in the distance. His form was straight like the arrow, and elastic as the manzanita bow. His eye flashed like the lightning, and his foot outstripped the wind.

But once, when hunting, his eye moistened at the vision of a beautiful maiden sitting 107 111 alone on the very summit of the South Dome. Unlike the dark maidens of his tribe, her golden hair rolled over her dazzling form, as waters of gold would linger over silver rocks. Her brow was like the moon hanging in a soft mist, and her eyes gleamed like the far-off blue mountains bathed in sunset. Her little foot shone white and bright as the silver waters of the Yo-Semite Falls. She had small white wings on her shoulders, and her voice was like the silvery tones of the night-bird on the hill-side. She softly pronounced the name of "Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah," and was gone out of sight. Flashing was the eye, swift the foot, as Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah sprang from crag to crag, leaping over gorges and across streams; but he only felt the down of her wings filling his eyes, and he saw her no more. Every day did the young chief wander up and down the mountains, leaving sweet acorns on her dome. Once more his ear caught her footstep, light 108 112 as the falling snow-flake. Once more he caught a glimpse of her form, and saw a silver beam fall from her eye. But he had no power to speak to her, and her voice was drowned in the river of silence. She was sitting on her dome. In his love for the maiden he forgot his people; the valley became parched; the beautiful flowers laid down their heads and died; the winds lost their strength, and could no longer fan the valley; the waters dried up, and the beaver came on the dry land to die. Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah saw nothing of this; he kept his eyes on the maiden of the rock, and saw nothing else. Early one morning, as she stood on her dome and saw the valley neglected and perishing, her soft eyes wept; then kneeling down, she prayed the Great Spirit to pity the valley, and bring again the green grass, the green trees, and sweet fruits, and the yellow flowers, and especially the beautiful white mariposa. In a 109 113 moment, the great dome on which she was kneeling was cleft asunder, and fell down, down, deep into the valley. At the same time the melting snows of the Nevada Mountains sent the River of Mercy (the Merced) down the cliffs and through the valley, while the fallen rock stopped the waters just enough to make the Mirror Lake. All was altered; the waters now murmured; the fish leaped up in their joy; the birds hastened back with song; the flowers sent out their sweets, and hung them on the wings of the wind; the sap bounded up to give the tree new life, and busy life was everywhere at work. But in that awful convulsion which rent the mountain, the maiden disappeared forever. But the half dome bears her name, "Tis-sa-ach," forever, and the little lake catches and mirrors her dome forever. The morning and the setting sun place their rosy mantle on that dome every day, and as she flew away, the downy feathers from her 110 114 wings fell on the margin of the lake; and there you may see them still, --in the form of a thousand little white violets.

When Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah found that she had gone forever, he forsook his lofty home, and having carved his head and form on the side of his rock, a thousand feet above the valley, that the people of his beautiful valley might never forget him, he went in search of his lost one. On reaching the other side of the valley, loath to leave it, he sat down, looking far away towards the setting sun, where he thought she had gone; and there his grief was so great that he turned into stone, and there every visitor of the valley may see him still, looking off for the loved and the lost! So the legend.

If any one doubts this story, I can only say, I have seen the split dome, and the lake with white violets, the white mariposa, and face of Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah on the rock that 111 115 bears his name, and his form turned into stone, sitting on the summit of the opposite mountain!

In grandeur, sublimity, and beauty, the Yo-Semite Valley stands alone. At the upper end there have been shakings and rendings, rocks thrown down on either side, sometimes as large as a great church, as if demons had been breaking up and hurling the mountains at each other. The river dashes and bounds among these fragments, as if frightened and infuriated; and then half an hour's ride brings you to the oaks, and pines, and lawns, smooth as a garden, wild as nature, not showing the mark of axe, or anything to alter this park from what it was when the eye of man first looked into it.

Everything to eat or use must be brought over and down these mountains on pack-horses; and so difficult is the carriage, that five different cooking stoves had to be procured before a 112 116 sound one, divided in parts, could be brought here. And here live the educated and refined Mr. and Mrs. Hutchings, the latter a true lady, from Worcester County, Massachusetts. Here they have lived for five years; never at home in California till they found this spot, where they have been ever since, she without going out, contented and happy. They have a well-selected library of about six hundred volumes, and for intelligence, need not blush before any guest.

The only spot that I have ever seen which could in any wise be compared to it, is the Lauterbrunnen Valley, in Switzerland. They are both of about the same length and breadth; they both have walls on each side; they both have waterfalls; they both have great beauty. But here the comparison ends. The Lauterbrunnen has one waterfall, -- the Staubbach, or "Dust Brook," with a leap of nine hundred and twenty-five feet. The Yo-Semite 113 117 has half a dozen, two of which are higher than this, with many times the volume of water. The Staubbach empties itself in the air, and is turned into mist, and is lost to sight long before it reaches the ground. The Pohono, and the Yo-Semite, and the three upper falls come thundering down, their column undiminished, their force augmented every foot they fall. And in the Yo-Semite there are other falls, much greater in volume, if less in height, than even these.

In the Lauterbrunnen the sides are cliffs, twelve hundred or fifteen hundred feet high, it may be. In the Yo-Semite they rise three, four, and four thousand five hundred and eighty feet above the level of the valley. The eye wearies by looking up, and the mind staggers in trying to take in the vastness of the creations before it.

Whether you stand still in any part of the valley, or whether you stand amid the spray of the Yo-Semite or the Pohono, or beating 114 118 your way up over rocks and hill, and up the ladders, to gaze upon the Nevada Falls, flowing like the mane of the white horse in the Apocalypse, you feel sure that you are in a strange region.

As to the how, or by what convulsions of nature, this marvellous valley was created, I have found no theory that begins to be satisfactory, and I shall not venture to give my own, aware that it is, and can be, nothing but a theory.

Who should visit the valley? I answer, Every one who possibly can. No one will ever regret it; but in order to do it, I would recommend that you take time enough; that you carry all the health and vigor you can, for both will be severely tried. I would recommend a pretty heavy purse, and, if perfectly convenient, I would recommend that you be not much over sixty-eight years old. But whatever your fatigue or age, you will, most assuredly, long to go again.

The United States have ceded this valley 115 119 to the State of California, on condition that it be forever kept as a natural park. I am glad of it, and yet I have no doubt the time is near when Art will be sent in there to improve Nature. As it now is, it is all Nature. There, encamped under the trees, with no other covering, I saw the wild children of the forest, the Pono Indians; their arms, bows and arrows with flint heads; their food, acorns pounded in a rock hollowed out ages ago for the same purpose; their kettles and furniture, only willow baskets; their method cooking, heating stones, and throwing them, when heated, into the water till it boils; their ornaments, faces tattooed and painted; their life, aimless and brutal; and their enjoyments, nothing above those of the beasts.

The great impression which you receive on visiting this valley, is that man is small and God is great. We see here the foot-prints of his presence, and the finger-marks of his power; but when He was here, wonderful in 116 120 working, how He chiselled out this wonderful spot! When the first rush of waters was heard, as they leaped down into this deep basin; when the first sun peeped over the rim, and hung the first rainbow over the boiling waters; when the first human eye saw it, and the first human step trod it, --we do not know. But we know that particle by particle these solid rocks will crumble off and fall, till that valley shall be even with its rim, should the world continue long enough. But we know also, that when myriads of eyes have gazed upon these marvels, and when the highest peaks of earth's mountains have become a level plain, our God will remain the same, unaltered, with a wisdom to devise new creations, and a power to execute new plans, surrounded by a family so advancing in knowledge, that they can admire his works, and so grown in what is good, that they can adore and worship and praise Him in notes higher and purer than any that are earthly.

NATURAL PRODUCTIONS OF CALIFORNIA, INCLUDING A VISIT TO THE GEYSERS.

WERE two islands to be thrown up from the bottom of the ocean, one fertile, abounding in grains, cattle, sheep, green fields, and food in abundance, for man and for beast, --the other, a hundred miles or more from it, barren, treeless, herbless, and without soil, but abounding in mines of silver and gold, very rich and inexhaustible--in a few years the cultivated island would be rich, and the other poor; the one would have a sober, staid, healthy population; the other, most likely, one that was uneasy, excited, generous, and prodigal, gambling and unscrupulous; and that because we must, to be prospered, follow the 118 122 great leading and laws of divine Providence in every thing; and He has made the soil to be the source of material prosperity.

Everything in this world that has life , whether it be animal or vegetable, must draw that life from the earth. The gentle one, who can hardly bear the sight of the silk-worm, is proud to wear the silk which that worm has manufactured out of the mulberry leaf. The city dandy, who is shocked at seeing a heap of compost, feels proud to eat the mushroom that grows in it. It is very plain that man, and the horse, the cow, the sheep, the insect, nay, the king himself, is "served by the field." It is probable that there is not a fish in the waters, nor a living thing on the globe, that lives not by the soil, directly or indirectly.

In the cold heights of the Alps, and in the colder regions of the Arctic seas, --those great repositories of the ice-glaciers, --these torrents and glaciers are all the time travelling 119 123 slowly down towards the sea. They grind the mountains through which they pass, and bring down rocks, and stones, and earth in powder, and in unmeasured quantities, and shoot off into the sea, unless they are dissolved before they reach the sea. As soon as these glaciers break off and fall into the sea, they are called icebergs, and the matter they bring from the far-off mountains is food for fish. They come careering along, loaded with rocks and earth, and flow off into the Gulf Stream, where they melt and deposit their load; and there, where for ages the iceberg has found its grave, does the insatiable cod find his living. Around the mouths of our rivers, where food is abundant, brought fresh by the running waters, do the oyster, the eel, the clam, the duck, and the fish gather, and make it their home. Seldom, indeed, are fish found in the solitudes of the ocean. The whale goes among the floating ice, to gather 120 124 the little insects by myriads, for his food. Thus from the bosom of mother earth, all draw their nourishment. Does your table groan with luxuries? does your coat keep you warm, or make you feel that you are well dressed? does the bride blush under her gossamer veil, or the orange blossoms in her hair? does the old bachelor sit down to his real Havana cigar (grown and made in the valley of the Connecticut)? does the lover of wines sip his glass? --all must come out of the earth. Out of the earth grow our clothing, our food, our fuel, our houses, the pen with which we write, the paper on which we write, and everything we use. Nature finds materials, and it is for man to take and improve them. We do not know at this day what the wheat, the oat, the rice, the apple, the onion, the potato, or the domestic fowl were, in their wild state. The wild sheep of the mountains, and the merino and south-downs, seem very little related. If 121 125 the Baltimore Oriole can gather straws, hair, wool, and the waste thrums of the factory, and build her curious hanging house, --if the little coral insect can take the alumen which comes from the Amazon, and the lime which comes from the waters of the Missouri, and the coloring matter which comes from the Nile, and with these build her crimson, coral reefs, and build islands in the ocean, --are we to wonder that man can turn the coarse ore of the pit into the hair-spring of the watch, or be able to take Nature in her wild state, and turn her wastes into gardens of beauty?

The question as to what population a country can feed and clothe, as to what are her capabilities of soil and climate, and not what her mines will yield, is by far the most important question you can ask. It is of little consequence what a State is to-day, in comparison with the question, What is she to become?

In regard to California, her produce of 122 126 to-day, either from soil or mines, in bushels, in tons, or in dollars, is of very little consequence, except as they bear on the future, and as they are an indication of what the plans of God are in the future, in regard to that territory.

We have no other State or section which has so great a variety of soil and climate as California, and no State which can yield such a variety of products. All that can be raised in the temperate zone, or in the semi-tropical climate, will grow here in the greatest profusion. The soil and climate are such that the same amount of labor will yield more than anywhere else, and of a quality unsurpassed. Instead of planting your seed and waiting years before you can eat your apple or your pear, you may feel sure of a good crop the third year. The rapidity of growth will astonish you, and not less, the early day at which you get returns. I saw in Oakland, 123 127 in the garden of Mr. Hunt, formerly of Springfield, a large area of dwarf apple trees, none of which were much over two feet high, literally loaded with fruit, and off which his son assured me, that in the second year, they gathered apples which weighed twenty ounces each; and I saw, also, a limb of a fig tree, which he said he cut off the last fall and stuck into the ground, and which, this summer, is bearing figs. In the same garden is a century plant, whose stem was as large as a man's leg, and then, when I saw it, twenty-one feet high. It had grown fourteen feet in seven weeks. He predicted it would grow twenty feet more, and then blossom. How amazed we should be to see beets that will weigh a hundred and twenty-seven pounds each, onions a foot across the top, cabbages weighing eighty pounds each, and other vegetables in proportion! The great trouble there about fruit is, that, it is so easily raised, it has no market.

The first steamboat we entered on the Sacramento River had twelve tons of salmon, caught that day, and which she was carrying, as her daily allowance, to the city of San Francisco: the fish would weigh twenty pounds each, and they were retailing at six cents the pound, but can often be bought for twenty-five or thirty cents, the whole fish. The cars that come up from the Santa Clara valley, bring twelve tons of strawberries daily; and this fruit is in market every month in the year. The potato will yield at least two annual crops; and such huge potatoes! You can hardly persuade yourself that they were not at least four years in growing; the fig tree yields three crops. The long, dry summer allows the farmer to take his own time to harvest his wheat and his barley, and to let them lie in the field as long as he chooses. The mildness of the climate saves him the necessity of building barns or raising hay. 125 129 He harvests his grains in the latter part of May, or the beginning of June; and one peculiarity is, that the dryness of the atmosphere causes the capsule of the wheat to contract and hold in the great plump kernel of wheat, or else there would be a great loss. The very thing which would shell out our wheat here, retains it there; so that, if your wheat stands uncut for two months after it is ripe, you sustain no loss. So you thresh it and put it into sacks in the field, and let it lie till convenient to carry it to market.

You know how, in our climate, immediately after a shower, the sun often pours down upon us, with a heat almost insupportable. The reason is, the air is full of moisture. But in the valleys of California, where there is no rain or moisture, though the thermometer stands high, yet the heat causes no suffering--scarcely inconvenience. Another thing to be mentioned is the very superior quality of 126 130 the wheat that grows there. There is nothing like it known in the world. They claim, too, that the great number of insectivorous birds, such as the beautiful valley-quail, protected by law, keep down the insect world. And the very dryness of the wheat, almost as if kiln-dried, preserves the berry well for exportation, and defends it from the weevil and other insects.

The average bushels of wheat to the acre, through the State, is less than it should be, from the fact, that it has been the fashion, after the first ploughing, which gives forty or fifty bushels to the acre, just to brush over the stubble, in the fall, with a bush-harrow, and trust that enough seed has been dropped to insure a crop. The ground was not probably moved an inch deep, and yet the second crop would be from twenty to twenty-five bushels to the acre. And so the third year, the crop would be from twelve to fifteen 127 131 bushels. The system is exhaustive of the soil, and suicidal of the future; and this accounts for the low average per acre. They have been in the habit, too, of just clipping off the heads of the wheat and barley by a peculiar reaper, and then burning the stubble in the field. They are beginning to learn that this is poor economy, and are now ploughing in their stubble.

The annual produce of wheat, now, is about twenty million of bushels, and about half that amount in barley. This often yields, by the large field, eighty and even one hundred bushels to the acre. It is used chiefly for feed; for though Indian corn can be raised to great advantage, they find the barley better feed in their climate, and much more easily raised. Of oats they raise two millions of bushels, of superior quality; but this is not a favorite crop.

To show you on what a scale things may 128 132 be and are done by our friends there, I would state, that Mr. Jones, on his ranch, in the neighborhood of Stockton, in San Joaquin valley, has, this year, sixteen thousand acres of wheat; to prepare the ground for which, he had nine hundred horses ploughing at the same time; thus, calling his yield but half a crop, he will have three hundred and twenty thousand bushels of wheat, and that the cost of the sacks to put it in will be thirty thousand dollars: that a Mr. Hathaway raised twenty-one tons of beets on an acre, among which was one beet that weighed one hundred and seven pounds: that the same gentleman also gathered one hundred and thirty-two bushels of oats from an acre: that General Bidwell, in one year, raised thirty thousand acres of grain.

We found one ranch, ten miles by thirty in extent, or nineteen thousand two hundred acres; also another, the owner of which has one hundred thousand head of cattle, to say 129 133 nothing about sheep. He numbers only ten thousand calves this spring. He delivers by contract twenty thousand head of cattle at San Francisco this season, at thirty dollars a head, yielding him the pretty sum of six hundred thousand dollars. Probably these are not the largest ranches. Two men in San Francisco own eight hundred thousand acres of land, which they wisely intend to break up into small farms. These great ranches and these monstrous herds of cattle are a nightmare upon the prosperity of a country. It can be prospered, in the long run, only by having small farms. There should be no great, over-grown estates. Every farmer should own his farm. He is then at the head of a little kingdom, and has every inducement to manage it well and make it beautiful. Then, every meadow reclaimed, every hill made fruitful, and every conquest over Nature is a benefit to himself. The owning the soil in fee simple 130 134 is what has done much for the development of soil and of character in New England, and it is an essential element of permanent prosperity.

Another production for which California is peculiarly adapted, is the hop . The climate and soil of her valleys prevent loss by blight, insects, or winds. So far the yield, on the average, has amounted to two thousand pounds to the acre, while even four thousand have been gathered. They have a method of drying, which prevents the breaking of the blossom, by which the lupuline, or heavier and most valuable part of the hop, has hitherto been mostly lost. The quality, therefore, ranks high, and will be an article of large export.

Wool is becoming a mighty production in California. There are two gentlemen in Santa Barbara, --and old Spanish mission three hundred miles down on the coast from San Francisco, --who own two hundred thousand sheep, 131 135 producing nearly one and a quarter million of pounds of wool. The estate of these gentlemen is twelve miles square. Another gentleman owns an island thirty miles long and twenty wide, stocked with ten thousand head of cattle, and fifty thousand sheep, while the hogs have so multiplied that they are considered a nuisance, and a war of extermination is waged against them. The natural increase of sheep through the State is full one hundred per cent., and seventy-five after deducting all that are used for food. Some flocks have yielded one hundred and twenty-five per cent. increase.

The Cotswold breed is the one usually preferred. The last year yielded thirteen million of pounds, at seventeen cents in gold, and wool of a finer quality need not be desired. They shear by machinery, much to the comfort of the animal, and to the expedition of the process. Though we saw vast flocks on the 132 136 foot-hills and mountains, yet the lower part of the State seems to be the favorite place for raising the sheep. The flock is sheared twice a year, though I am told the second crop is not so convenient for the manufacturer.

The soil and climate are also so admirably adapted to the raising of silk, that I shall be greatly disappointed if this does not become an extensive and profitable business. The large Japan variety of worm has been introduced, and cocoons of a mammoth size are the result. They have nearly twelve hundred thousand mulberry trees already growing, and the past year yielded thirteen hundred thousand cocoons, eight hundred ounces of eggs, at four dollars the ounce, were exported, the last year, to France and Italy. The Japanese are coming in colonies, having purchased great tracts of land for the purpose of cultivating silk; and they, probably, are the most skilful raisers of silk in the world; so that, in all 133 137 probability, this is soon to become a great business. They also propose to add the cultivation of the tea-plant to that of the mulberry.

Now comes the question of the vine and the wine. Whether wine will increase or decrease the amount of intoxication, --and I am very sure it will increase it, or, at least, the temptation to it, --yet it is a fixed fact that more wine is now raised in California, than in all the rest of the United States. When inquired of, if I saw much drunkenness in California, I used to say I saw no drunkenness, but I saw a great deal of hard drinking, and drinking-places were so abundant, that it seemed as if they must be one of life's essentials.

There is not a variety of grape known on the face of the earth, which will not grow in perfection here. Over the gold belt, thirty or forty miles wide, running the whole length of the State, the soil, being volcanic, exactly meets the wants of the vine. The wine-raising 134 138 regions, properly speaking, are three, --Lower California, four or five counties, where the grape is not pressed till fully ripe, and which produces a wine with little flavor, highly charged with alcohol, and heady. A great portion of the brandies distilled in California, are from the Los Angeles region.

The next region of wine is the west Coast Range, in the valleys made by these mountains, among which Sonoma valley is most noted. Here the vineyards are very large, --one of which contains five thousand acres, and here the most capital is invested. There are nearer the European wines, and are in great favor.

The third region is the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevada. Here, probably, the grape reaches its highest perfection; and here, too, they have already learned to make the raisin, equal, it is said, to any that can be imported. There are in the State not far from thirty 135 139 millions of vines already growing, producing annually nearly seven millions of gallons of wine, and over one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of brandy. The increase of vines is about three millions a year. However much we may regret the abuse of the vine, from the days of Noah to the present hour, the fact seems to be a fixed one, that the vine will accompany civilization, and we must meet it as well as we can--consider it one of the trails of our moral strength, one of the temptations we must meet, and to which no man is obliged to yield unless he chooses. Riceland exists in abundance, but it has not yet been cultivated.

From what has been said, you cannot doubt that California is to be, at some future time, like the garden of the Lord. There are sixty-five millions of acres of land that can be cultivated and made most productive; while there are thirty-three or thirty-four millions of 136 140 acres, --about one third of the whole State, --which is too mountainous to be cultivated.

There are only a little over four hundred thousand people there yet, to occupy it, and nearly half of these are in the city of San Francisco. Only seven per cent. of the land is yet fenced in at all, and not over three per cent. is cultivated. When the ninety-seven parts remaining shall be cultivated, what may it not produce? A short time since it was thought that wheat would grow only in the rich valleys. But over the hills, and far up too, grows a little bush, called the "Tar Bush," with a beautiful leaf; but it sticks to and defiles whatever touches it. Hence its name. But it is found that wherever the "tar-bush" grows, the soil is suitable for wheat.

Eastern mind, and skill, and perseverance, will meet ample reward. My travelling companion met a Massachusetts gentleman, who, seven years ago, bought his lands for one dollar 137 141 per acre, and last year produced twenty thousand gallons of wine, two hundred thousand cocoons, has fifty thousand vines, and a garden filled with all kinds of fruits. Lower California has a climate that never freezes, and the thermometer seldom rises, even in summer, higher than 65° or 70°. I know of no climate in the world more beautiful, and no region so inviting to enterprise as that.

The coast of Alaska, fifteen hundred miles distant, is to furnish all California with abundance of cod, furs, and ice, for every family who wish it. I am believing, too, that a new stimulus to industry will be given when it is known by trial that their delicious fruits--the cherry, the peach, the pear, and the grape, can be brought eastward, and in unmeasured demand all along the railroad, and still more in all New England. Any fruits that will bear six or eight days' travel will come, to the benefit of the valleys of the Golden 138 142 State, and to the intense delight of ourselves and our children.

The rapidity with which manufactories have arisen and multiplied in California is probably without a parallel in a new State. The peculiarities of her situation brought many of the most intelligent men to her shores. These had been accustomed to comforts and luxuries, and those they must have. At first they had to import even their lime and brick, and indeed everything except meat. Soon they found the necessity of tools and mining machinery, and then of steam engines and steamships. These they sought for first: then, as their steamships had to travel seventy thousand miles each during a year, it was found that they must have new copper sheathing every year. This led them to build a dry dock, probably inferior to none in the world, where the huge ship can be floated into her bed in a few minutes; where the monster engine can pump out 139 143 eighty-four thousand gallons of water a minute, and exhaust the dock in two hours; where in three days she can be re-covered, at a dock-rent of three thousand dollars a day. These two docks, one floating, and the other stone, are four hundred and fifty feet long, one hundred and twenty-five wide, and thirty-one deep. No visitor at San Francisco should fail to see them.

At first, nobody expected to stay in California only long enough to obtain gold; nobody thought the soil capable of producing anything. So that it was not till about eleven years ago that men felt safe to go into manufacturing: and so much afraid were they of dishonesty in companies, that it is said two thirds of all the manufacturing done in the State is done by less than one hundred owners. The nearness to China and Japan has done much to stimulate machine-shops and mills for rolling iron. At the time when the 140 144 commerce of the world is increasing beyond all precedent, God is opening new sources of industry. Ship timber is becoming scarce on the Atlantic coast; but go north of California, and there is Puget Sound, unequalled for timber, where ships can be built better, and stronger, and cheaper than anywhere else in our country, or in the world; and where, not unlikely, within a very short time, the ship-building of this continent will be transferred and carried on, and whence, every ship, for any part of the world, can start loaded with lumber.

Still nearer California are the iron mines of the Willamet, in Oregon, besides iron, copper, manganese, and plumbago mines, in different parts of California--inexhaustible in extent; and there is half-civilized China, just beginning to rub her eyes open, which will want a vast amount of steam shipping on her great internal waters; and then the enormous amount 141 145 of iron railing for roads already built and constantly wearing out, and for the almost interminable lines yet to be built as a necessity, --all this must make a demand for iron manufacturing, to an extent almost unheard of before in our country. The carrying-trade in lumber and grain from the Pacific coast is yet in its infancy; but I feel safe in predicting that in a very short time it will be so great as to baffle all our present calculations. Already they have lead and shot works, and the bells cast in San Francisco are heard ringing all over the State, and their gongs are screaming in China. You would tire and wonder to be led through the mills where industry and skill are creating such a hum--in the works in broom-corn of the first quality, in the chemical works where they themselves have no conception of what they will yet be called to do, in the jewelry manufactories, where they astonish you by the quantity and richness of their productions, 142 146 in the manufacturing of leather, boots, shoes, hose, saddles, and harnesses, even to the making of organs and musical instruments, --you see the foundations of future success already laid. The manufacturing of flour, of the very best quality, has already been felt over the world. I am sorry to say that the ease with which barley is raised, and its superior quality, have erected a brewery in almost every town through the State; but of the one hundred and fifty thousand barrels of ale brewed the last year, very little found its way beyond their own boundaries. It will, however, probably very soon be an article of export. The nearness to China brings in an immense amount of sugar in its crude state; this has necessitated the business of sugar refining, and their works are very perfect and large in extent. If they can raise the sugar-beet to the almost incredible weight already attained, I see not why they cannot make sugar enough from that root to supply the Mississippi Valley.

Our woollen manufacturers will expect me to say something about that branch. Hitherto these factories have had to depend on steam as the motive power; but when railroads shall be opened up to the Stanislaus, the Tuolumne, or the Merced Rivers, one of which is already begun from Stockton to Copperopolis, there will be a water-power enough to create scores of Lowells. In San Francisco there are thirty-nine sets of machinery in operation. The Pioneer and the Mission mills operate thirty-one sets, one hundred and twenty broad looms, and about five hundred hands. They consume two million pounds of wool annually, make eighty thousand blankets, one hundred and twenty-five thousand yards of broad-cloth, fifty thousand yards of three quarter flannel: whole value one million of dollars in gold. Chinese labor--none better--one dollar per day; foreman, from four dollars fifty cents to five dollars; cost of fuel and water 144 148 rents in both mills, forty-seven thousand dollars. The other mills in the State use one million of pounds additional annually. Add to all this, gold, not less than twenty-five millions dollars; silver, still more; so that the shipments of gold and bullion amount to not less than a million a week the year round. Merchandise exported, nearly twenty-two millions dollars, viz.: wheat, ten millions six hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars; wine, three hundred thousand dollars; wool, two millions three hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars; hides, three hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars; leather, two hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars; furs, mostly from Alaska, a little short of one million dollars; quicksilver, besides what is used in the mines, about the same amount--one million.

There is another branch of business to which I have barely made allusion. Let us now make a little excursion. We take the 145 149 steamboat at the city, pass over the bay, enter the San Puebla Bay, take the cars, and go up the incomparably beautiful Napa Valley. You stop at Calistoga, where are hot springs, boiling hot if you want, and sulphur springs to your heart's content. An early ride the next morning, of about twenty miles, brings you to the foot of a great mountain, over which you are to ride. This is called "Foss' Station," where you eat the best breakfast in California, because the morning ride has given you an appetite. "Foss" is an institution himself--a huge, well-proportioned, uneducated New Hampshire man, endowed with qualities which in any condition would make him a marked man; and you look at his brawny arms and powerful body almost with envy. But he has his six-horse team harnessed to an open wagon, and you are now off for the Geysers. You ascend a mountain five thousand feet high, up which you wind and 146 150 creep, till you come to a ridge about two miles long, and so straight that you can see the road two miles ahead. It is just possibly wide enough to let the wagon run on its edge, though to look at it in front, it looks as if you were to ride on the edge of a rusty case-knife. Down upon this ridge the horses dash, and you see, if the wheels should vary a foot either side, you would roll down into a gulf that makes you quiver to look at. But over it you pass; and now you are to go down the mountain into the can˜on below. You are to descend one thousand nine hundred feet in two miles. You tremble for the Pittsfield lady sitting calmly by the side of Foss, where she sees every danger, and shows no other effect of the strange situation than the brightening of the eye. Crack goes the whip, and the trained horses dash down upon the quickest gait horses ever did go, and after making thirty-five short turns, a failure at any one of 147 151 which would break your limbs, if not your neck, you are at the bottom--just eleven minutes in coming down, holding your breath, throbbing with excitement, glad you have taken the awful leap once, and feeling very sure that whoever takes it hereafter must be a fool!

You are now in a deep can˜on, on every side of which the beautiful mountains rise up three thousand feet or more. Nothing can exceed their beauty. A large trout brook runs through the can˜on, stony, but the water is clear, cold, and beautiful. You go down and cross this brook at right angles, just where, out of another can˜on at right angles to this, you see another little brook meeting you. On either side of it the mountains rise high and steep. The bed of this can˜on and along this little brook is the home of the Geysers. The Geysers were originally found in Iceland, and the word Geyser is Icelandic, meaning 148 152 "vehement," or "urgent," because a Geyser spouts out water, hot or cold, and sometimes mud with the water. You now feel that you are in a strange place; the ground burns your feet, the air chokes and suffocates you. The atmosphere is filled with the smell of sulphur, nitric acid, and every other disagreeable smell you can imagine. At your feet boils out a stream of alum. Perhaps two feet from that is anothe rof nitric acid, or Epsom salts, or soda, or pure sulphur, or sulphuric acid, or ammonia. Here is a deep-mouthed opening, up which is boiling a huge volume of liquid as black as ink. It is called the "Devil's Inkstand." The ink with which I am now writing this manuscript came from this inkstand, and I am using it just as it was made there. A little above is the "Witch's Caldron," perhaps seven feet in diameter, black, boiling, spouting, and raging. Its depth is unknown. All these are boiling, steaming hot; more than 149 153 a thousand of these steam-holes are in this can˜on. On your left is the "Steamboat," where, high above your head, the steam spouts and roars like the letting off the steam when the steamboat stops. Thrust your stick into the side of the hill anywhere, and the steam will rush out. You seem to be treading on the very borders of the infernal pit. What with the steam, the heat, the smells, your head grows dizzy and whirls, you pant for breath, and you hasten to get out. But you must stop at one more spot. It is called the "Devil's Tea-kettle," where the steam intermits, and sputters, and wheezes, as if groaning in chains. You stick your cane into it, and, whew! it roars and sputters like a huge cat when a strange dog comes into the room. You almost expect to see the horns of the Evil One thrust up next. The place is so strange that you want to stay longer, but feel that it would kill you. You can 150 154 compare it to nothing but hell. It is called, "the Pluton Can˜on." In the cool of the evening or morning, or in cold weather, the steam of this great concealed furnace rises up, and is seen afar off. Were a dome of ice to be thrown over it, the steam would be so suffocating that nobody could go near it. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of orifices in which you could roast eggs. It is said that you might stand at the mouth of the can˜on and hook a trout in the big brook, and by turning round in your tracks, you could let him down and boil him in one of these little natural kettles.

By all I had read or heard, before visiting the Geysers, I had supposed them to be volcanic, and that fire was the cause of all this heat, and that it must be not very far from the surface of the earth, and that the Geysers were really safety-valves for the prevention of earthquakes. A very short 151 155 examination convinced me that my notions were all wrong, --that they are not volcanic, but a great chemical laboratory .

I found here iron, --that which makes the inky water, --alum, ammonia, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, sulphur, Epsom salts, in large crystals; acid water, which, sweetened a little, makes good lemonade; magnesia, soda, and one spring said to be extraordinary in its effects as an eye-water. The alum spring is one hundred and seventy-six degrees by the thermometer, and the Witch's Caldron, one hundred and ninety-five and one half degrees. Now, fill these great mountains with these several chemicals, and let in the water upon them, and let what is left of it make this little Pluton Brook, and you have all the phenomena which you find here. The whole region, abounding in sulphur springs and hot springs, is a hidden treasury of chemistry. Not far from the Geysers is Clear Lake, where they 152 156 dredge up the bottom-mud and find clear, beautiful, crystallized borax, and can get, if they can sell, six tons a day.

There is no place in the world where borax so pure and so abundant can be found; that found in Thibet comes nearest to it, but the borax is far inferior in quality and in quantity, and so in China.

To me it seems clear that the day is coming when Science will come here and uncover these hidden things, and bring out, most likely, in almost fabulous quantities, the treasures here now concealed. I can almost imagine some Yankee standing over the Devil's Inkstand and dipping up ink enough for the use of a continent. Here, or near here, undoubtedly, is sulphur enough to furnish a nation with gun-powder; and I write down the Geysers, not merely as a place where men will go to be horrified, but where they will go, at a future day, for materials to be used for the good of men; 153 157 and these that now seem to be the breathing-holes of the pit, are only the way-marks by which God shows us where to look for these chemicals, laid up till called for.

I am aware that this view destroys much of the romance of the thing; for it is far more romantic to feel that we have stood over a volcano, just ready to burst out, or over regions infernal, where demons are panting, and struggling, and groaning, and you can almost hear the clanking of their chains, than to feel that you are in a huge chemical shop, where the chemicals have got thrown together, and water from the hydrant has broken out, and continues to run in among them. But that under this covering there are rich hidden treasures, which will one day bless the world, I have not a doubt.

I have thus given you a bird's-eye view of the capabilities of California--where nothing 154 158 that man has done is over twenty years old, --and yet he has achieved wonders, --where the hand of man has yet touched but three per cent. of her rich soil, where everything is and grows, and is to be and grow, on a scale unexampled, and where the invitations for men to go are loud. But the men to go there should be men of industry, men of intelligence, men who only want opportunity and materials with which to work, and if they can carry capital, so much the better; but it is not the place for drones, or those who want to live without labor. Such are not welcomed; but the right kind of men are welcomed with a cordiality that is beautiful.

The inhabitants gathered there are from all parts of the world, and they all understand that they are to lay aside their prejudices, and melt into a new and homogeneous society; and they do so.

The country is a new field for human 155 159 industry, and experiments new and great are there to be made. God has reserved all this for designs which I shall hint at hereafter.

Mines of the precious metals there are, and mines of iron, and lead, and copper, and quicksilver; mines of coal and tin there are; but after all, the deep, rich soil of the State will be the great source of wealth, and will call in a population that will carry there all that is good in the old States, leaving behind, I trust, what is evil.

I stand on the Nevadas, and look off over this strange country; and I am not looking at so many acres of grain, so many mines, so many factories, but I am looking at a territory now embraced in a single State, which, when filled up as Massachusetts is to-day, will contain twenty millions of people, --where generation after generation is to come up and pass away, --where art, and mind, and wealth, 156 160 and skill, and luxury, and ambition, and education, and religion will all struggle together for supremacy, but through it all, will roll the River of God to make glad the cities of our God, and to cool the passions, and moderate the spirits, and fit the unborn multitudes for a higher end than can be attained on any, even the most favored spot, in this world.

Our Schools and Colleges, our Churches and our Institutions, will live again in all those beautiful valleys, and a tide of living joy will continually roll through them, and the song of praise and gratitude will go up to heaven--"loud as from voices without number." That wonderful region is to be another monument raised to the honor of the Pilgrims, and of that wisdom which was born in the cabin of the Mayflower.

MORMONS AND MORMONISM.

It is very difficult, if not almost impossible, to speak of the Mormons with feelings perfectly balanced. In their history there is the romance of fanaticism and the romance of suffering. You pity them for the cruel persecutions which they claim to have endured; you are amazed at their credulity; you are in admiration over their industry, and you are indignant at their assumptions of religion, under the name of which they glory in practices for which the whole civilized world send men to the State Prison. They claim that theirs is the new, the last, the most perfect Dispensation, --revealed from Heaven; that they are "the Latter-Day Saints," are the 159 162 special and only favorites of Heaven, and are directly inspired by God.

They claim that one Joseph Smith dug brass plates out of a hill, in the State of New York, which hill they call Cumorah; that these plates were in an ancient, unknown language; that Joseph Smith, Jr., was inspired to translate the writings engraven on these plates, and that the Book of Mormon is this translation. How these plates were put into that spot, how kept from corroding, how they could make a book of five hundred and sixty-three pages, very closely printed, I cannot ascertain. In the beginning of the book, is the certificate of several that they had seen these plates. Three of these testify that an angel from heaven brought and showed them to them. The others, among which is the testimony of Smith, Sr., merely assert that they had seen them in the hands of the translator, Joseph Smith, Jr. I could not find any one among 160 163 them who had ever seen the plates, though I found a man, stone blind, who assured me that he had seen the hole out of which the plates were dug. They claim that as soon as Smith had fairly got the plates, he began to be persecuted, and had to flee from place to place while translating them; that he had to meet vexatious lawsuits, more than fifty in number; and that he paid out in these lawsuits, first and last, the sum of one hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars!

He was the first Prophet. They claim that, for his religion, the Prophet, and his brother Hiram, and some others were imprisoned, and at one time actually fed on human flesh. For myself, I cannot see why a divinely inspired man should not know what flesh he was eating. They claim that the saints first undertook to settle in Ohio, but were driven out by a mob. They then went to Missouri, and made two several attempts to settle; had purchased 161 164 farms, built mills, churches, &c., and were driven out by violence, and outrage, and murder. They then went to Illinois, into a swampy, unhealthy region, and made it into a garden. This was their Nauvoo, where they built an immense temple.

Here, too, they were persecuted, driven out by armed men, and their city bombarded by at least five hundred remorseless, armed men. The story of their exile, their persecutions, and their sufferings, is most painful. Of course, I take their own accounts, for the other side of the story has never been written, or if it has, I have never seen it. But it will be written, and we shall then have both sides of the story. I am assured that the other side view will be very different, and will make fearfully against their own history. We shall see. But, taking their version, I hesitate not to say, that the treatment which they received in Illinois was not merely unjust 162 165 and unkind, but it was cruel to a degree that ought to make savages blush.

It was in the year 1845 that the mob began to burn their houses, pillage their property, shamefully treat their women, and finally murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram. What it was that so exasperated the community I cannot see. It was not polygamy, for at that time, they had had no revelation allowing more than one wife. In their "Book of Doctrines and Covenants," containing the revelations made to Smith and many others, men and women, they say positively (page 331), "Inasmuch as this Church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again."

It seems to have been one of those periods of frenzy, like that which burned the witches 163 166 at Salem, and which sometimes unaccountably sweeps through a community. The community of Mormons, being once more expelled from what they supposed their homes, now set their faces westward. As many as twelve hundred wagons had been built by February, 1846, when the strongest and healthiest set forward and crossed the Mississippi on the ice. The feebler portion were left to come in the spring. But violence came upon them, and they had to winter on the bottom-lands of the river, enduring famine, sickness, and death. Here they claim the Lord interposed, and sent them such clouds of quails, and so tame, that they had but to knock them down with a stick. On these they lived for months.

The whole number of Mormons now was about twenty thousand. They claim that in every persecution they endured, ministers of Christ--Methodist and Presbyterian--were the instigators and the ringleaders. Credat Judæus Apella .

They were now scattered all through the country between the Mississippi and the Missouri, and a more affecting picture of their being spoiled and of sufferings--as drawn by General Kane, the brother of Dr. Kane, of Arctic fame--can hardly be found. Gradually the whole multitude worked their way westward, through the country of the Pottawattamie Indians, three hundred miles, to the Missouri River. The Pottawattamies had just sold their lands to the United States, and were to give possession the coming season; and, of course, there the Saints could find no home. They had now to build ferry boats, by which to cross the Missouri. They crossed chiefly at Omaha, near which, they say, they found "some missionaries and Indian traders, who occupied their time principally in selling whiskey to and swindling the Indians." Who these whiskey-selling and swindling missionaries were, we are not told.

Such assertions remind one of the prophets described by Jeremiah: "They are prophets of the deceit of their own hearts." The Mormons also claim, that at the Missouri River an officer met them with a requisition for five hundred men to go to the Mexican war; that in three days that number left their families, and were on their march; that they were infantry, and passed over the deserts, and through pathless mountains, and made the unexampled march of two thousand and fifty miles, to San Diego, California, most of the time on half, and often on quarter rations.

Brigham Young was now the prophet and leader, in the place of Joseph Smith. He now had a revelation allowing, if not enjoining, polygamy. While waiting for those left behind, covering a path of two hundred miles, Young built over seven hundred log-houses for the next winter quarters; also water and horse-power mills, and one hundred and fifty 166 169 of what they call "dug-outs," i.e., huts in the ground, and only the roof above the cellar.

In the spring of 1847, Brigham Young, who bears the title of President, left his twenty thousand at or near the Missouri, and with one hundred and forty-three men, set forward on an exploring expedition. My belief is that he intended to find a path over the unknown deserts into Oregon. Starting before the grass had grown, they carried their food, and fed their cattle on the bark of the cotton-wood tree, till the grass should spring up. For six hundred and fifty miles they made their own road, and for four hundred more they followed a trapper's trail. This one thousand and fifty miles brought them to a valley. This valley was barren, and covered with crickets; but here Young had a revelation that he was to stop, and this was to be the home of the Mormons. The valley was about twenty-eight miles by twenty-five. Notwithstanding his 167 170 revelation, he sent out his men in exploring parties, in all directions, to see if they could find a spot more to their minds. This was just twenty-two years ago this very month, i.e., July, 1847. His messengers returned, finding no spot so good as the one divinely pointed out. Here they began to plant the few potatoes they had brought, and sowed a little grain.

The valley was barren, covered with the wild sage bush, which grows only in alkaline soils. Nothing could be more forbidding. Not a tree grew for shade, not a green thing for the eye. With characteristic energy, Young went back to his people, starting them onward and seeing that they took all the food they could. Now, for years, the work was to get all the multitude--the old, the young, and the infant--on to the new home. Wagons and teams by the hundreds, handcarts conveying the sick and children, often drawn by 168 171 women, new graves of the pilgrims, strung all along their route, marked this epoch. The first year after their arrival, the large mountain crickets came down in such multitudes as to threaten to eat up everything. Just as they began to despair, the white gulls from the rocks in the Salt Lake came in vast flocks, and with an appetite so insatiable, that they arrested the ruin, and were their deliverers. Notwithstanding, before they had learned how to manage their soil, they came so near starvation, that they had to dig wild roots with the Indians, eat every hide and skin they had, and everything that was possibly eatable.

The Mormons claim that they carried the first printing press that ever crossed the Missouri; that they raised the first national flag that ever waved in Utah; that they made the first brick ever made in California; that they carried there the first emigrant ship and the first printing press; that they discovered and 169 172 dug the first gold; that they discovered their valley where the foot of only one trapper had ever gone before. They claim that during the four months' trail, in 1849, when the old and the young died most fearfully, the spinningwheel and the loom, set up in wagons, never stopped a single day! They claim that the first newspaper published west of the river, and also the first in San Francisco, was published by the Mormons.

Though in 1850 there was not a shingled roof (all being cloth) among them, yet the emigrant wagons, as they stopped on their way to California, never lacked hospitality and kindness; their sick never lacked care and nursing, and never had or took occasion to complain of heavy charges. Such is a brief history of the beginning of Mormonism, as they give it.

Now, for a few minutes, forget the history of the Mormons, and go with me to a spot 170 173 in the far interior of North America. In the midst of the fearful desert, between the Rocky Mountains and the Nevada Range, rises up the Wahsatch Range of Mountains, running parallel with the other two ranges, north and south. It is not a single peak or ridge, but a range of ridges and spurs, with little valleys between them. You are now in one of these valleys, with high mountains all around you: one turret before you is eleven thousand seven hundred feet high, and snow hangs and covers their tops the year round. The air is so clear that these mountains, fifteen miles off, do not look to be over four or five. The air is soft, and it seems as if summer had contrived to hide and play under the mantle of winter. In the midst of this valley is a gentle swell of ground. Turn your face north, and you see, twelve miles distant, a great blue sheet of water; and on your right, a mile or two distant, a sweet river, making towards that 171 174 greater water. On that gentle swell stands a city, laid out in squares. The streets run east and west, north and south, and each four miles long. They are each one hundred and thirty-two feet, or eight rods, wide. On each side of every street flows a brook of clear, pure mountain water, and rows of trees are planted along every watercourse. It seems to you that some of these streams must be running up hill. But there they are, in full speed, running through every street in the city. The squares of the city are laid out so as to have just ten acres in each square, and these ten acres again divided up into eight squares, so as to give one and a quarter acre to each house. These little squares are all made into gardens, planted with trees, bearing all manner of fruits and vegetables. Among this shrubbery, is the dwelling-house, built of adobe brick, --i.e., clay unburnt, --the bricks smooth, well-shaped, and of an olive or gray color, --the houses 172 175 often two stories high, and very neat in appearance.

In one of these squares, rises up a huge building, oval in shape, two hundred and seventy-one feet long, one hundred and seventy-one wide, and seventy high, with a roof that resembles one of the metallic, oval covers with which we cover our dinner platters.

Every garden is watered or irrigated by a little stream drawn from the street-brook nearest to it. The abundance and constancy of water make the trees and the vegetation dance in a halo of green. In the most busy street, these acre-and-a-quarter squares are cut up, and store joins store, and shop joins shop, as in any other city. The population of the city is about twenty thousand people.

This, then, is "Salt Lake City," the centre of Mormonism--a city and a people unlike anything else in the wide world. That huge building is their Tabernacle, or church. You 173 176 gaze upon the mountains rising up all around you like a rim of rock--not a tree on them; at the Great Salt Lake, twelve miles off; at the River Jordan, on your right; at the rushing of the mountain torrent, pouring in a paved channel through the middle of a central street, that seems to sing as he goes, "I am what is left of the mountain stream, after the city has drank all that it wants;" and you gaze at the soft, hazy atmosphere around you, and feel that you are on one of the most beautiful spots on which the sun shines. Can this be the desert which, twenty-two years ago, was covered with wild sage? What master mind planned, laid out this city of the desert, and made it what it is to-day? You soon learn that this is only one among many evidences of the workings of a very shrewd mind. When you get out of the city, you find the whole Territory surveyed off, first into five-acre lots; and then the next tier, 174 177 ten acres; the third, twenty; and the most remote forty acres, which is the highest amount any one man may own.

You now find that among the spurs of this great range of mountains, there are many little valleys creeping up among them, for a long, long distance. You find the Territory of Utah to contain sixty-five thousand square miles; or about nine times as large as Massachusetts. This, in acres, is forty-one million six hundred thousand. Of this, not over five hundred thousand acres are supposed to be capable of cultivation, leaving forty-one millions of acres not cultivable; i.e., only one acre in eighty-three can ever be cultivated. The inhabitants in Salt Lake City amount to about twenty thousand, Mormons and "Gentiles," as they call all who are not Mormons.

They have one hundred and thirty cities and villages scattered among these valleys, to the distance of four hundred miles one way, 175 178 and two hundred the other way, and in all about one hundred thousand people. They are industrious and frugal to a wonderful degree, and have one hundred and sixty thousand acres, or one third of all their land, under cultivation. Of this, ninety-four thousand acres are cultivated by irrigation, bringing in an annual water-rentage of two hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars. They have eighty thousand acres in grain, two thousand in coarse sugar-cane, six thousand eight hundred in roots, two hundred in cotton, nine hundred in orchards, one thousand in peach, seventy-five in grapes, one hundred and ninety-five in currants, and thirty thousand in grass.

When, in 1847, they first raised the American flag, the Territory belonged to Mexico. In it are mines yet to be worked, of iron, coal, and gold, and probably silver. Their valleys extend, north and south, eight hundred miles. All around these valleys are deserts of a 176 179 hundred miles in every direction. The climate is dry and hot, but exceedingly pleasant, and mild in winter. The property expended in aqueducts is estimated at ten million five hundred and eighty-eight thousand seven hundred and eighty-two dollars.

Salt Lake has a City Hall which cost seventy thousand dollars, and the city has no debt; and the Territory has actually a surplus of seventeen thousand dollars in its treasury; they have one hundred and eighty-six school districts, two hundred and twenty-six schools, eighteen thousand children, and three hundred and six teachers, at an annual expense of sixty-one thousand dollars.

They are taking measures to make a canal from the Utah Lake, forty miles distant, at an expense of about five hundred thousand dollars; which will enable them to irrigate fifty thousand acres more; for nothing can be raised there without constant and careful 177 180 irrigation. But with it, everything is raised in the greatest profusion and abundance. They boast of a theatre, churches in all the villages, debating clubs, and Female Relief Societies. Wherever mountain streams are found, they are conducted to the soil, and if, for a single day, it should be shut off from their gardens, they would suffer, if not perish. Sometimes, in dry seasons, the water is allowed but half the day, and often they must get up at midnight to let it on. In the intensely Salt Lake, twelve miles off, ninety miles long and fifty wide, there shoot up sharp mountains, bare rock, not a living thing on them, unless it be gulls, making an addition to the dreariness of the scene.

This lake has risen nine feet during the last two years, and is now three hundred feet lower than the water-marks on the surrounding mountains show it once to have been. Is there any probability that it will ever rise up 178 181 to its old place? Who knows? It has the Bear and the Jordan, and I believe other rivers, emptying into it; but it has no visible outlet. How are we to account for the rise of the lake? Have the cultivation of the land, the growth of trees and vegetation, been sufficient to increase the rain so as to raise the waters of this great lake? I doubt it.

Who make Mormons, and whence come they? I reply, they are mostly foreigners, from the lowest, most illiterate strata of society in Europe. They are from the quarries in Wales, from Norway, Sweden, and especially from Denmark. At a period as early as when they were on the banks of the Missouri, Brigham Young sent what they call missionaries to Europe, and began system of Emigration and filling up his society from abroad. I do not know what arguments such a recruiting officer would use, but doubtless he would tell those who were almost starving, 179 182 that here they would find food enough; those who wore wooden shoes, that here they would wear leather; those who never aspired to own anything in the shape of property, that here they would actually become land-holders, and own real estate!

In the mean time he started a Permanent Emigration Fund, to which every emigrant was to contribute at least enough to pay his own passage, as soon as he was able. Out of this fund they have, up to the present time, expended more than five million dollars in bringing emigrants over the ocean. So perfect was the system arranged, that when the emigrants landed on the banks of the Missouri, there would be five hundred wagons of four yokes of oxen or mules each, and carrying ten in a wagon, waiting to put them on to their new homes. A committee of the British Parliament has sat at the feet of the Mormons, to learn their system of aiding 180 183 emigration. At the present time, when the Railroad brings on a new colony, they have everything arranged most curiously. Almost all who now come, have relatives or friends among the Mormons, who have written to them; for they assured me of the astonishing fact, that there is not a Mormon who cannot read and write in his own native language--which I am compelled to doubt. Long before the emigrants arrive, the Rulers receive a list of the names of those who are coming. This list is posted up on the walls near the Tabernacle, and the time mentioned when they will arrive. Now, suppose an arrival of eight hundred on Wednesday evening. It is all known who are coming, and when. From the distant valleys, all through Mormondom, the teams have gathered, and by breakfast time next morning, they are all carried out of the city, to visit a few days with their friends, and then they get on their little tracts of land, build a cayote 181 184 house, which a man can build in a day, and begin life. A cayote house is a small cellar dug in the sand, and a few boards set up over the hole as a roof. The hole into it is like the hole of the cayote wolf's burrow; and hence the name. The emigrant stays in the cayote till he has the means of building an adobe dwelling. As fast as he is able, he pays back what has been advanced for his passage. In the construction of the Railroad lately, these were let out to work, and the emigration fund was paid in rapidly. Still, there are due this fund, at the present time, the Rulers tell me, not less than six hundred thousand dollars. I suppose this debt, when paid in, would remove six thousand people from Europe to Utah. I met three hundred on a single train, on their way, as I came eastward.

Among a thousand men or more, who worked on the railroad, from the Mormons, there were 182 185 no murders, no drunkenness, and no fightings. In the streets of the city are no brawls, or intoxication. In all Mormondom there is but one place where intoxicating liquors are sold; and that favored man, who sells them, has to pay for a license, seven thousand two hundred dollars annually, paying one thousand eight hundred dollars, in advance, every quarter! Such a license law would do the business in Massachusetts, or anywhere else.

The government of the Mormons seems to consist of a President and Prophet, united, who is Brigham Young--the receiver of revelations, and the vicegerent of heaven. With him are associated three chief councillors, then twelve apostles, then bishops enough to be scattered through every town and village, giving one to each. The Bishop is a kind of judge, ruler, alealde, teacher, preacher, magistrate, and sometimes the miller, or the storekeeper, or the raiser of cattle, or cotton, or the 183 186 manufacturer, or the hotel-keeper of the village. He is selected for his self-control, shrewdness, and ability to manage men. He is the man-- omnis homo --of the village. Then there are subordinate officers, like the Israelites of old, down to rulers of tens.

The greatest shrewdnesss is shown in putting the right man in the right place; and as the keen mind of Young can appoint and remove, and not a soul ever ask a question, he is sure to make a wise selection, first or last. He appoints the officers, and if, for any reason, he thinks it best to remove a man from the territory for a time, he has only to tell him it is thought best for him to go on a Foreign Mission, and that he will buy his house, setting his own price on it, and the man bows in silence, and does it all. There are what they call Gentiles among them; but, taking the whole population, they do not exceed two and a half per cent. I ought also 184 187 to say that they claim that their treatment of the Indians has ever been just and kind, acting on the principle, that it is cheaper to feed them than to fight them, and that they have never had their emigrant trains molested, or lost a life or a dollar of property by the Indians. Nor is it too much to say, that, had it not been for the Mormons to furnish labor and food, the Pacific Railroad could not have been built, at present, even if it ever could have been done. The bee-hive, painted on the wall which surrounds the offices and dwellings of Young, is a good emblem of that industry which is everywhere most apparent. If there are more men in the city than are needed to do the work of the city, they are sent out. You will wonder to see an uncouth adobe wall at the foot of the mountains, about twelve feet high, stretching round the city for miles. It is in ruins, and never was of any earthly use. It was built at a time 185 188 when the population had nothing to do, under pretence of guarding against the Indians; but in reality, it was to keep the people employed. Nor are you surprised, either, to learn that canals, to the amount of a thousand miles in length, have been dug, in order to bring water into the city and over their house lots.

This untiring industry is manifested also by the one hundred and fifty grist and saw-mills, three cotton, and four woollen factories, twenty-five tanneries, besides the making of shoes, hats, wagons, nails, furniture, and the like. The theory of the leading mind among them is, that they shall raise and manufacture everything they use, and thus be, and continue to be, a community, distinct and separate from all others, having their own standard of civilization and religion.

I have thus far given you what I deem a candid view of the best side of the 186 189 picture, such as the stranger gets on a single day's visit. Here is a community gathered from different parts of the world, brought and cemented together, a perfect outward fusion, making them a unit, differing from all other people in government, domestic habits, and religion. Has that community been thus cemented by religion, as they claim, or by something else? Will that system be permanent, or has it the seeds of death within itself?

Now, I am going to say frankly, but I hope kindly, what other impressions were made upon my own mind.

(a.) I think the government is a despotism, rigid in its exactions, omnipresent in its watchfulness, far-seeing in its plans, and unscrupulous in using means to attain its ends. I do not deny, may, I have said, that it has done a great amount of good, in gathering the poor of the earth, melting them together, 187 190 making them earn their bread, and giving them a civilization as high as it is.

But this ignorant mass is clay in the hands of the master spirit. The presiding Genius wields, in their view, all the authority that earth and heaven can give him. He is prophet and king. When I see that not a man among all his subjects dares disobey any order of his, when their amiable Delegate to Congress tells me that when he is elected, it is done on this wise: In the Assembly Young says, "Brethren, we are now to elect a member of Congress; our Brother, Mr. Hooper, has done very well, and I think we cannot do better than send him again;" and that decision gives a unanimous vote; and when the same amiable Member tells me that were he, when in Congress, to receive a telegram from Young, saying, "Your presence is needed in London," he would pack up and be off within three days; and when 188 191 they all tell me no man has yet ever refused to go on a Foreign Mission, when the Chief told him to go, and when they admit that when a man dies his will or wishes go for nothing, his property all goes to the church, --can I doubt that here is a despotism beyond anything elsewhere in the world? He becomes offended with a large mercantile house in his city; they do not pay as much for tithes as he demands; he excommunicates them from his church. He then opens what he calls "co-operative" stores, one in every ward of the city, with the blasphemous sign over each, --a great staring Eye, and "Holiness to the Lord," in large letters. To them, this blasphemy, as it seems to me, is religion. Then there is a system of watching, espionage over everybody and everything. You cannot stay in the city three days without feeling that you are watched; the air is close, you cannot breathe easy; hear two 189 192 strangers talk together, and you will soon see some one cautiously listening. You learn to speak low, and if you talk with a resident, not a Mormon, you will see him cautiously looking around, and very likely getting up and closing the door; and you soon get to have the feeling, that were you to speak out, and tell just the impressions that are made upon you, your life would not be safe for twenty-four hours. A gentleman who resides among them, tells me that this is true in regard to himself; and not a Mormon would dare trade at any other store, save one of the "Mount Zion" stores, as they are called. If you say I got wrong impressions, and was frightened at shadows, I have only to say, that I tried hard to get right impressions; and those who know me best, do not believe I am often frightened at shadows. That this power is wielded so as to keep these people in perfect subjection, and much for their 190 193 good, I do not deny; nay, so far, praise it; but it is, after all, a despotism which native Americans would not endure a single month. And this is one of the elements that has given strength to Mormonism. The stories about the murder of the physician at the Sulphur Spring, the secret whispers about the presence and deeds of the "Destroying Angels," of the "Danites," and their deeds of darkness when they come in the form and dress of Indians, may not all be true; but they are received as truths, and convey impressions about the government there which no government can afford to have believed.

(b.) My impression is, that this people are under the power of a fanaticism most remarkable for this age of the world. When they build their faith and hopes, for this life and the next, on what none but men in a peculiar state of mind can believe, I call it fanaticism. For example: that Smith, in 1826, dug up 191 194 brass plates that had been preserved for ages and ages, by a perpetual miracle, in the State of New York, in the town of Palmyra; that these plates, so ancient that nobody, not miraculously endowed, could read the language, were found in a common, coarse box, such as had been used for window glass; that Smith interpreted them with a stone in his hat and his hat drawn over his face, while another man wrote down the revelation; and that the contents of these plates filled the Book of Mormon, --taxes credulity to the point of fanaticism. That book lies before me, a series of weak, puerile romances, with a poor imitation of an Eastern dress thrown over them, without dates, without localities, with an abundance of names, an ape of Hebrew names, and of the style of the Bible. Nothing but fanaticism can swallow such stuff; common sense is outraged by its pretensions. And when I hear, as I did hear, the Vice President, on 192 195 the Sabbath, declare before thousands, that Brigham Young had a revelation from heaven which introduced polygamy, and when I hear him further declare that he had "known" --(this was to show that the Mormons are the Latter Day Saints, and have new revelations), "that in more than ten thousand instances he had known the sick to send for the Apostles and Elders, and they had gone and anointed them with oil, and prayed for them, and they all recovered ," I can only say, I do not believe it; and I do not believe he does; or, if he does, he is under the full power of fanaticism. They suffered outrages in Missouri and Illinois which I deplore and condemn with abhorrence; but I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that the whole system was begotten by an arrant impostor, or else the judgment of all the rest of our age is lost. Let me add, too, that in conversing with the Mormons you receive the impression continually, that they 193 196 are under the power of a strange spell. It creates an unwavering faith, so that they talk of the certainty of their individual salvation, when you feel that, at the very time, they are living in the habitual violation of some of the plainest precepts of the Bible. It does not alter the case, that they have suffered, and are willing to suffer, for their belief. Fanaticism cannot be distinguished from religion, if you look only at its martyrs.

On arriving at a certain age, all the youth, of both sexes, are baptized publicly, by immersion, with peculiar rites; and then they have what is called the "endowment" system--rooms in which the sexes, at the right time, are initiated into the secret mysteries of Mormonism.

"Do you know," I asked a shrewd one of the creed, "what the `endowment' system means?"

"Certainly I do."

"Could you explain it?"

"I suppose I could."

"Will you be good enough to do it?"

"Why," said he, with a peculiar twinkle of the eye, "it is the way to make a Mormon!" and that was all I could get out of him. "O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united."

But there is a step beyond this; they also are "baptized for the dead," on this wise: You are a Mormon; you have had a parent, an uncle, an aunt, or some other dear relative, who died before the Latter Day Dispensation, or, at all events, without becoming a Mormon. You now come forward as the proxy of that relative, are baptized again, and in heaven this is credited to your friends, and insures their salvation. How many you may thus deliver from purgatory, or raise up to higher glory, and how often the charm will 195 198 work, I do not know. You may say they are honest in all this; it may be so, but it is the darkest fanaticism, notwithstanding.

(c.) It is a system of irresponsible power; no one knows the secrets of the ledger. But through our whole nation, Brigham Young is supposed to be the richest man in the United States. In the first place, accountable to nobody, not even to tell what becomes of the money, there are the hundreds of thousands of dollars for the use of water; there is so much for the surveying of every lot sold; and then there are "tithing-houses," one or more in every city and village of the one hundred and thirty towns. In these is gathered annually one tenth of all that the ground yields, of all that every man or woman raises by skill, by labor, by trade, by mechanics, or any other method; not one tenth of the gains , but one tenth part of all that human industry produces. I need not say that this sum must 196 199 be enormous. You receive the impression that Brigham Young owns the whole, the soil, the machinery, the industry, the cattle, and all the Mormons besides; and practically he does. As he is a prophet, inspired of heaven, he can do no wrong, and is too sacred to be questioned; and as President and Governor, he has the power of handling the property as he pleases. The question is not, whether he is the most honest man in the world or not, but whether he has not an irresponsible power, such as is safe in no man's hands. I do not take or receive the things that are said and printed about him, and language said to fall from his lips, for they would not be endured to be repeated here; but I take the great and admitted facts of his position, and say that if he does not abuse human nature, and wrench from toil and poverty enough to make him rich beyond all other men, it is not for want of opportunity, or power, or 197 200 temptation to do it. I am sure I don't know any other man who would not, as I should fear, be overcome by a temptation so great.

(d.) I regard the Mormon system as a system of insupportable licentiousness. It is well known not only that Polygamy is allowed, but is woven into their religion, and sanctioned thereby as the perfection of all religion. They not only have a plurality of wives, but, like the Indians in owning horses, seem to feel that they are to be esteemed and honored in proportion to the number they have. In the first house I entered, the man has five wives. The man at the house at which we stopped, has four; the first seemed to be grieving and hiding in her chamber, the second waiting on the public tables, the third taking care of her baby, and the fourth playing honey-moon. In the same street lives a man who has four wives, the mother and her three daughters!

We were told that Young has three daughters, 198 201 all the wives of one man. I talked with an Apostle who has but five wives, and twenty-four children. I saw a Bishop who has nine wives, and one of three councillors who has nine, and children, I don't know how many. By no possible means can you learn how many wives Brigham Young has, even if he knows himself; and they do not hesitate to say he does not always know his own children. It was a matter of wonder to me how a man could support so many wives. I told them it put us upon the strain to support one. But their reply was, that their wives supported themselves: they make gloves, knit, dry figs, peaches, and apples, put up garden seeds, spin and weave linen, and are always busy about something that will yield a little. But if you think, as a community, these wives have many fashionable bonnets, many silk dresses, many gold watches, or rich furs, a single glance over the assembly, when they are gathered together, will undeceive 199 202 you. Their rule is, when the husband takes a second wife, the first wife shall solemnly give her husband away to the new wife, and so she to the third; and so on through the list. If you ask if this is done cheerfully , they will tell you, Yes. I say I don't believe it! It is not human nature, nor woman's nature, to do so, and all the testimony in the world would not convince me to the contrary. I questioned one of the Apostles on this point, and his reply was, "O, our wives understand this, and do it."

"Yes; but suppose the wife don't want to do it--what then?"

"O, the man is the glory of the woman, and this glory is not to be tarnished by the notions of the woman."

Then, when you know what the human heart is, and when you know of the case in point, where the second wife went to get the first wife to join with her to prevent the coming in 200 203 of the third wife, and receiving the answer, "No! you broke my heart, and I don't care how soon yours is broken," you are more than certain that the instincts of woman's heart must be eradicated or killed before she can ever submit to a degradation so terrible.

Add to this, their "marrying by proxy;" i.e., like the baptism described, as a matter of religion, a man marries, and raises up a family of children, not, forsooth, because he wants to, but so as to have this wife and children passed over to some relative or kinsman in the next world, who was so unfortunate as to have but one wife in this world; and thus they become his crown of glory! If you don't call that charity "in the long run," pray what is it? Abomination, if not charity!

The fact is, these second, third, and ninth wives are nothing but concubines, and they very well know it. A well-dressed woman, and one who had been highly educated, came 201 204 to me, and introduced herself as "Mrs. Cobb, from Boston;" and then went on to tell me how she had forsaken her husband and children, and come away from them, when her eyes became opened to see the spirituality of Mormonism. This shameful tale she called "bearing testimony to a Massachusetts Minister." I afterwards learned that she is one of Brigham Young's wives, or concubines, --not calling herself Mrs. Young, but "Mrs. Cobb."

You will want to know how such a fifth or ninth part of a wife looks and acts. I reply, the elder women look sad and worn, as if the path had been and is a weary one, --a path of thorns and disappointments, --and when age creeps on, and they have to reap neglect, --being not now necessary to the husband, even from habit, --solitary and alone, with nothing divine to support or cheer them. The young women look as they are, brazen-faced and stupidly bold--very much as wrong-doers 202 205 of their sex appear in every part of the world. As for that purity which William Hepworth Dixon ascribes to them, and which they claim, I have only to say, that the Gentiles who dwell there, and know them well, scout at the idea; and if you want further evidence, go into their market-house, and you will hear language from these young Mormon women, which, for obscenity and vileness, can hardly be equalled in the vilest alley in New York. It would take a great amount of rhetoric to make you forget what you may there hear in half an hour.

As for their plea that this system is in the order of nature, and it would be a blessing to introduce it into Massachusetts, where we have so many more females than males, let me simply say that if the system were not abhorrent to the Bible and to the best instincts of our nature, the fact that in India, where polygamy prevails, and has done so for generations, and in Mormondom, where it prevails, the 203 206 females born are altogether out of all proportion to the males, and that, were the system to prevail during a few generations, the disparity of the sexes would be still greater, and the evil sought to be remedied, greatly increased.

What will be the end of these things? Will Mormonism, increased continually by emigrantion, be perpetual? Or how will it terminate? It is very plain that we cannot, and shall not, persecute a hundred thousand people; we shall not make war upon their homes. But as for receiving a community, almost every leading member of whom we should shut up in the penitentiary, if they should come here and do as they do there, into the sisterhood of States--we never shall do that. Mormonism is a blotch on the civilization of this age, a mockery of the affections of the human heart, a caricature of the family relation, and a burlesque on the religion of Jesus Christ.

They are building a railroad to join the 204 207 Pacific Railroad at Ogden, forty miles. I hope it will be like the hole which the Irishman dug into his cellar--"good to let the darkness out, and the light in." Isolated as they were in their mountain valley, they might have lived longer, had not the iron horse climbed over the mountains and snorted at their door. They can't keep their people there. As for the vauntings of Brigham Young, that he will resist the United States authority as much and as long as he pleases, he is too shrewd a fellow not to know better. He tried the patience of the country once, when he built and armed forts in the Echo Can˜on to resist our troops, and when our General actually treated with him, and agreed that if he would go home and call off his men, he would not pitch his tents within fifty miles of Salt Lake City! He tried the patience of our country in resisting the United States courts and their operations, when by his influence he kept a Mormon jury from 205 208 rendering a righteous and legal verdict. The Judge kept them before him and at work on that verdict eleven months, and then, from sheer exhaustion, had to discharge them, and justice had to fall in the streets! Nor will the country forget that at this very hour, he is setting the authority of the United States at defiance, in creating, by his Legislature, and at his bidding, "a Court of Probate," and declaring it "co-ordinate" with the "United States Court." Instead of having the United States Marshal select the grand and traverse juries, as is law, and as is done in other territories, his Mormon court makes the selection and appointment, and thus the United States court plays second fiddle to the Mormon "Probate Court." I don't believe Congress knows that such a game is now being played.

A little out of the city, up on the edge of the foot-hills, is "Camp Douglas," and there are United States troops, commanded by a most 206 209 judicious, gentlemanly, as well as brave, General. He knows very well that he is there as a little army of observation, a kind of moral power. And he knows, and Young knows also, that after the terrible conflict we have had to establish the supremacy of our government, rebellion will never again be allowed; and that the first motions of resistance to this government which Young makes, will recoil and crush him. Time, moving on, creating public opinion, will sweep Mormonism away. While isolated in the deep valley, everywhere shut away by great deserts, a thousand miles from mankind, they could uphold their anomalous community; but the railroads have brought the world to them, and their mines will be sought and opened, and commerce and business will compete with their attempts to shut them away by high-handed laws. There is no great, bright future for Mormonism. It is like one of those poisonous mushrooms that spring up in the 207 210 night, which men shun, and which die away, nobody knows or cares how. The instincts of the heart, the experience of the past, the civilization of the present, the spirit of this century, and the plain teachings of the Bible, are all against it. There are not enough unbalanced minds created, who can get together, and long hold together, or make a great community. My own firm impression is, that Brigham Young will shortly have a revelation that polygamy is no longer to be permitted. And the sooner he receives this revelation, the better. My honest belief too, is, that there is not a woman among them who is not conscious of degradation, and who would not exult at deliverance, and who is not a victim of the deepest shame, even though they try to make her believe that her shameless life is sanctioned by religion, and that her heaven will be glorious in proportion as she ministers to the lust of the other sex here.

God has created the world, and put it under 208 211 certain laws, on the obeying or breaking of which, our happiness or misery depends. In Eden, when and where he created man in the fulness of happiness and perfection, he gave man and woman to each other--one husband and one wife. These, with their children, make the family, the home. And whoever, in his wisdom or in his wickedness, tries to be wiser than this, will find that he is wrestling against the eternal laws which God has ordained, and he can never succeed. God will vindicate his own wisdom. Silently and secretly he puts causes in operation which men cannot detect or counteract, and which bring down our Babels, which undermine our strongholds, and which mock our wisdom. I pretend not to say in what manner the power will come, which will make this horrible system of open licentiousness to be a thing of the past; but that it is on the way, I have no doubt. Outraged decency will demand redress. Open defiance of the piety of the earth and the will 209 212 of God will meet a rebuke that will bring it to nought, and this stain upon our name, this plague-spot of Sodom, that makes a great nation blush, will be removed. And may God speed the day.

THE HIGHWAY OF NATIONS, OR THE CONTINENTAL RAILROADS.

LET us go back twenty years. Then the cry of "gold," "gold," on the Pacific, had rung through the land. Ships were urging their way around Cape Horn, and emigrants were thronging their way westward, regardless of comfort, and even of life. Over the burning deserts, over the snowy Nevadas, down into the deep can˜ons they poured. In a single summer the overland emigration was estimated at thirty thousand people, and with their cattle, computed at one hundred thousand, and their wagons, would have made a continuous train of more than seven hundred miles in length! It took six months to go from the Missouri to 211 214 California, --a journey of the most intense suffering to men and to animals, from hunger, and still more from thirst. It is estimated that the wagon-freights across the mountains, before the commencement of the railroad, amounted to full thirteen million dollars in a single year.

If the emigrant was caught out in the winter, it took him five months longer, and with sufferings and dangers still increased.

In ten years after gold was discovered, California gained three times as large a population as the entire nation did the first sixty-eight years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. A very great part of this overland route was over the great deserts, where there were no towns to supply wants, no tree to shade the weary, and for hundreds of miles, no water but the intolerable alkali water, for man or for beast. Though, in the midst of these deserts, sharp, flinty, naked rocks, shot up by volcanoes, are seen here and 212 215 there, yet they only make the landscape the more dreary. As the emigrant crept along, from ten to twenty miles a day, under the burning sun, and in the cloud of alkaline dust which his team made, the scene grew more awful as he went westward.

One man, who had thus passed, twenty years ago, told us that he walked alone thirty miles for one drink of water; and Dr. Harkness, of Sacramento, told us that he actually walked sixty miles to find a drink of water, and then could get only a spoonful at a time. All along on this alkaline region, often white as chalk, you still see the bones of cattle, forsaken wagons, chains, kettles, and the like, strung along the trail of the emigrant. When these poor wanderers came in sight of Truckee River, the men and women would raise a shout of joy, and the poor cattle would gather up their remaining strength, and rush into the stream--maddened and uncontrollable.

When they reached the pass through which they were to make a path over the Nevada Mountains, and as they came to the brow of the mountain, till they reached the valleys of the Golden State, they had to let their wagons down the mountain side by ropes coiled around the trees, and thus, step by step, and tree by tree, they let their wagons down; the trees showing to this day the cuts of the ropes through the bark, and often into the wood.

What with building bridges and rafts to get over the streams, making paths on the mountain side, where no path was, --what with watching against the inroads of the Indians by night, and what with hunger, and thirst, and sickness, and deaths, we need not wonder that it was a formidable thing to emigrate to California. And yet, what a magnet was gold to draw them there!

In 1846, just twenty-three years ago, when Fremont was making his explorations over 214 217 these desolate regions, and was burying his faithful Indian guide, "Truckee," on the banks of the river that now bears his name, and at a spot where the town "Truckee" now stands, there was a Welshman at Dubuque, Iowa, by the name of John Plumbe (educated in our country), who began to talk and write about a railroad from the Great Lakes, across the continent, to Oregon and the Pacific Ocean. He was an engineer by profession. When he first broached the subject, there was scarcely any railroad; and only a very thin population, west of Ohio. Chicago was a little, unknown village in the centre of a vast, unoccupied prairie. No railroad had been made between the Atlantic and the great basin of the interior. A few trappers and hordes of Indians seemed to claim all west of the Mississippi. West of the population, lay an unknown land of two thousand three hundred miles, over which the dream-railroad of Plumbe was to 215 218 traverse; unscaled mountains, awful deserts, and wide rivers lay between the basin of the Mississippi and the Pacific. Yet never, till the day of his death, did Plumbe relinquish his favorite plan, and he actually lived to see his dream being wrought into reality. Asa Whitney was the next earnest and great toiler to start the enterprise, and did more than any other man to make the nation think whether the thing were possible.

When our friends in California came to understand that they were to stay there, find their homes there, build up a great city and State there; that they were five thousand miles from the East, and it took nearly a month to get to or from New York, and forty cents to get a letter; and that they were, in case of a foreign war, peculiarly exposed, --they began to move in the matter of testing the practicability of a railroad across the continent. When it was brought before Congress, in 216 219 whatever shape it came, the South were a unit against it. They had already laid their plans to divide the country into three parts, the North, the South, and the West. In that case, California, with its virgin soil and tropical climate, would fall to them; but if a railroad were built, it would most naturally connect the Pacific with the arena of freedom. Hence, it was not till the young State had grown up into manhood, and not till we were actually involved in the late war, that our government felt the importance of having a railroad connecting the West with the rest of the continent, so that, in case of a new war, we could get to them. The war seems to have been the weight that turned the scale. Hence it was, that though the ground had been thoroughly surveyed in 1853 and 1854, the government had not felt ready to take hold of it. Congress had, however, appropriated two hundred and forty thousand dollars 217 220 for surveys, and six surveying parties were sent out in 1853, and three more in 1854, composed almost entirely of men belonging to the corps of topographical engineers, among whom was General George B. McClellan. These parties surveyed ten different routes, beginning at Fulton, Arkansas, up to Minnesota on the east, and from San Diego to Puget Sound, Washington Territory, on the west. These surveys were carefully and elaborately reported and published in thirteen quite thick quarto volumes, and very beautifully illustrated by drawings. Let us now briefly follow the middle route, or the one finally adopted. The surveying party, which we will now join in imagination, start at Omaha, on the Missouri River, nine hundred and eight feet above tide-water, passing through the valley of the Platte River, crossing it once, till they reach the highest summit of the Rocky Mountains, Sherman, eight thousand four hundred 218 221 and twenty-four above the ocean. This is the highest point in all the survey; but the rise has been so gradual, that you can't realize that you are on the summit of the Continent.

You now pass over what is mostly a desert plateau, four hundred and twenty-one miles, to Echo Can˜on, from five thousand to seven thousand five hundred feet elevation. You begin to understand what a desert means. It is a plateau, once the bottom of an ocean, heaved up by volcanic agency, while here and there in it, is a sharp thrusting up of rocks in ridges, looking as if they belonged to some world, worn out, and left. Passing through that wonderful place, Echo Can˜on, on each side of which the mountains rise to a grand and even awful height, bare, crumbling, decaying, now composed of pudding-stone, filled with holes like a honeycomb, now blushing red with red sandstone, here and there rocks left standing, looking like 219 222 forts, or towers, or churches, or men and women turned into stone and standing in groups, and now a curious place, rocks perhaps five feet thick, thrust up, thirty feet high, twenty apart, and extending parallel up the mountain eight hundred feet. This is called the "Devil's Slide." And then you come to a place where the River Weber rushes out of the can˜on at a spot where the mountains close up together, giving space that must be enlarged by tunnels and a bridge to let the railroad out and over the fierce, maddened Weber River. This is called the "Devil's Gate." You now enter another plateau, about five hundred miles in extent, but ribbed with naked mountains, rising from five thousand to seven thousand feet. This second and last plateau brings you to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Where you cross over this lofty ridge, at the pass, near Donner Lake, is seven thousand and sixty-two feet above the sea. You must now descend two 220 223 thousand five hundred and seventeen feet in the next fifty miles. In the next ninety-eight miles you must descend six thousand nine hundred and sixty-six feet more. You are now over and in the valley of the Sacramento. This was the path marked out, when, in 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Bill, to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific.

At that time, the five hundred miles from Chicago to Omaha had to be built by private enterprise, in order to connect the two systems, this five hundred miles being not before constructed.

Having "surveyed" the route, let us now build the two roads, the one commencing at the Missouri and the other at Sacramento. We will begin at our end. You notice a great number of huge cast-iron tubes lying on the banks of the river. Those are to be used in constructing the great bridge, not yet built. Those hollow tubes are seventy feet long and eight feet in 221 224 diameter. They are to stand, one below low-water mark, and the other above it, most firmly riveted together. This will give each tube one hundred and forty feet in length. They are to be placed, eighteen in number, and weighing two thousand five hundred tons, upright, and then all the water is to be pumped out, and then each filled with solid masonry. The expense will be two million dollars, and it may take them two years yet to complete it. And now, under the iron energy and indomitable will of our own townsman, Thomas C. Durant, the men, the materials, the teams, the tools, the ties, and the rails, begin to accumulate at Omaha. Eighteen thousand men and six thousand teams are ready. At first, everything, even their locomotives, have to be brought from one to two hundred miles on wagons, the railroad from Chicago not being built. Every mile requires six hundred tons of rail. The ties are laid quite near to each other, being two 222 225 thousand six hundred and fifty ties to a mile, while our roads in this part of the country average but one thousand seven hundred to the mile. There is no timber, not even a tree, on the route, and the ties must be collected from six different States and two Territories. Every rail is riveted on both sides with the next, with wrought iron plates. For the first five or six hundred miles, the road is so straight, that as you look back or forward between the telegraph poles, it seems as if you were looking between two streets.

More than fifty temporary bridges have to be built, while the permanent ones are being carefully and strongly made, at Chicago. One of these bridges, the North Platte, two hundred and eighty-two miles west of Omaha, is to be of iron, three thousand feet long, estimated at a cost of one million dollars.

And now we come to the rough, strange camp life of the workmen. Cars containing 223 226 provisions, cooking apparatus, and beds for these eighteen thousand men, supply their wants. Tents, like those of an army, also accompany the working multitude. The greater part of the workmen have been soldiers in the war, and are accustomed to habits of obedience and camp life. Nine out of ten of all the workmen had been in the army. They had learned to love out-of-door life, and were initiated to hardships. They knew how to burrow their temporary houses in the most sheltered spots. They laid down the sleepers, having first graded the ground fifty miles ahead, spike down the rails, rivet them, and press on from two to four miles a day. The whole thing must be so managed that there shall be no waiting for timber, ties, or rails. When all ready, four rails were drawn from the cars, and laid in their places in a minute. Ten spikes to a rail, and three blows upon the spike, and four hundred rails to the mile, and twenty-one million of times 224 227 must these ponderous hammers fall upon the spike heads, before the road is done!

So they gradually rise up, ninety-two feet to the mile, from Cheyenne to the summit of the Rocky Mountains, when they chisel a path through, and press onward. Men from all countries and nations are among the workmen. They are beyond laws and magistrates, civil officers, and restraints of civilized society. Worse than all, the gamblers, the cutthroats, the convicts escaped from prisons, the vilest and the most atrocious men and women, congregate where are fifteen or eighteen thousand men, each receiving four dollars a day.

When a point is taken for a new terminus, say fifty or eighty miles off, these rascals rush there, lay out the tent city, open their grogshops, filled with the vilest stuff that ever entered a man's throat, open their gambling-houses, their theatres, and their hell-houses, filled with shameless women; and they now 225 228 proceed to organize a city government, elect their own men to the office of Marshal and the like, and by the time the workmen get there, they have everything their own way. They would rob and garrote a man for ten dollars. The consequence was, that violence and lawlessness had to be met with their own weapons. Every man was expected to carry at least one revolver. The workmen had, in self-defence, to form Vigilance Committees, and make and execute law. They would spot these villains, and when any one's cup was full, would send an armed band into the gambling or drinking saloon, march him quietly out, impanel a jury, try him, give him an hour or two to prepare for death, and before morning light he was hanged. As many as twelve have been found thus suspended in a single camp, in a single night. At the Idaho mines, one hundred and twenty of these cutthroats were thus hanged in three months. At two places, at which our train 226 229 stopped, on two successive nights, a man was murdered at each place, and was buried before breakfast in the morning, without judge or jury. It would be impossible to say how many murders were committed, or how many the Vigilance Committee avenged. Probably they hanged very few who were not murderers. The rope was the only thing the villains feared. When an inquiry was made about any one so disposed of, they would say, "I understood he broke his neck in climbing a tree."

A curious feature, unprecedented in railroad making, was, that the Printing press accompanied the working trains, and three daily papers were constantly issued! These temporary cities, built of cloth, or, at best, a few boards and a cloth roof, would have drug-shops, whiskey-saloons, and all manner of goods; the occupants paying from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars to the railroad company for ground enough to place his tent on. As the road 227 230 moved on, these cities would pull up and move on, and be abandoned. You now see only empty tin cans where they stood. In one of these, lands to the amount of thirty thousand dollars were sold, where not an inhabitant now remains.

In the first of these plateaus through which we pass, is a low kind of mountain, that looks like a huge rhinoceros, which had lain down to die, and which had died and shrivelled up, till his skin settled down upon him, bare, rough, and full of wrinkles. Strange as it may seem, in this treeless, herbless, dreary place, these hills are full of bituminous coal, soft, of fair quality, and good for the locomotive. It is so near, that it can almost be shovelled into the cars, as they stop before the mines. They have been dug only to draw from the top, where the air has had access to it; but when they come to get down deeper, the coal will doubtless be of a better quality. I mention this coal, 228 231 because without this, I do not see how the road could ever have been built, or kept running when built. So destitute of wood is the whole route, that in going from Omaha, the builders passed one thousand miles before they came to a tree! That stands marked--"The Thousand Mile Tree!"

So they build, pushing on, summer and winter, with an energy never equalled. I have often heard it said, the ties are nothing but cotton-wood, which is a species of poplar. This is true only to a limited extent, till they could get oak ties; and even the cotton-wood was carefully Burnetized , as it is called, which makes them as durable as any other wood used, --as they claim. The rest are oak, or a species of fir, very much like our larch, or tamarack. Where it was built in the summer, it will compare well with any other road; and where it was built in the winter, it is being rapidly made good. I was surprised to find it as good as it 229 232 is. For three hundred miles west of Omaha the cars run at the rate of thirty-four miles to the hour, and fifty-five an hour have been run, which no engineer would dare do on a poor road.

I may mention, in passing, that Brigham Young, in order to keep his people secluded from the world, took a large contract to build, each way in front of his people, and thus for a time effected his object. Another strong reason probably was, it was the first good opportunity he had had of drawing money into his settlement, i.e., into his own hands; for he received very much of it in pay for their emigration, as one of his confidential friends told me.

Let us now build at the other end, beginning at Sacramento, under the supervision of Charles Crocker, a second Durant, and appropriately called a railroad King. On the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans under 230 233 General Jackson, eighteen months earlier than we commenced at Omaha, ground was broken at Sacramento, and Governor Stanford, amid nods and smiles of incredulity, shovelled the first dirt from a wagon into a mud-puddle, where the road was to commence. This was in 1863. And now the same unconquerable energy was needed, for the difficulties in the way seemed insuperable. Eight thousand Chinamen--and better workmen could not have been found--were put to work. Among all these there were no murders, no vigilance committees needed, no riots, no whiskey-shops, and no drunkenness. These children of heathenism put our race and religion to the blush. Besides these the company often had five thousand men at work elsewhere.

The work was to be done on hills and mountains, some of which were so soft and sliding that they were almost impassable in the rainy season, and some were rocks so hard that it 231 234 seemed impossible to drill them. The rails and most of the materials had to be shipped at New York, and carried nineteen thousand miles around Cape Horn. It was all a very high grade, some of it as high as one hundred and sixteen feet to the mile. Here, too, we ought to say, the road could never have been built without the Chinamen.

At one time thirty-one vessels were urging their way round Cape Horn, laden with iron, locomotives, and materials for this road. On the Sierra Nevadas were twenty-five saw-mills, yielding six hundred and twenty-five thousand feet of lumber daily, supplied by the axes of a thousand men, as they rang up over places where the axe had never been heard before. More than one hundred miles of ties were always in advance. The almost inaccessible mountains poured down timber and stone without measure. The two roads handled and laid down about seven hundred tons of iron daily, 232 235 during the six days in the week, and once, on a strife, one road actually laid over ten miles of rail in one day, and the other one eleven miles, --together making a distance farther than an emigrant team could travel in a day!

The whole State was moved and straitened to gather all the supplies needed. Up, up crept the road. They meet a mountain which they can neither climb nor bore. So around it and up it the road winds, till it gets high enough to move off on the ridge of another mountain; and as you wind around this new Cape Horn, you look down fifteen hundred feet, and yet see the peak still five hundred feet above you, and feel that you ought not to be safe. Over deep gulches (a California word), by high and giddy trestled work, the foundations most carefully laid against the rush of waters, and often the waters turned off and away from the abutments, --the road goes. They come to solid mountains, and they blast 233 236 them away, so that the locomotive can cling to their sides, or they push a tunnel through them. There are fifteen of these tunnels, and, united, would amount to six thousand two hundred and sixty-two feet, or more than ten times the tunnelling between Boston and Albany. Down the sides of the Cape Horn Mountain rushes the American River, looking like a mere brooklet, while all around the mountains rise, till they terminate in perpetual snows.

Nestled in, under the eye of everlasting snows, lies the little "Summit Valley," a mile long and half a mile wide, --as if a child of sunshine had crept up to see how it would seem to summer among the desolations of broken rocks, and volcanic mountains, and eternal snows.

At an altitude over seven thousand feet, far higher than Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, and twice or three times higher than any other railroad in this country, is the long 234 237 tunnel, bored through rock as hard as porphyry, and then the road clings to the mountain-side in a place that had to be blasted out--not by gunpowder, --for that had lost power, --but by glycerine. Just at the dusk of evening, when life would be least exposed, you might have looked up a thousand feet above Donner Lake, and seen the workmen fire their glycerine blasts, when huge masses of rock and a world of powdered de´bris poured out of the mountainside like the explosions of a score of thunderclaps, as all this came thundering down, and rolling down the deep declivities, while the echoes rolled and ree¨choed from can˜on to can˜on, till they were lost upon the distant mountain-tops.

No finer, more sublime scenery can be found than that seen from the different points of this Central Pacific Railroad. Huge battlements were laid, deep gorges spanned, mountains climbed and bored, till the home of eternal 235 238 winter was invaded. The sixteen tunnels tell the story of the rocks. And here, where the avalanche slides and thunders, are the sheds, strong, and inviting for him to slide over. And where the snow falls from twenty to forty feet deep, are sheds supported by mighty timbers, the full round trees used, and these sheds already nearly forty miles in length--the grandest specimens of timber-strength I ever saw.

And now we have climbed the Nevadas, and again come to the everlasting deserts. We have met with one covered with alkali, white as snow, and forty miles wide. I have studied not a little to ascertain to what use these vast beds of alkali can ever be put; can they, should it be possible to sink artesian wells through the alkali and bring up pure water, ever be washed free from the salts, and made fruitful? How deep is the deposit? The Mormons inform me that in such alkaline 236 239 deposits, the deeper they go, the stronger the salts, and that they cannot be made fruitful by irrigation. Of what possible use can they ever be, then, to the human family? Can they be used for manure to enrich other portions of our country? My friend and travelling companion* brought some of it home, and put it into the hands of a skilful expert to find if it would make soap, and if so, what would be its worth here . The result is not so favorable as I supposed possible, inasmuch as there are other ingredients mixed with the soda. Still, I am not quite sure that those vast repositories of alkaline matter will not hereafter become an article of commerce. May it not yet be, that, as the cars pass up the valley of the Truckee, the traveller will look out and see a huge, broad building, occupied by some Yankee, with a glaring sign, "The Desert Universal Soap Factory?"

As to which railroad deserves the more credit, it is not easy to say. They are both the products of great skill, energy, and labor.

The Pacific is the more thoroughly built, the Union is by far the longer, and began much later. They are built in a time for shortness unparalleled in the history of railroads. They are monuments of wonderful achievement, even in the nineteenth century. But they are done, and we will now attend a wonderful wedding on the great plateau of the mountains.

It is Monday morning. We are in the first cars that ever crossed the continent of America! We have crossed over fifty temporary bridges, one of which had just broken down. It was over a swift, rushing river, with a fall of sixty-five feet just below the bridge. It had been mended, and we reached it in the darkness of night. They were afraid to let the engine rest on it, and so they back us up to the bridge, and very carefully unfasten the 238 241 coupling, and let our cars, one by one, run over. We are in the big, heavy car, and we stand on the platform, see the foaming waters, fifty feet below us, and hear their savage roar, and we hold our breath, till we are over.

But now we are on a plateau, surrounded by dreary mountains. That bold headland yonder is the object at which thousands of men, on both roads, have been looking for six years. It is "Promontory Point," on the very back-bone of the continent. Engines and trains from the East, and engines and trains from the West, some covered with flags, stand facing each other. A rod or two between them has, as yet, no ties and no rails,

One man, West Evans, who had furnished the Central company with two hundred and fifty thousand ties, and who had furnished the first tie put down, was there with the last, a beautiful specimen of the California laurel, which 239 242 was duly laid down, and then taken up and preserved. The ties of the Central road were all sawed, of red wood; those of the Union were hewed.

At the appointed time, the Master Spirits of the two roads meet. White workmen from the East and olive Chinamen from the West meet, bearing the last sleepers and the last rails. A few boards, set up like a roof, is the telegraph office. A few tents, bearing the sign of "Saloon," or "Restaurant," compose the place. A rough flag-staff, with our dear old flag on it, tells us we are yet in our country, and the glorious flag is a witness of the scene. A regiment of soldiers, on their way to Alaska, are present to see the occasion. Telegraph arrangements have been made, so that every telegraph in the land shall be connected. A skilful officer has been detailed by the Government to carry the wire down to the "Golden Gate," below San Francisco, and attach it 240 243 to a fifteen-inch Parrott gun, to see if a gun can be fired eight hundred miles off. At the appointed hour, the last tie is laid; and now, before the rails are laid, the telegraph flashes through the country, "Are you all ready?" Back, from scores of cities comes the echo, "All ready." Again the telegraph says, "At the third tap" it will be done. "We understand," say the wires. In Washington, Cincinnati, Chicago, all the western cities, in New York, Boston, even in Halifax, in all the Pacific cities, people stand grouped and breathless around the telegraph offices. "We are now going to attend prayers--hats off," say the wires, and in all these places they take off hats and listen to the prayer as it leaps over the wires, sentence by sentence, to places four thousand miles apart. The officer at the fort at the Golden Gate can hardly retain his seat for excitement. What a place in which to pray! Was prayer ever offered there before? Was 241 244 ever prayer heard by mortal ears four thousand miles away, before? The occasion would have been overwhelming, had we not felt that God, who had lifted up this continent, and had placed us on the summit, and who had given to man his skill, --God, God alone is great! The Governors of four States or Territories, with their gold and silver spikes, are there--each golden one having nearly four hundred dollars in it. And now the last rail is laid and spiked. A telegraph wire is coiled around a silver hammer, and the President of the Central Pacific just taps the head of the golden spike! That tap proclaimed to the country, and through Europe, that the work is done! The railroads are wedded into one! That gentle tap fired the big gun which the officer was watching at the Fort, and instantly set all the bells in the land a ringing, and announced that the greatest work ever attempted in railroads was a success! In three minutes the 242 245 telegrams came back from all the cities--"The bells are ringing, and the people rejoicing." The whole thing seemed a wild dream. The telegraphing seemed to magic, and we could hardly realize that creatures so small and feeble as men, had accomplished a work so great. It made all other works of the kind seem small and insignificant. This was May 10, 1869. The little ring on my finger, bearing the significant words, "The Mountain Wedding, May 10, 1869," and presented me in commemoration of the occasion, was made, as I know certainly, from a piece of one of the golden spikes.* And thus the marriage was consummated, under the bright sun, in the desert place, and under the eye of Promontory Point--hereafter to become historical.

Perhaps there were three thousand men, including workmen, present, besides a 243 246 sprinkling of ladies; but in reality, the millions of our country were present. I understand there is to be an historical painting of the scene.

If you ask how I came to be there, and be a participator on the occasion, I can only say, that as it was without my expectation or seeking, I do not feel especially to blame; and as for my participating, you know that when men cannot get better materials, they have to use such as they can obtain.

Allow me, now, to attempt to convey to you my own impressions as to the results of this great work--premising, that I consider railroading but just in its infancy, and that we have no conception of what the system is to become. I do not look at it merely as a new and short pathway by which we may visit that wonderful land, California--as a means of bringing us fruits that have ripened under their rich sunlight--and as an advance in the progress of civilization; but 244 247 as giving all the institutions of the east power to kiss the young sister at the West, and breathe our love upon her, as she "sits, the highway of nations."

There were two minds that saw this result many years ago; I mean the Rev. Theron Baldwin, of New York, who has planted and matured, as the exponent of the College Society, more Colleges and permanent Literary Institutions, than any other ten men that ever lived. More than ten years ago he saw this railroad, and called it "the highway of nations." He looked over these vast heights, and began to dig Jacob's wells on the Pacific, not waiting for the road to be built. The other was Thomas H. Benton, who, twenty years ago, urged this work upon his country with an eloquence worthy of the man. I wish I had time and space to quote his own beautiful language.

This remarkable speech of Mr. Benton was made at the first National Convention in 245 248 behalf of a railroad to the Pacific, held at St. Louis, October, 1849.

The HON. THOMAS ALLEN, of Pittsfield, wrote the call for this Convention, addressed to the people of the United States; also the address of the Convention to the Nation; also the Memorial to Congress. He started the first Pacific Railroad ever actually commenced, now running from St. Louis to Sheridan, six hundred and ninety-five miles, --was its President over three years, -- took the first locomotive ("Pacific No. 3") from Taunton, Massachusetts, that ever crossed the Mississippi: he also wrote the Memorial to Congress, urging them to grant lands and loan bonds. The plan thus suggested was adopted, and is the basis of the Pacific Railroads.

Thus two Pittsfield men, Allen and Durant, have been very prominent in these great works. Can any other town claim like or equal honors?

Benton pleads that the nation shall build the railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific. He seems to stand higher than any one of his fellows. He looks back three hundred and fifty years, and sees the great Columbus, sent out by a King and Queen, searching for the East by sailing west. He sees him checked by a continent which he had discovered, and from which he was afterwards carried home in chains. But the great thought--"find the east by going west"--has never died. The Franklins, the Kanes, and the other navigators who have perished in the attempt to solve the problem, have kept the thought active. It has been reserved for our day and this Republic to complete the great design of Columbus, by making a highway over a continent, turning the ship into a steam-car, and every day launching the true ship of the desert westward, every way larger, more costly, and freighted with more mind, than Cook's ship ever had, though she 247 250 sailed round the globe. This car-ship starts from Boston, joins hands at New York, looks in at the half-way house at Omaha, and passes on. And Benton in his vision saw all this, and on the heights of the Rocky Mountains, he seemed to see a Statue of Columbus, chiselled from the everlasting rock, with his face looking westward, and his arm outstretched, saying to every passing car, "There is the East! there is India!" On these sublime heights the traveller sees a great, awful Rock, lofty and square, like a great fort. Who knows but, coming in sight of that Rock, now called "Watch Rock," the eye of the traveller may yet moisten as he sees such a Statue of the Great Navigator, with a scroll in one hand and the other pointing towards the setting sun, and saying, "Eureka! I have found my passage to the East!"

One of the immediate results, I have no doubt, of the successful termination of this great enterprise will be the construction of 248 251 three more such roads--the Southern, from San Diego to Fulton, in Arkansas, and thus to New Orleans; the second, from St. Louis to San Francisco; and the Northern, from the northern lakes to Puget Sound, or to Oregon. The country will never rest till all this is done. In thinking of what has been done, you must bear in mind that this whole thing has been against nature. It is easy to build railroads north and south, for so run the rivers and the valleys. But go from Boston to Albany, east and west, and how is it? We had to cross the continent, where mountains and deserts had risen up to the snow regions, as if forever to keep the two oceans apart. Skill hath laid his iron hand on the mane of the everlasting mountains, and, grinding flinty rocks to powder beneath his heel, hath leaped over the barriers of nature. Is it possible that the Prophet caught a glimpse of the iron horse, thousands of years ago, when he says, "The chariots shall be with 249 252 flaming torches in the day of his preparation, and the fir trees shall be terribly shaken. The chariots shall rage in the streets; they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways; they shall seem like torches; they shall run like the lightnings"?

There is another text also, quoted by the Rev. Dr. Dwinell, of Sacramento, in his most beautiful sermon on the completion of this railroad, most expressive of the thought I now wish to convey. "Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."*

Had a company of angels been sent to fling that great highway across the continent; had they put down the stakes where cities and villages should spring up, and be strung along like pearls on a dark string; had they been the Directors, and laid the plans to make it a highway for our God, --I cannot see that it would have evinced a higher end than that we now see. Did it not seem like God's coming to take possession of it, when he so ordered it that a Minister of the Gospel should be on the ground to consecrate it to his glory, ere the last spike should be driven? that this minister should be in the first car that ever passed the continent, and preach the first sermon in the Golden State, on arriving there, of any one ever thus to arrive? that he should find at Sacramento nine Christian people, most of them 251 254 missionaries from the Sandwich Islands, waiting to take the first cars that would come the other way? When I look at the barrels, the boxes, and the passenger-cars on this road, I look at them with a Christian's faith, and see them as so many instrumentalities to carry out my Father's plans. I see that by this pathway hearts that have been long separated, faces that are to be washed with tears of joy, homes that have been broken up, are again to meet and be reunited. The cold iron is to be kept warm by the bounding hearts that are flying over it to meet kindred hearts. It was the last link needed to belt the globe. You leave New York by steam to Liverpool; by steam on land you spin through France; by steam you go from France, on the water, to Alexandria; from Alexandria, on rail, steam takes you to Suez; from Suez to China or Japan, on water, by steam; from China to San Francisco by steam; and now again the last link is supplied; 252 255 over land by rail, to New York, about one sixth of the whole distance by this new channel. Now the couriers of civilization can go round the earth in three months. And this earth-born Daughter of Strength wends her way, as we should expect, among and through the highest, most civilized nations of the earth. There is England, a hive of industry on a little earth-spot in the ocean, made brilliant by a galaxy of talent, planting her colonies all over the earth, aggressive, massive, the true successor of the Roman power. There is France, with her artistic civilization, the creator and umpire of taste, the queen of fashion, and the wonder in the workmanship of what is beautiful. There is Egypt, a land that ever has been, and ever will be, a puzzle. There is China, with its immovable, half-civilization, abiding her time; and old India, waiting for the British people to do for her what she cannot do for herself; and here is the New World, working out for the 253 256 human race the great problem of human governments, individual freedom, the highest civilization, and the problem of human responsibilities, and aspirations, and achievements, --this New World, having been the last nation to take the torch of freedom directly from the hand of God, and in the best possible position, to hold it up in the presence of earth; and here is the Church of God, sublimated and set free from the materialism of past ages, and leaning on the breast of her Beloved as no church ever did before! Why, it seems as if around this great "highway of nations," God had gathered the wealth, the population, the intelligence, the civilization, and the religion of the earth; and here are to run the shuttles that shall weave the garments of peace and good-will, which all nations shall soon put on. Here, on this pathway, are to be found the elasticity of the temperate zone, the institutions of learning which are to be the school-house of the nations, and also 254 257 the pure Christianity which is to be the leaven that is to leaven the whole lump. Whatever of education, learning, intelligence, virtue, progressive thought, human freedom, power to plan and power to do, which earth possesses, is on this line of quick communication.

And can you see nothing but freight and cars, and the smoke of the locomotive? Humanity now revolves around this great axis created by man, and it is to be the centre for the re-construction of humanity. It will be the highway of commerce and of learning, of brotherly kindness, of the messengers of peace, and of the Gospel of Christ. It is not an evidence of decay, but of new life, --this mingling of blood; and when I see this great link supplied, letting in our east, and bringing the old east--China and the like--to be their west, I can see a future for the Atlantic slope, for the Inland mighty valley, and for the Pacific slope, such as I never saw before.

California, cradled in excitement, and now giving promise of a rapid and great growth, must have been dwarfed, had she forever been isolated and shut away from the rest of us, and she must have degenerated. Human beings must mingle with others, or they become inbred, and degenerate. That downward tendency which seems to be a part of all that is human, is arrested by contact with what is vigorous and healthy. Our gardens and flower-beds must have their seed changed. And at this hour, and by the means of steam, God is pouring one nation into another, and mingling languages and tongues. Over the snowy summits of the Nevadas we shall pour our people, creating new homes, and villages, and cities, like those we have here, --starting on a new race of improvement. And this railroad makes our country one. It can now never divide, creating a government off on the Pacific slope by itself; but all will unite in one grand effort to make our 256 259 nation great at home, and a leader in the world's march after improvement.

Said William H. Seward, when that road shall have been extended to the Pacific Ocean, "disunion will be rendered forever afterwards impossible. There will be no fulcrum for the lever of treason to rest upon."

There was a time when old Paganism stood trembling, on feeble limbs, and looking, with anxious eye, for something better; and then God lifted up the Star of Bethlehem, and the world advanced. There was a time when the eye of science was dim, and the word of God, whose "entrance" everywhere "giveth life," was shut up and away; and then God gave the printing-press, and knowledge and truth were unbound, to walk together among men. There was a time when the population of the earth needed more comforts, and better material things, and the opening of the coal mines, and the putting the spindles and the looms of the 257 260 factories in motion, created the supply needed. Brain was worth more than mere muscle, for brain could turn wood and iron into muscle.

There are epochs in the world's history, and in the advancement of our race. Our day is the day for making the earth smaller, by creating speed; and I see in it a Divine plan; and I hear His voice, saying, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed." All the discoveries which men make, all the inventions which they bring out, all the facilities for intercourse which they create, be it rushing over a vast continent, bringing Commerce to move her burdens on the land instead of on the water; flashing thought along on the bed of the ocean, --all are taken up in God's plans, and made to reveal his glory. It is taking the materialism of earth, and sanctifying it, and making it not merely harmonize with, but be the carrier of spiritual things.

It may take a century, or three centuries, before men will understand the full import and power of the railroad; but this we do know--that a road which goes into the far west of the Pacific, does not stop there. In ways that we do not know, it reaches into the spiritual world, and is the bearer of spiritual good to our race. It already melts away our prejudices, and brings us into brotherhood with all the nations. I may not be able, and I am not able, to point out all the bearings which this one new road will have on the kingdom of light and mercy; yet I feel just as sure that it will have mighty results upon that kingdom, as if I had seen the Divine hand swing this great enterprise over the mountains, and press it down there with his foot.

China is our neighbor now. The East and the West embrace; nay, we hardly know which is East or which is West. This one road has turned the world around. Thus beneath all this 259 262 labor, and toil, and skill, in the cry of Commerce for new working-ground, and in the rising up of myriads to find better homes, we see the Divine Mind urging it all on, and forward, for the good of that race, which His Son hath redeemed, by becoming one of them.

That great dome of heaven, which our Heavenly Father hath hung over all the earth, covers one great family, and their means of intercommunication are creating a warmer brotherhood, and thus causing us to feel that we are at home anywhere beneath that mighty dome.

THE FUTURE OF THE PACIFIC SLOPE, AND THE CHINESE QUESTION.

ON the Pacific shores are three harbors, conveniently located to meet the wants of commerce--on the north, Puget Sound; on the south, San Diego; and in the centre, San Francisco Bay. The latter is the queen of harbors, and has a great headway in advance of the others. As you come into the bay, passing the Golden Gate, you are sailing directly east. After passing east a few miles, you turn to the south, around the point of a peninsula. On the end of that peninsula is San Francisco--a city built on and among the most dreary sand-hills. Originally no spot could be more uninviting. But in twenty 261 264 years the high hills have been cut down and carted into the water, rocks blasted, sloughs filled up, till now you find a wondrous city, with nearly one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, with architecture which would honor any city; with nothing that looks young, green, or unfinished; and kept in order by its police, superior to any other city in the land. You are amazed at seeing a city looking old, and ripe, and finished, having twelve daily papers, and many of them of mammoth size; having six miles of wharfage already built; having huge steamships, that run regularly, not only every day and hour through the harbor, but on the New York line, and on the lines for China, Japan, Sandwich Islands, and Oregon. In this city capital has centred, and has been wisely and generously used to build public institutions, free schools, hospitals, asylums for the blind, for the deaf and dumb, for the orphans, and for all in 262 265 distress. San Francisco is, by her position, by her energy and wisdom, to be the Elect Lady of the coast, and nothing but earthquakes will interfere with her growth. In the centre of mines which have but just begun to be developed, in the midst of a region unequalled in the world for agricultural productiveness, with unexplored mines of coal and of iron, with unmeasured forests of the finest timber ever found anywhere, with one continental railroad already built, and another--that to St. Louis--which will be built, she must become a great commercial and manufacturing city.

California can support twenty millions of people by her own resources, and the whole Pacific slope twice that number, at least. One eighteenth of all the land in the State was given by Congress, to be devoted, as fast as sold, to public schools. In addition to this, Congress gave her five hundred thousand 263 266 acres of land, to be devoted to internal improvements; and the State has wisely decided that the inside of the human head is the place to begin improvements, and has set this also aside for schools and public education. She also taxes all the property of her people for schools. The free-school system of Massachusetts is adopted, and there is not a child in the State which may not be educated at public cost. These schools are established as fast as population requires, and are already of a high order. This free-school system is justly the pride of the State, and no new State can boast of better. And as goes California, so will go all the Pacific slope. There will be no better schools in the land than these will be. Both California and Oregon have determined to have a College or University that shall be like a steam engine on the top of a hill, to draw up what is at the bottom of the hill. In every 264 267 neighborhood, it is already true, that the schoolmaster is abroad. The churches, of course, must be in their infancy, but they are well organized, manned with an able, devoted, and talented ministry. They have the right ring to them.*

The Sabbath is far better observed than I expected; and while six military companies march through the city, to fife and drum, every Sabbath, and strike the stranger very unpleasantly, yet they go out into the country to spend the day. I am happy to say that they are Germans or Italians. No company of Americans thus desecrates the day.

And as to Sabbath Schools, they are perfectly bewitching. I have never seen so large a proportion of the population gathered into Sabbath Schools, nor finer schools. Whatever 265 268 these people take hold of, they do it with a heartiness that is truly refreshing. I attended the State Convention of Sabbath Schools, and also the State Convention of the Young Men's Christian Association, and was most highly gratified and satisfied with the earnestness, the judiciousness, and the success, with which the working power of those churches is brought out. There is no narrowness or bigotry of denomination apparent. They work together in the common cause, and for the common Master.

I may say, too, that, probably owing to the climate, you find the finest set of children in that country that you ever saw--the fairest, fullest, and most perfect physical development. I was struck with this, and feel assured that here will be developed a physical manhood, such as has nowhere yet been found. It can hardly be otherwise, when every child can live out of doors more than 266 269 half of every year, and will prefer to do so. The question they ask is, not, to what denomination does a man belong, not what his attainments, but, "What can the fellow do ?" And this standard of doing something and much, with the climate and the thousand incentives to effort, will, in the future, I have no doubt, produce, not giants, but a noble race of men, if not superior to any now in the world.

On the great Eastern continent, west of the Yellow Sea, is a great plateau of the most fertile land, surrounded by mountains, watered by vast rivers, connected by a canal seven hundred miles long, teeming with multitudes of human beings, packed together, and hardly getting food enough to sustain life. Nearly a third of earth's population are crowded together there. The people are almost as ancient as the flood, and were probably there when Abraham was in Canaan. Two strong men 267 270 have tried to impress their own minds upon the people--Buddha, in India, who lived about six hundred years before Christ, and Confucius, in China, who lived about a century later. You now understand me to be speaking of China and the Chinese. The latter of these men gave laws and religion; but the laws were barbarous, and the religion had no stamp of divinity upon it, carried no divine sanctions with it, and only set human character, like mortar, without elevating or advancing it; the most it hoped to do, was to stand still. So the generations have come and gone--now and then a vast revolution; but as President Hopkins, in his admirable sermon before the College Society, says, it was "the mountain-pressed giant simply turning over." "There have been," he also says, "stability and order, but a stability without growth, and an order without progress." Such is the amount of human life in China, that men take the place of 268 271 beasts, and a dozen men will do the work of a single horse, for the wages which one horse ought to earn. The result is, that this people, half starved from generation to generation, are dwarfed--not larger or heavier than our women. Still the Chinaman is lithe, strong, active, enduring, quick to imitate, quick to learn, mild in disposition, taught to respect law and obey magistrates, kind to animals, industrious, willing, economical, and able to live on very little. His religion is gloomy, and suicide is more common than with other races. The overgrowth of population induces infanticide and a disregard to human life. The Chinaman has very little self-respect, and is, of course, tricky, deceitful, and untruthful; but he is never malicious or revengeful.

I am speaking of the mass. Among the educated and mercantile classes, there are fine specimens of integrity and all the commercial 269 272 virtues. The following beautiful speech was made a few days ago, by a pure-blooded Chinese merchant, Choy-chew, at an entertainment in Chicago:--

"Eleven years ago I came from my home in China to seek my fortune in your great Republic. I landed on the golden shore of California, utterly ignorant of your language, unknown to any of your people, a stranger to your customs and laws, and in the minds of some an intruder, one of that race whose presence is deemed a positive injury to the public prosperity. But, gentlemen, I found both kindness and justice. I found that, above the prejudice which had been formed against us, there flowed a deep, broad stream of popular equality; that the hand of friendship was extended to the people of every nation; and that even Chinamen must live, be happy, successful, and respected in `free America.' I gathered knowledge in your public schools; I learned to speak 270 273 as you do, to read and write as you do, to act and think as you do; and, gentlemen, I rejoice that it is so; that I have been able to cross this vast continent without the aid of an interpreter; that here in the heart of the United States, I can speak to you in your own familiar speech, and tell you how much, how very much, I appreciate your hospitality, how grateful I feel for the privileges and advantages I have enjoyed in your glorious country, and how earnestly I hope that your example of enterprise, energy, vitality, and national generosity, may be seen and understood, as I see and understand it, by our government. Mr. Burlingame has done much to promote good feeling in China towards the American nation. He made himself well acquainted with the authorities at Pekin. He won their confidence to a remarkable degree. He is an excellent man, and, I believe, if his advice is received and acted upon, China will soon be the cordial friend of 271 274 all the commercial powers of the earth. Already we are doing something in the way of progress in modern improvements. Steamboat lines have been established on our rivers, and the telegraph will soon connect us with the wonderful sovereignty of the Western Hemisphere, where the people rule, where everything proclaims peace and good-will to all. China must brush away the dust of her antiquity, and, looking across the Pacific, behold and profit by the new lessons of the new world. We trust our visit, gentlemen, may be productive of good results to all of us; that the two great countries, East and West, China and America, may be bound forever together in friendship, and that a Chinaman in America, or an American in China, may find like protection and like consideration in his search for happiness and wealth."

The Chinaman will often learn our alphabet, and even to put syllables together, at a single 272 275 lesson. He is a good washer and cook, and will make a little go a great way for himself, or for his employer. Such is the Chinaman, when I have added that he is an idolater, is superstitious, carries his temples and gods with him, lives upon rice and tea, and smokes opium with his tobacco when he can get it.

Though I went into their Joss-house, or Temple, yet, not being able to communicate with the old priest, I could not understand much of their worship. There seemed to be two parts or rooms. In the first were various hieroglyphics, in large gilt letters, and images, and abundance of little Joss-sticks, or candles, which are to be bought and burnt before the idol, to take away sin; the sins are removed as the stick burns. I was told that these are very much sought after by dissolute women.

In the second room, was a kind of table or altar, on which lay two pieces of wood, flat on one side and rounded on the other, very much 273 276 like a pea-pod split open. These the priest takes up, the faces meeting, and drops them on the table. If they fall and remain on the round side, you are to have good luck; if on the flat side, bad luck; and they fall so, nineteen times, at least, out of twenty. You may now buy "good luck," by paying the priest a small sum of money. Beyond that table, and behind a kind of screen, were three idols, bedizened by gilt, and each in a kind of niche or recess. The left hand one was the god of medicine or health; the middle one, "the best woman that ever lived," i.e., the goddess of purity; and the third one, on the right, the god of gold, or riches. There was a large handbell, used, it would seem, to wake up the god, before propitiating him, by burning sticks or gilded or silver paper before his little shrine. There was no provision for social worship, or teaching of any kind. All seemed planned to let the votary go directly to the god whose favor 274 277 he was most anxious to obtain. It seemed to be the lowest kind of idolatry, the very gods being hideous in shape and countenance.

When the gold mines were discovered, their report went out into all the earth. Thousands of Chinamen were soon scattered over California, digging gold. When the railroad was to be built, they were on hand and ready to engage by thousands. The more they are known, the more their labor is in demand; and now, there are at least one hundred thousand already on our shores, and within a year that number is to be doubled, and they will probably be numbered by millions in a very few years. They could send out forty millions, equal to the population of our nation, and be benefited by the depletion. They can all, without exception, read and write in their own language.

The great besetting sin of the Chinese, is their inordinate love of gambling. Every evening, as you pass along a Chinese street, you 275 278 will hear, here and there, a strange din, which you suppose is meant for music. The doors and windows of every shop are wide open. That shop where you hear music is a gambling shop. As you enter, you notice, on the right hand and on the left, a high counter, nearly as high as the chin. In the centre of the counter is a place marked out, four square, perhaps ten inches square. The sides of this square are numbered one, two, three, and four. You want to try your fortune. You put down, say four bits, i.e., fifty cents, or silver half dollar. That must be laid at the side numbered four. A man sits by, having copper coin before him about as large as our old-fashioned cent piece. He has quite a heap of them, each with a square hole in the middle of it. With a little square stick, about as long as a goose-quill, he now counts these coins, carefully putting the end of the stick in the square hole. If, when he has counted up to a certain number, --which 276 279 he does with astonishing rapidity, --there be a remainder, --one, two, three, or four, --the man who put down the silver, gains so many bits, but loses his forfeit, --on some principle which I could not comprehend. I could see, however, that the bank or saloon had decidedly the lion's share. On both sides these gamblers stand. At the end of the room, behind a partition, about a yard or four feet high, sit the musicians, who both play and sing. But of all musical instruments ever invented, of all sounds ever put forth as music, of all contortions of faces ever made, you now see the superlative. The music wails at times like a sick animal, or screeches like cats under your chamber-window, in a dark night.

Just in front of the half dozen musicians, who often relieve one another, is a table with a huge tea-pot on it, holding, perhaps, two gallons of most delicious tea, --free to all, --and which they quaff out of little shallow, china 277 280 bowls, without cream or sugar. But whether they sing, or drink tea, or gamble, they smoke their long pipes, with tobacco medicated with opium. The fumes fill the room; your head begins to swim, and to grow dizzy; your stomach grows nauseated, and you are glad to get out into the open air, satisfied that most who gather there, will spend all their day's earnings before they leave the hideous place.

Thus far they feel that they are strangers, and intend and expect to go back to their country. All their dead are carried back for burial. Over twelve hundred bodies, as is estimated, are now annually carried back to China, at a cost of one hundred dollars each, in gold. The State of California has a law that every man who works in the mines shall pay a tax of four dollars a month, unless he is a citizen, or declares his intention to become one; but no Chinaman has, so far, ever signified his purpose or wish to become a citizen, though 278 281 there are thousands engaged in gold-digging.

And where and what is to be the end of this thing? Our Irish friends in California have risen up against the Chinese, and abused them, and declared they shall not come to our shores. They might as well go down to the Golden Gate, and say that the tide shall not come in, with the Pacific Ocean behind it. They can no more be stopped than water can be prevented from running down hill. Intercommunication is such, that labor will go where it is best paid. Nothing can keep back the myriads of starving people in China. And besides, the thing that we now want, --the great material want of the country, --is cheap labor. And whoever will furnish that, will find enough to employ him. A few years ago, and the employees in the factories at Lowell were all American girls. They determined, and the owners determined, that none but American help 279 282 should be employed. But now, there is not over one American girl, we are told, to a thousand Irish. That is all right, and is in accordance with unalterable laws.

Now, as to our Irish friends saying "the Chinese shall not come," I should like to talk with an honest, warm-hearted Irishman on this point. I would say, "Now, look here, friend; I know, and you know, that all that the Irishman is to-day, is what our country has made him. He came here poor, scorned, and oppressed. We have lifted him up to be a citizen, --to be on an equality with ourselves. He owns farms, has millions of money in the Savings Banks, has a good home, and his children are educated at the public expense; and now, for him to rise and say that any other poor, oppressed people shall not come here and receive the same blessings, is a meanness so despicable, that no Irishman ought ever to be guilty of it. He ought to blush to name the thing."

But what is to be the result of this influx of Chinamen? No mortal can say. The first effect will be to expedite the building of railroads and developing the resources of our country. Already all the railroads west of Chicago are negotiating at what price they will transport them, and have fixed upon a cent and a half a mile. Another effect, immediate, will be to stop the strikes among workmen--a curse to themselves and a curse to the community. In the factories of San Fracisco they had none but Irish, paying them three dollars a day in gold. They struck, and demanded four dollars. Immediately their places, numbering three hundred, were supplied by Chinamen at one dollar a day--and superior workmen they are. So it will be all over the country; for all over the country they will come, and be welcomed. Well, you will ask, won't this be a great injury to our Celtic and Teutonic workmen now among us? I answer, no: I believe it will be a 281 284 great blessing to every mother's son of them. And how do I make that out? I will tell you. It will show them that the sooner they cease to be Irishmen or Germans, and become Americans, the better. It will put them to educating their children. It will scatter them on our farms, and on farms of their own. It will be a power under them to lift them up. It will be a power behind, to push them forward. They will see that they must rise or sink. They must gain intelligence and skill enough to employ this new power, or they must work for it. The question cannot be settled by the shillaleh or the fist, the dirk or the pistol, but by intelligence and manly character. And if any one doubts which race wins, he does not look at it as I do. What will be the effect on the negro? Good, I have no doubt. It will make him feel the necessity of working, not by fits and starts, but continuously, and of being economical and frugal. Placed side by side, the Chinese will 282 285 be the educator, and the negro will rise. But what, say you, will be the result on the government of this country--creating here a conglomerate mass, such as our form of government never contemplated? Will not these Foreigners at some day, perhaps not distant, be able to take this nation into their own hands, and become its Rulers? I reply, no , and that because there are some things that will prevent it, deeper than numbers or votes. There are certain organic laws that override all human plans and notions, and to these I want now briefly to allude. Will you follow me?

The great colonizers of the earth are the Anglo-Saxons. They scatter and plant themselves in any climate, create a government, and retain their ground. This implies character--to plan, perseverance to carry out the plans, and the power of governing. East, West, in India, or in America, the results are the same. And when the question is, will this race retain 283 286 its supremacy in this land, the answer must be found in the peculiar character of this race--the Anglo-Saxon.

We are far less imaginative than the races around us, and, of consequence, far less impulsive. That fiery eloquence which is found in the Welsh and in the Irish, and those picture-words which make the Scotch language so fascinating, we know nothing about. Even the tragedies of Shakespeare are calm, sober, strong utterances in pure English, compared with the every-day language of the Highlander. The Celtic people love to follow leaders in politics, priests in religion, and to be superstitious, while we want to be self-reliant, self-asserting, and have individuality, in every possible way. The French are mercurial. They are more lively, more impulsively eloquent, more easily excited to enthusiasm, and more successful in matters of taste. Educate the French mind thoroughly, and it becomes a wonder in 284 287 metaphysics, mighty in abstract speculations, but wholly unpractical . The Anglo-Saxon says, "Bring on your theories; but cui bono --what's the use?" Then he calmly thinks and balances matters, and lets the judgment come in, cool and sober. He puts his imagination in abeyance. He has his eye intently fixed on what is practical. Others may have more dash, but he has pluck. In the battle of Waterloo, the Anglo-Saxon stood in solid, immovable columns, and let the French dash on him with the finest cavalry the world ever saw. The cavalry of Wellington were drawn up where they could overlook the whole battle-field, and were commanded to--do nothing but wait! There they did wait, cool, collected, calmly abiding their time. The very horses seemed to feel the occasion, and hardly champed the bit. There they waited for eight long hours, when the word "charge" came; and charge they did, and 285 288 scattered their foes like chaff. No other race would have done so. "I abide my time" is the motto of the race--persevering, and ever guided by "common sense." You will notice, too, that it is the Latin races who have, as a whole, stuck to Popery--a system that gratifies the imagination, gratifies the taste, and abounds in superstitions, as much certainly as they can swallow, let their capacity be what it may. Against all this, our race early rebelled. Long before Luther was born, our own glorious Wickliffe, the Father of our Reformation, thundered in his own country from the pulpit, and gave his wonderful translation of the New Testament to the world, as the strong pillar against which men might lean.

We complain that our Congress and our Legislatures meet and spend their time in speech-making. Why, they can't help it! It is a part of the very nature of the Saxon race, to get together, to discuss and plan, and act 286 289 together. You may trace it back to our early ancestry. Trial by jury grew out of this, and so did Parliaments. This leads us to discuss, to respect one another's opinions, whether we are in the Senate Chamber, in the town meeting, or in the little school district meeting. It leads us not only to plan, but to act together for a common object, which is for the good of all. We may add to this, it causes us to reverence and obey the laws which we ourselves have enacted, and which have proceeded from ourselves. To respect our own laws, becomes self-respect. There is a great amount of dormant will in the Saxon, and sooner or later, he makes it felt. The little boy who requested the teamster to stop, that he might ride, and, on being refused, threw himself coolly down on the track where the wheel must go over and crush him, if it did not stop, --was a true Saxon.

Now it seems to me that these umistakable, 287 290 natural endowments fit our race remarkably for colonizing the earth, for enlargement, and for governing. The one involves the other. While other races are often convulsed, --(see the twenty-two revolutions in China without a particle of progress, the violent and bloody revolutions in France, Spain, Italy, and South America, --you see that while they are unable to hope for any change for the better, except by wading in blood), --our race effects the greatest changes, amounting to a revolution in results, by means entirely peaceful. The recent disinthralment of the church-establishment in Ireland, is an example of what I mean. In all other races, when such changes are made, you expect riot, bloodshed, and anarchy, more or less. I have said, that we are the great colonizers of the earth. The French, the Spaniards, the Italians, the Irish, have never established great colonies, and managed and governed them; they are not 288 291 the races to do it. No other race would have gone to California, and to Oregon, and there created their own government so peacefully, and there waited in patience till the nation was ready to cast the folds of its flag over them, and still wait and work, till their railroad brought them to us.

The Englishman asks, "What would the Irish be in the United States as rulers? What would they be without the Anglo-Saxon? They are useful elements of society, but alone they would cut a sorry figure. If Ireland could be towed off into the middle of the Atlantic, and its northern parts emptied of its population back into Scotland, and left to manage its own affairs at its own cost, we should have a sorry specimen of what such a people would do in the way of government." It is not necessary for me to indorse or refute these sentiments; they are the words of a great and a good man. You can judge 289 292 of their correctness, and of the allowance, if any, to be made, for the English feeling. But this I may say, that it does not seem very likely to me that the Anglo-Saxon race, having founded and created this government, and having the original traits of character which they have, will ever yield this government to any other race. I plant myself there. Add to this, that God hath given us a language that seems fitted to become almost universal. Men won't ride in an ox-cart when they can go in the stage, nor in the stage when they can go in the cars, nor in a scow when they can go in a steamboat. It is found that there is no language in the world, so terse and so condensed as the English. It is becoming the language of the ocean telegraph all through Europe, and probably will be through the earth. They won't write messages in any language but the best. And what is best for the telegraph, will be the best medium by 290 293 which to convey all thought; the world cannot use any instrument but the quickest, and thus the simple wires on the poles, stretching round the world, may change the language of a world, and bring one race to be uppermost. Or, if you say they use the English language because the English Operator is so superior to any other, then the argument accumulates for the superiority of the race in handling the world.

God, in his providence, reserved the great western slope of this continent, looking off on the Pacific, till the Atlantic States had become settled, their soil much exhausted, their institutions planted and tried, their population flowing out, and carrying their habits, and schools, and churches, into the great Interior Valley, and made that great basin safe; and then he suddenly swept off the imbecile races that roamed over that slope, and annexed it to our inheritance. It was a 291 294 new world, having a new climate, a new soil, new and unfailing mines, forests that over whelmed the spectator with awe, fertility scarcely equalled in the annals of the world, and peopled with the most energetic men that could be culled from the civilized world, our own people vastly preponderating.

And what are the plans of Infinite Wisdom in all this? I believe, to give us an opportunity to work out a higher civilization, more and better means of educational development, a nobler exposition of human capabilities, and a loftier type of spiritual Christianity. I believe that vast slope, so rich in mineral, agricultural, and manufacturing wealth, so little that is wasteful in climate, is put into the hands of men who will never do what is mean, never settle down into sloth, never refuse to meet responsibilities, and never be satisfied with a meagre development. I believe, too, that God has pity for other 292 295 portions of his great family, and is bringing here, by thousands, and most likely by millions, that race who must be, from their past, life-long minors, intrusted to our care, making us responsible for their receiving kind treatment, careful training, and, above all, the Gospel of His mercy. What shall we do with the Chinese? is said to be the great problem of this generation. I answer, it is a problem we cannot solve, nor are we called to do it. God is sending them here, and we cannot stop the stream. Their industry will add immensely and rapidly to our wealth; they will have their idol temples through California, in New York, most likely in Boston, and very likely in our villages; that we cannot help. If they are to let us, by treaty, build churches and enjoy our religion in China, we must allow them to enjoy their idolatry here. And no one can certainly say that this new element will not change the centre of power in the world.

But won't the Chinese be abused, outraged, and almost reduced to slavery here? I answer, no. We have Associations to protect the dumb beast from cruelty, and, if necessary, we shall organize similar associations to protect the Chinaman. Cruelty and barbarism will not be tolerated at this day; the press will make the groans of the distressed ring through the land.

You will see, now, why I look upon the Pacific slope as so important. Our gold is there! Our silver is there! Commerce is making herself a great place there! Noble men and beautiful children are there! Multitudes are gathering there! Free schools are there! Colleges are being planted there! And a great future must be there!

I stand on the heights of the Nevadas, and I look off over mountain and valley, till I see the blue waters of the Pacific, and I see centuries crowding into single years, and I 294 297 see showers of mercy, which have hung up in the dry air, descending upon that wonderful region. "Tyrants! in vain ye trace the wizard ring,In vain ye limit mind's unwearied spring.What! can ye lull the winge´d winds asleep,Arrest the rolling world, or chain the deep?No! the wild wave contemns your sceptred hand;It rolled not back when Canute gave command."

From the place where the sun rises, have our race been travelling, towards where the sun sets, to the present time. Every generation has seen "Westward the star of empire take its way,"

till that star can no longer guide the poor wanderers farther. In that long march of ages, what cities and nations have halted long enough to grow, and mature, and die! what graves have belted the earth! But the West is found, and the Star pauses. Seventy-five years ago, probably before any one of my readers was born, 1794, there lived a clergyman in one of 295 298 the smallest parishes in Connecticut. While in this position he wrote a poem. He was afterwards known as Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College. It would seem as if he must almost have been a prophet, and seen what we see, when he penned the following lines:-- "All hail, thou western world! by Heaven designedTh' example bright, to renovate mankind.Soon shall thy sons across the main land roam,And claim on far Pacific's shore their home;Their rule, religion, manners, arts, convey,And spread their freedom to the Asian sea.Where erst six thousand suns have rolled the yearO'er plains of slaughter, and o'er wilds of fear,Towns, cities, fanes, shall lift their towery pride;The village bloom on every streamlet's side;Proud Commerce' mole the western surges lave;The long, white spire lie imaged on the wave;O'er morn's pellucid main expand their sails,And the starred ensign court the Korean gales.Then nobler thoughts shall savage trains inform,Then barbarous passions cease the heart to storm:No more the captive circling flames devour;Through the war path the Indian creep no more;No midnight scout the slumbering village fire,Nor the scalped infant stain his gasping sire;But peace and truth illume the twilight mind,The Gospel's sunshine, and the purpose kind.

Where marshes teemed with death shall meads unfold;Untrodden cliffs resign their stores of gold;The dance refined on Albion's margin move,And her lone bowers rehearse the tale of love.Where slept perennial night, shall Science rise,And new-born Oxfords cheer the evening skies;Miltonic strains the Mexic hills prolong,And Louis murmur to Sicilian song.Then to new climes the bliss shall trace its way,And Tartar deserts hail the rising day;From the long torpor startled China wake,Her chains of misery roused Peruvia break;Man link to man, with bosom bosom twine,And one great bond the house of Adam join;The sacred promise full completion know,And peace and piety the world o'erflow." *

There have been attempts made to keep our foreign population separate, --to have schools in German, and churches in German; and in the great settlements of Pennsylvania this has 297 300 been done; but the railroads that have been pushed through that State, are letting in the English language, and in a very few years nothing but English will be spoken. It is inevitable.

Our nation is a universal solvent. Put the children of a dozen nations into our free school, and they will all come out Americans. And when I see the Germans in Hartford and New York setting up and demanding German schools, it does not worry me in the least, for I know it cannot come to anything. Those who enjoy our privileges and breathe our air, must become Americanized. They cannot help it; and that for a strong reason, viz., that the American character impresses itself upon whatever it touches . It is strong, intelligent, active, direct, practical, and is everywhere a power. I assert that it is not boasting, but a simple truth, to say, there is no character on earth so certain to impress itself on the world, as the American.

Thrown into a war, in 1860, with a population of only thirty-one millions, with no Army and no Navy, the free States, in four years, put one and a half million of armed men in the field, fought two hundred and twenty-five battles, raised the navy up to six hundred and eighty-four vessels and fifty-one thousand men; invented the Monitor, that nondescript power; laid the nation under a terrible debt, and came out of the war victorious, richer in men and in property than when we began; and to-day are a power in the earth, at least fifty fold greater than ever before.

Despotism has learned that there is no people so powerful as a free, intelligent people, who make their own laws, create their own institutions, and, if necessary, fight for them. Mind you, eighty per cent. of all who were in our armies were native-born Americans. At this hour, England congratulates herself that she is emancipating her Catholic Ireland noiselessly 299 302 and without blood. I may safely ask if she ever could or would have done it, had there not gone over the water an influence from this country, which she is quick to feel and slow to acknowledge? Even Napoleon, at this hour, feels the air of this free country, and is trying to loosen the ropes by which he has held the elephant, which he is afraid to hold and afraid to let go. Other nations do and must cut one and another rope, and let the ship of State swing and ride easier, or she will blow up.

The Chinese must and will learn our language, gradually adopt our dress and customs, and when he reads our Bible, and learns our religion, in laying aside his own language it will be comparatively easy to drop his idolatry, and become a Christian believer. In two Sabbath Schools, I have seen, on an average, a hundred Chinamen in each, delighted to learn to read in English, and having the Bible for their reading-book. The force, the cool energy, and 300 303 the persistent power of the American character, is something which makes a deep impression upon weaker races.

If, then, I am told, as I am almost every day, that this conglomerate mass, made up of Anglo-Saxons, Europeans, Africans, Chinamen, and a sprinkling of all nations, is hereafter to cement into a sort of pudding-stone race, I reply, it may be so, but I do not believe it. God has given this continent to the strongest race on earth, and to the freest and best educated part of that race, and I do not believe he is going to let it drop out of hands that can handle the globe, and put it into hands that are hands without educated brains.

It is putting our government, and our civilization, and our Educational Institutions, and our Protestant religion, to a test more severe than was ever put upon a people. England, the old hive, is full, and there can 301 304 be no such influx of foreign elements there; but here they come, and will come--to be scattered over a vast territory, to be instructed in human rights, and human responsibilities, and, be the risk great or small, hanging over us like an avalanche, threatening to fall on us and grind us to powder, or hanging over us like a cloud, to be disolved in fruitful showers to gladden every part of the land, --be it the chest into which the giant is to be pressed, and the lid shut down, and the chest thrown into the sea, or be it the treasure-box, out of which uncounted blessings will flow, --we must accept it, and feel, that for wise and good purposes, God has opened the door of hope to other portions of his family, and is sending them here to share our inheritance, and to be enlightened and blessed by our sympathy and kindness.

You now see why I have attached so much 302 305 importance to the slope west of the Rocky Mountains. On that slope hangs the future of this country ! Heretofore we have said that the Great Valley of the Mississippi is to contain the numerical population of the country, and guide its destiny; and so it would, had it not been that the whole thing is altered by settling California, and bringing the ocean Isles, and China, and Japan, and all the East to our very door, and had it not been that the swarming, teeming population of those countries have found out that here is food, and here labor is needed, and will be rewarded, and hence they are to flow in, like the waves of the Pacific, unceasingly, till the demands for labor are satisfied; this is inevitable. I have seen single steamers come into San Francisco, with from twelve hundred to fourteen hundred Chinamen on board, --once a fortnight each; and hereafter there must arrive two such ship-loads weekly, 303 306 to meet the engagements already made. Thus the Golden Gate has become the gate-way of a living stream of humanity, in the form of a half-civilized heathenism. We have now to learn--God is forcing it upon us--that they, as well as we, are a part of God's family, and must be cared for accordingly. They may seem like the two barley loaves that tumbled into the camp of the Midianites; they may be for our food or for our ruin. And who, at this hour, tries to cast the horoscope of his country, without taking this new element into the account, will make a terrible mistake.

And here comes in a thought that I deem of great importance, and that is, the destiny of the human race is every day becoming more and more closely linked together . A few days since, and we talked of the Sandwich Islands as a far-off people; now they are our next-door neighbors, and we hardly know whether to 304 307 think of them as Americans or as Foreigners. The eighty thousand English and Americans in Paris cannot be forgotten in the plans and measures of the French Government.

Oceans and mountains were made to keep nations apart, so long as the world knew no power but the brute power of war; but since the Prince of Peace hath created such facilities for travel, that, practically, there "is no more sea," and the everlasting mountains have bowed before his chariot, and the nations are poured into each other as water, the whole human family are to work out the same destiny and have a like inheritance. Everything points that way. Everything works that way. I look upon the generation now living, and soon to live, as called upon to decide questions wide as the earth, and to solve problems that will affect the whole human family. Whether we will, or no, we are linked in with all the rest, and we cannot rise without lifting them up with us. It 305 308 means something to live now--far more than ever before.

I must add, too, that the world is rushing on its own destiny with a rapidity never before known. The earth is becoming smaller, and time is becoming longer. A month now is a year, compared with a century ago. The man who builds his hopes for the elevation of his race on science, sees science advancing as never before. The man who looks to politics and human governments to create a millennium on earth, sees the principles of human rights steadily marching on, and threatening shortly to tread tyranny under foot. The man who looks to education to renovate the world, sees free schools everywhere spreading, and Colleges endowed most richly, and springing up like mushrooms. And the man who looks to the Bible and the Church of God to usher in the day of "good will to men," and the day of God's glory, sees that everything there is 306 309 advancing; that three fourths of the population of this country are under the dominant influence of the chief Protestant churches; that the largest increase of Christianity in the world, during the present century, has been in the United States; that every church reaches a population about four times as large as its membership; that the increase of our church members, notwithstanding the great influx of foreign and Papal population, has greatly outrun the increase of the people; that in 1800, with a population of about five million, the church members were three hundred and fifty thousand; while in 1860, with a population of thirty-one million four hundred and forty thousand, we had over five million church members, i. e., the ratio of professed Christians to the population was one to fifteen in 1800, while in 1860 it was one to six. We may add, the vast preponderance of talent, skill, enterprise, wealth, and manhood of the nation 307 310 is under the direct influence of the Gospel of Christ.

The church Edifices in this country in 1860 amounted to fifty-four thousand, at a value of one hundred and seventy-one million dollars, and the number had increased fifty per cent. in the ten years preceding that. The edifices averaged, for the Methodist, two thousand dollars each church; the Baptists, one thousand seven hundred dollars each; the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, five thousand five hundred dollars each; and the Roman Catholics, three thousand seven hundred and ninety-five dollars. Between 1860 and 1866, the contributions of the Protestants in this country, for benevolence, were two million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars annually; in 1866, over five million dollars; and the sums given to Colleges and schools of a high grade, have been over a million a year for the last eight years. And all this relying on the voluntary principle, amid the burdens of a great war.

Now then, kind Reader, if I fail to make the right impression on you during the few minutes that remain before I close, I have lost the great object of these pages.

I believe this nation has a mighty destiny before it; that the tide of time rushes as never before; that our dangers and our responsibilities are inconceivably great; that the Gospel, in its power and purity, going to the heart and guiding the conscience, and controlling the passions, and bringing out the man to individual responsibility to God, is the great power on which we are to rely. The Church of God is called upon for money, for labor, for thought, for faith, and for love. We ought to see that every child in the land is in the Sabbath School; --one school in every neighborhood; that the Home Missionary is all over the land, treading every mountain, visiting every glen, on the banks of every river, preaching Christ, planting churches, and lifting up humanity. We ought 309 312 to see that there are free schools everywhere, as free as the air we breathe, and Colleges to educate and prepare the mind to act in clear light, with expanded views, and with noble ends. We must cast up and "prepare a highway for our God," and then occupy that highway.

You will say, perhaps, that all this is calling for money, money, to flow like water! Truly it is! Truly it is! But can you travel fast, on land or on water, without spending money? Can you live at this day without spending money? Would you go back to the days of the spinning wheel, and saddle and pillion, because you could live cheap? Why, there is not a man among us, who may not be, and if true to himself, will not be, older at fifty, than Methuselah was at nine hundred and fifty years. You tell me I lived fast during my journey to California; truly I did. I travelled fast, saw fast, made friends fast, 310 313 and lived longer in two months than during any other period of two years of my life. We are all living at the same rate. It would once have cost me five years to obtain the information contained in these pages. The Church is living centuries in a generation, and what matters it, if she is called upon to give her labors and money in proportion?

I want my generation, and I want the generation coming after me, to rise up in views, and in heart, in proportion to their opportunities and responsibilities. To be a Christian in this country now, is to be lifted up to fly with the angel that hath the everlasting Gospel to preach to every creature. I had rather live with my generation now, than to live the life of Methuselah.

O my country! the names of thy great sons will hang over thee like so many bright stars; the great spirit of our fathers lives, and will live, and the Sun of Righteousness himself is 311 314 rising on thee with warmer and warmer beams. God's great plans move on, and the roar of the ocean, and the stern silence of the flinty mountain, are waiting at His feet. Those plans, like the century plant, are now unfolding, in their beauty and in their richness. We have bled for thee, O my country, and we will now pray and labor for thee, and we will raise up sons and daughters worthy of our fathers, and worthy the inheritance which they have left us. Over all the land their spirit lives! "The Pilgrim spirit has not fled;It walks in noon's bright light,And it watches the bedOf our glorious dead,With the holy stars by night!And it watches the bedOf the brave who have bled,And shall guard this wide-spread shore,Till the waves of the bayWhere the Mayflower lay,Shall foam and freeze no more!"