Part 7 (1/2)

There were many Jews in San Francisco, but none in the mines;--they alone of all the nations gathered in California kept to their ordinary occupations, chiefly the selling of clothes, and never looked for gold.

Even their dress did not change. ”They are,” writes a Pioneer, ”exactly the same unwashed-looking, s...o...b..ry, slipshod individuals that one sees in every seaport town.” But the Jew prospered, and was a good citizen.

Another Pioneer, who could look beneath the surface, said, ”The Jew does honor to his name here. The pressure which elsewhere bows him to the earth is removed.”[32]

The variety and mixture of races in California were without precedent, and San Francisco especially prided itself upon the barbaric aspect of its streets. Perhaps the Chinese were the most striking figures. The low-caste Chinamen wore full jackets and breeches of blue calico, and on their heads a huge wicker-work hat that would have made a good family clothes-basket.

The aristocratic Chinaman displayed a jacket of gay-colored silk, yellow satin breeches, a scarlet skull-cap with a gold k.n.o.b on top, and, in cold weather, a short coat of Astrakhan fur.

There was, of course, a Chinese quarter, and a district known as little Chili, where South Americans of every country could be found, with a mixture of Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands, and negroes from the South Seas. In July, 1850, there arrived a s.h.i.+p-load of Hungarian exiles, and somewhat later a company of Bayonnais from the south of France, the men wild and excitable in appearance, the women dark-skinned, large-eyed, and graceful in their movements.

There was a Spanish quarter where, as Bret Harte said, ”three centuries of quaint customs, speech and dress were still preserved; where the proverbs of Sancho Panza were still spoken in the language of Cervantes, and the high-flown allusions of the La Manchian knight still a part of the Spanish Californian hidalgo's dream.”

The Spanish women were usually attended by Indian girls, and their dress was coquettish and becoming. Their petticoats, short enough to display a well-turned ankle, were richly laced and embroidered, and striped and flounced with gaudy colors, of which scarlet was the most common. Their tresses fell in luxuriant plaits down their backs; and, in all the little accessories of dress, such as earrings, and necklaces, their costume was very rich. Its chief feature, the _reboso_, was a sort of scarf, like the mantilla of old Spain. This was sometimes twined around the waist and shoulders, and at other times hung in pretty festoons about the figure.

It was only in respect to their diversions that the Spanish had any influence upon the Americans. The gambling houses and theatres were largely in Spanish hands at first, and the _fandango_ was the national amus.e.m.e.nt in which the American miners soon learned to join.[33]

And yet the fundamental gravity of the Spanish nature, a gravity which is epitomized and immortally fixed in the famous portrait of Admiral Pareja by Velasquez, was as marked in California as at home. It is thus that Bret Harte describes Don Jose Sepulvida, the Knight Errant of the Foot-Hills: ”The fading glow of the western sky through the deep, embrasured windows lit up his rapt and meditative face. He was a young man of apparently twenty-five, with a colorless, satin complexion, dark eyes, alternating between melancholy and restless energy, a narrow, high forehead, long straight hair, and a lightly pencilled mustache.”

One is struck by the resemblance between Don Jose Sepulvida, and Culpeper Starbottle, the Colonel's nephew, whose tragic death the Reader will remember. Bret Harte thus depicts him: ”The face was not an unprepossessing one, albeit a trifle too thin and lank and bilious to be altogether pleasant. The cheek-bones were prominent, and the black eyes sunken in their orbits. Straight black hair fell slantwise off a high but narrow forehead, and swept part of a hollow cheek. A long, black mustache followed the perpendicular curves of his mouth. It was on the whole a serious, even quixotic face, but at times it was relieved by a rare smile of such tender and even pathetic sweetness, that Miss Jo is reported to have said that, if it would only last through the ceremony, she would have married the possessor on the spot. 'I once told him so,' added that shameless young woman; 'but the man instantly fell into a settled melancholy, and has not laughed since.'”[34]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MINERS' BALL

A. Castaigne, del.]

There were, in fact, many things in common between the Southerner and the Spaniard. They lived in similar climates, and the fundamental ideas of their respective communities were very much the same. The Southerner was almost as deeply imbued as the Spaniard with extreme, aristocratic notions of government and society; and he, like the Spaniard, was conservative, religious, dignified, courteous, chivalrous to women, brave, narrow-minded and indolent.

In _The Secret of Sobriente's Well_, this resemblance suddenly occurs to Larry Hawkins, who, in describing to Colonel Wilson, from Virginia, the character of his Spanish predecessor, the former owner of the _posada_ in which the Colonel lived, said: ”He was that kind o' fool that he took no stock in mining. When the boys were whoopin' up the place and finding the color everywhere, he was either ridin' round lookin' up the wild horses he owned, or sittin' with two or three lazy peons and Injuns that was fed and looked after by the priests. Gos.h.!.+ Now I think of it, it was mighty like you when you first kem here with your n.i.g.g.e.rs. That's curous, too, ain't it?”

The hospitality of the Spanish Californian was boundless. ”There is no need of an orphan asylum in California,” wrote the American Alcalde at Monterey. ”The question is not who shall be burdened with the care of an orphan, but who shall have the privilege of rearing it. An industrious man of rather limited means applied to me to-day for the care of _six_ orphan children. He had fifteen of his own;” and when the Alcalde questioned the prudence of his offer, the Spaniard replied, ”The hen that has twenty chickens scratches no harder than the hen that has one.”

A Pioneer, speaking from his own experience, said: ”If you are sick there is nothing which sympathy can divine which is not done for you. This is as true of the lady whose hand has only figured her embroidery or swept her guitar, as of the cottage-girl wringing from her laundry the foam of the mountain stream; and all this from the heart!”[35]

Generosity and pride are Spanish traits. ”The worst and weakest of them,”

remarks an English Pioneer, ”has that indefinable something about him that lifts so immeasurably the beggar of Murillo above the beggar of Hogarth.”[36] The Reader will remember how cheerfully and punctiliously Don Jose Sepulvida paid the wagers of his friend and servant, Bucking Bob.

A gambling debt was regarded by the Spaniards in so sacred a light that if he who incurred it was unable to pay, then, for the honor of the family, any relative, a G.o.dfather, or even one who had the misfortune to be connected by marriage with the debtor, was bound to discharge the obligation. Some Americans basely took advantage of this sentiment; and, in one case, an old Spanish lady was deprived of a vineyard, her only means of support, in order to preserve the reputation of a scapegrace nephew who had lost to an American at faro a greater sum than he possessed.

Some convenient and becoming articles of Spanish dress were adopted by the Americans, notably the sombrero and the serape, or horseman's cloak.

Jack Hamlin, as the Reader will remember, sometimes went a little further.

Thus, when he started on his search for the Sappho of Green Springs, he ”modified his usual correct conventional attire by a tasteful combination of a roquero's costume, and in loose white bullion-fringed trousers, red sash, jacket and sombrero, looked infinitely more das.h.i.+ng and picturesque than his original.”

The profuse wearing of jewelry, even by men, was another foreign fas.h.i.+on which Americans adopted in the early years; so much so, in fact, that to appear in a plain and unadorned state was to be conspicuous. The jewelry thus worn was not of the conventional kind, but a sort of miner's jewelry, significant of the place and time. Ornaments were made from the gold in its native state by soldering into one ma.s.s many small nuggets, without any polish or other embellishment. Everybody carried a gold watch, and watch-chains were constructed upon a ma.s.sive plan, the links sometimes representing dogs in pursuit of deer, horses at full speed, birds in the act of flight, or serpents coiled and hissing. Scarf-pins were made from lumps of gold retaining their natural form and mixed with quartz, rose-colored, blue-gray, or white, according to the rock from which they were taken. The big ”specimen ring” worn by the hero of _A Night on the Divide_ was an example.

Some Americans adhered to their usual dress which, in the Eastern States, was a sober suit of black; but usually the Pioneers discarded all conventional clothes, and appeared in a rough and picturesque costume much like that of a stage pirate. Indeed, it was impossible for any man in '49 to make his dress sufficiently bizarre to attract attention. The prevailing fas.h.i.+on included a red or blue flannel s.h.i.+rt, a ”wide-awake”

hat of every conceivable shape and color, trousers stuffed into a huge pair of boots coming up above the knee, and a belt decorated with pistols and knives. More than one Pioneer landed in San Francisco with a rifle slung on his back, a sword-cane in his hand, two six-shooters and a bowie-knife in his belt, and a couple of small pistols protruding from his waistcoat pockets.

In the rainy season of '49, long boots were so scarce, and so desirable on account of the mud, that they sold for forty dollars a pair in San Francisco, and higher yet in Stockton. Learning of this, Eastern merchants flooded the market with top-boots a year later; but by that time the streets had been planked, the miner's costume was pa.s.sing out of fas.h.i.+on, and long boots were no longer in demand. These changes were greatly regretted by unconventional Pioneers, and even so early as 1850 they were lamenting ”the good old times,”--just one year back,--before the tailor and the barber were abroad in the land.

Local celebrations were marked by more color and display than are usually indulged in by Americans. In 1851, on Was.h.i.+ngton's Birthday, there was a procession in San Francisco headed by the Mayor in a barouche drawn by four white horses. Next came the fire engines of the city, each with a team of eight gray horses, and followed by a long train of firemen in white s.h.i.+rts and black trousers. Then came a company of teamsters mounted on their draught horses, and carrying gay banners; and finally a delegation of Chinamen, preceded by a Chinese band and bearing aloft a huge flag of yellow silk.

Hors.e.m.e.n, more or less intoxicated, and shouting like wild Indians, charged up and down the streets at all hours of the day and night, to the great discomfort of many and the fatal injury of some pedestrians. ”On Sundays especially, one would imagine,” a local newspaper remarks, ”that a horde of Cossacks or Tartars had taken possession of the city.”