The Fantastic City

The grand social events of a season of the fifties were the Apollo Balls. These were subscription parties given in Apollo Hall in Pacific Street, since then part of the notorious Barbary Coast, and even then a far from select neighborhood. But in it was the only hall spacious enough for a large ball, so to Pacific Street we flocked in hacks and buses, or on foot across the Plaza. Apollo Hall was a bare loft with unfinished rafters which were hung with bunting for our dances. Wooden benches were the only seats, but they supported the wealth and fashion of San Francisco, and many handsome gowns.

At one of the Apollos, Lucy Gwin made a memorable début. She was the spirited daughter of Senator William Gwin, one of the promoters of the Pony Express. In time she became the very stately dowager, Mrs. Evan Coleman. We were all assembled that evening when music sounded for the first dance, a redowa. Suddenly a couple swooped down the room, in the dance, turned and rushed back again at a breakneck speed. It was Lucy Gwin making her début, assisted by Billy Botts. He was a small man, and Lucy Gwin towered above him, while her crinolines nearly hid him from view. But he kept the pace, and emerged triumphant. He was the best 'fancy dancer' in society, and his speed in the redowa was terrific. He would race with high steps down the length of a room, pause for the turn with one foot pointed, and then race back again. Usually his partner was a mere accessory to the performance.

This irrepressible William, son of Governor Botts of Virginia, was a clerk in the Custom House, where so many young Southerners of limited means were employed that it was known as the 'Virginia Poor House.' Harry Wise, whose 'Uncle Henry' was another one-time Governor of Virginia, was one of them. His brother Tully was law partner of John C. Calhoun's son, and these three were among popular bachelors of the Apollo, who, all considered, were a cosmopolitan band.

Romano Bernardo Sanches was a dark young Spaniard from Florida. Robert Johnson was a son of the Swedish Consul. Henri Tricou was French; Emil Justh, a Hungarian. Alfred Goddefroy, a German, was the partner of a young Englishman, Willy Sillem, in a lumber shipping business. After the eccentric Henry Meiggs, builder of Meiggs's Wharf, exiled himself to Chile, Willy Sillem sailed down after him to collect a bill due the firm and returned, not only with the money but with a bride, the
niece of Henry Meiggs.

A great beau was Charley Fairfax, of Virginia, 'the Baron' to all his friends, since he actually was heir to the title in England, although the family had lived for generations in America. He was a clerk in the Supreme Court at Sacramento, but commuted to San Francisco weekly or oftener, and was one of the early members of the Pacific Club, where his wit and good-fellowship made him a favorite.

One of my father's favorite stories was of an encounter with the Baron at the Club one afternoon just before the Civil War. Father's title of Colonel, I may explain, was one of those synthetic military titles so often bestowed in the South, probably because, with his tall, soldierly figure and gallant manners, he suggested a Virginia Colonel. At any rate, he was 'Colonel' until his death, and the appellation sometimes misled acquaintances to mistake him for a Southerner. On the afternoon in question, he found himself one of a group of Southern gentlemen, including Charley Fairfax, who fell into discussion of differences between the North and South. The Baron delivered a scathing denunciation of the North and Northerners while Father listened with detached amusement. In a pause the speaker turned to Father. 'You are from the South, of course, Colonel', he said, to reassure himself.

Father considered. 'Why, yes,' he answered finally, and excoriations continued. But once more, vaguely uncertain, the Baron paused. 'By the way, what part of the South are you from, Colonel?' he inquired.

'Why, I'm from the southern part of Connecticut,' Father replied mildly, and the meeting adjourned without formality.

Our Beau Brummel was George T. Marye, who came out from Oxford with the dress and ways of Mayfair, and always wore gloves on the street, pale lemon-color kid, with clothes that could have come only from Bond Street. Sunday mornings he made an impressive progress down the aisle of Trinity Church to his pew, faultlessly attired, his pot hat held a little high in a gloved hand. He was very well liked, and so, in later times, was his son, George T. Marye, Jr., who was Ambassador to Russia before the Great War.

Judge A. C. Monson, who came out from New York for several long visits, was another glass of masculine fashion. He wore his hair, as did my husband, in the English effect of a part extending from the forehead to the nape of the neck. The hair was brushed forward from the back, and down on either side in front, to meet in a ridge above the ears. 'Dundrearys' were the usual accompaniment of this effect. They were the extraordinary development of side-burns into long, flowing side-whiskers, which took their name from E. A. Sothern's rôle of Lord Dundreary in an English comedy. Judge Monson never pronounced the letter 'R.' He said he couldn't, but the fops of London were then deliberately ignoring it for some reason I never knew, and I fancy Judge Monson merely emulated them when he spoke of 'Wushing about Pawis while he was abwoad.'

Of the Apollo beaux who founded families still prominent in California were Edward Pringle, of South Carolina, William and Pepe Barron, Pelham Ames, of Boston, William T. Wallace, and J. B. Crockett; and little Joe Thompson, 'Spanish Joe,' whose high ambition it was to be mistaken for a Spaniard. He studied Spanish assiduously until he had mastered language and mannerisms, and spoke English with an accent.

As early as these years of the eighteen-fifties there were children of Spanish-American marriages, and the son of an American father married to a Spanish señorita would be called 'Don' in the Spanish manner. Such hybrid effects in nomenclature as Don Abel Stearns, Don Daniel Gibb, Don Abel Guy, and Don José Thompson were not unusual. But by the time a scion of the Ashe family married a granddaughter of Don Bolado, the custom had long been discontinued.

The prettiest woman at the Apollo dances was young Mrs. Baldwin, wife of Captain Charles Baldwin, of the Navy. She had the wax-doll prettiness so much admired then, with golden hair worn in short curls all over her head. Mrs. Thomas Holt was a beauty of the same type, who as Addie Smith had been a belle in Washington, sharing laurels with her friend, Addie Cutts, who married the 'Little Giant,' Stephen A. Douglas.

In the same set were the A. P. Crittendens, at whose home in Taylor Street we sometimes dined with no presentiment that our host would one day be the victim of a sensational murder. He was of the Kentucky Crittendens, a lawyer and at the time of his death one of the leaders of the California bar. I've forgotten preliminary details to the murder. Possibly Mr. Crittenden had met Mrs. Fair, the lady who killed him, over some legal business. She chose an effective moment to end their friendship. Mrs. Crittenden had been visiting in Washington and her husband had crossed the bay to meet her at the railroad terminus in Oakland. Laura D. Fair (no connection of Senator Fair) crossed on the same ferry-boat, saw him greet Mrs. Crittenden, and followed them to the deck of the boat returning to San Francisco. While they sat talking together on the open deck, she suddenly stepped before them and shot Mr. Crittenden dead. News of the murder was called through the streets, and not since the Broderick-Terry duel back in '59 had the city been so stirred. It was in 1870. The trial was a cause célèbre which seemed to be all the more shocking when Laura D. Fair was sentenced to be hanged. However, a new trial was granted, and this time she was acquitted on the ground of temporary insanity. I think no one was sorry, although none felt sympathy for Mrs. Fair, who was neither very young nor very beautiful as a really successful murderess should be. But the thought of hanging a woman was too dreadful. I believe it had never been done in California.

In the mountains above Napa Valley were hot sulphur springs long known to the Spanish Californians. Early in the fifties an enterprising American built a hotel near them and gave it the name of the fashionable old Virginia resort, White Sulphur Springs. It was the resort of San Francisco's fashionables for many years.

To escape the summer trade winds and blowing dust of the city, we went to the Springs for a visit late in our first San Francisco summer. A charming place, but a truly dreadful day's journey to attain. We traveled by land and water from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M., seated upright on hard seats all of the way. The Benicia boat first took us up the bay to Mare Island, where we changed to a little river boat for the trip up the Napa River; a yellow, winding stream between flat banks. At the straggling little town of Napa, we found a four-horse stage-coach to convey us to the Springs. It was a long, hot, dusty ride that ended in a flourish in front of a cool, white hotel, where ladies in crisp cool muslims and gentlemen in fresh linen watched our arrival. We were too tired to care.

The hotel was a low, white building with long piazzas, set among tall trees in a wooded gorge of the mountains. A little stream with fern-covered banks flowed through the gorge, spanned by rustic bridges. Here and there were white spring-houses, arbors built over the springs and covered with vines. Shady paths wound over the mountain-side, and if one followed them to a summit, the valley lay below, spreading to the bay and distant hills. It was wild, beautiful country and gave me a glimpse of California's beauty that the city's sand hills had not suggested.

The second evening after our arrival, we were among crisp, cool spectators when dusty travelers alighted from the stage. Among them was a dapper little gentleman who turned to assist a dainty little lady following him: Captain David Farragut, of Mare Island, with Mrs. Farragut, we were told. They were a delightful little couple, devoted to one another. We became friends at once, and exchanged many visits with them until Captain Farragut was ordered East two years later. He had been sent from Washington in 1854 to establish the Navy Yard at Mare Island in San Francisco Bay.

In spite of his small, slight figure, Captain Farragut had 'presence.' Already he had lived adventurous years sailing the seven seas, and his face was weather-browned, with the look of a man who has seen many things. As a boy of eleven, he had fought in a battle of the War of 1812, midshipman on the Essex when she was engaged by a British ship off the coast of Chile; I have heard him tell of his baptism of blood — a genuine baptism. When fighting began on the Essex, he stood waiting for orders at the foot of a companionway. Suddenly a wounded man toppled down the stairs, his blood pouring over the horrified boy. Farragut staggered away, he said, ready to faint, but pulled himself together and got on deck; and presently, with men falling on every side, he became indifferent to blood and death and fought like a veteran.

In the evenings at White Sulphur, we danced in the rustic ballroom, and it was always a joy to watch Captain Farragut. He was a most meticulous dancer. Holding some tall and stately belle at arms' length, he would rhythmically rise and fall on his toes with each slow step, while they revolved in the old-fashioned waltz.

Senator and Mrs. Gwin, with dashing Miss Lucy, were there; Senator — soon to be Governor — John B. Weller with Mrs. Weller; Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Haven; and with the Farraguts and ourselves made a congenial group. We drove one day across the valley to Calistoga Hot Springs where a low, whitewashed hotel accommodated a few guests; accommodated also a rattlesnake the day we lunched there. We were enjoying fried chicken, country style, when we noticed the proprietor at the door of the dining-room, whispering to a waitress. Presently she came over to us. 'Don't be scared, folks,' she said, 'but there's a rattlesnake got in the house and they can't find it. You only got to watch out for it.' Very promptly we adjourned dinner, preferring to forgo fried chicken consumed on guard, and retired from the premises.

Often on our stage trips through the mountain country a rattlesnake would scurry across the road ahead of us. Stage-drivers said they were curious, and liked to see us go by. If one shook his rattle in the undergrowth, the stagehorses would shy and tremble with instinctive dread, for the sound itself was light and pleasant.

Soon after the White Sulphur visit, we went to Mare Island to visit the Farraguts. They had a charming home. Mrs. Farragut was a Virginian with the Southern woman's gift of hospitality. She had been Virginia Royall, of Norfolk. The Captain's first wife had likewise been a Norfolk girl, a Miss Marchant, who died after years of invalidism. Mrs. Farragut told me that before she met the Captain, she had heard stories of his devotion to the invalid wife and thought he must be the kindest man alive. They were a singularly happy married couple.

We were often visitors at the Yard after that. It was becoming a most attractive place, with lawns and flower parterres and the pretty cottage homes of the officers. Usually we made the trip up the bay on the United States surveying ship Active, which was placed at the service of navy officers. Captain Alden, afterward Admiral Alden, was in command, and lived on board with his quaint little wife, who fitted nicely into her compact home. They were generous hosts, especially so on one happy trip when San Francisco guests went to Mare Island for the wedding of Miss Alice Turner to Dr. Brown, surgeon on the Active. The bride was a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Turner. He was civil engineer at the Yard and long our friend.

The wedding-supper on this occasion was unusually elaborate, a gastronomic diversion of scalloped oysters, glazed hams, hot quail on toast, and many other delicacies. Mrs. Inge had lent her famous colored cook, who went from San Francisco to prepare it.

Wedding-guests remained overnight at various homes in the Yard, and, returning on the Active the next day, we were a merry party, quite ready to fall in with Joseph Haven's nonsense. Going up from the city, Captain Alden had entertained us at a feast of a luncheon. Returning, the Lucullan feast was repeated, with champagne for every one in unstinted measure. We were overwhelmed with all this amiable hospitality, and discussing it on deck Joseph Haven said, in a sort of reversed appreciation, 'Let's call an indignation meeting and protest!'

Some one found Bishop Kip who had officiated at the wedding, and placed him in the chair. He thought the meeting was called to pass a straight vote of thanks to Captain Alden. 'Fancy my feelings,' he said later, 'when I found myself presiding at a farce!'

Joseph Haven made a speech advising passengers to demand the return of their passage-money (there was none, of course), in view of the treatment they had received, food not fit to eat and nothing to drink! Moreover, first-cabin passengers had been obliged to mingle with the steerage on deck.

This referred to Mrs. Inge's colored cook returning to the city. Unluckily, she heard the speech and at this point burst into tears and lamentations. The farce abruptly terminated, and Joseph Haven explained for an hour to the injured lady that it was a joke and that we all had for her a most profound respect as the Number One cook of San Francisco; and Bishop Kip assured her that Joseph Haven spoke the truth before her grief was pacified. What a lot of nonsense to remember so long!

Once at Mare Island the entente cordiale was seriously strained, when H. M. S. Satellite called to permit Captain Prevost to pay his respects to Captain Farragut — at least it was strained in the mind of one young Britisher. The Satellite had brought members of the Boundary Commission from British Columbia to meet a Panama steamer at San Francisco. While she was in port, Captain Prevost desired to call on the commandant at the Navy Yard and asked us to go with him as guests on his ship.

When we reached Mare Island, an American officer stood on the wharf to welcome us, and we made the landing in small boats. A swift tide was running, dashing us with spray, and with the thought that British seamen might not understand our bay currents, the American started to call a few suggestions to the rowers. Up jumped a little middie in Her Majesty's uniform, in charge of the small craft. 'I command this boat, sir!' he barked. The Ametcan stared a moment, then, controlling a grin, he turned and walked away, and Great Britain landed her envoys without further American interference.

Distance has never discouraged Californians. In the mere matter of mileage they are probably the greatest travelers on earth. Children were sent across the continent to school and came home for holidays, and in the old days of a week to cross from coast to coast, business men would step on an overland train to attend a conference in Wall Street as lightly as a New-Yorker might have journeyed from Long Island. In the not distant future they will probably commute by airship.

We traveled less, of course, before the railroads came to California, but distance never dimmed our vivid interest in events of the world. When news of them reached us, our celebrations, a month late, were spirited and enthusiastic.

We were three weeks from any source of news of the presidential election in 1856 and the time of waiting to know results was highly exciting. Both parties celebrated with equal conviction of victory, certain, after election day, that its candidate was now President-elect of the United States. Buchanan, with Breckinridge for Vice-President, was a favorite in the Southern contingent, and General Frémont, Republican nominee, had strong support. Torch light processions of 'Buck-and-Breck' men alternated with those of Frémont supporters, and, of course, in the sporting spirit of the time, many and large were the bets made.

We were enthusiastic and vigorous about politics in those days. Men discussed them with high voices and excited gestures. Women expounded the opinions of husbands and fathers. For our political convictions, like our religion, were inherited (I am speaking of women), although the daughter of a Democrat married to a Republican would discard her father's politics to assume those of her husband — usually; not always. I have known strong-minded women to remain staunch Democrats through years of happy marriage to a Republican. But the children were raised Republicans.

It is true women did not vote. It did not occur to us to desire to vote. We never thought of women's rights, assuming, I suppose, that we had them. But we were keenly interested in elections, cheered for our candidates at torchlight parades, and did much informal electioneering. It is possible that we were effective in a way; hardly probable.

Men whose offices were on the line of march of torchlight processions gave parties for them. Politics were mixed at these affairs, and no ill-will. Often a gay crowd gathered in Dr. Ashe's office at Washington and Kearny Streets on Buck-and-Breck nights, to cheer the marchers and drink toasts in champagne.

On the day a Panama steamer was due with news of election results, business was fairly at a standstill, but no steamer arrived. The next day people went about with eyes fixed on Telegraph Hill for first sight of the signal flag. None appeared. That night Mr. and Mrs. J. W. Wallack opened a season at Maguire's Opera House in 'The Merchant of Venice.' It was to have been a brilliant première for Shylock, Wallack's great rôle, but, although the audience was gayly caparisoned and boxes overflowed with fashion, our attention was divided. Ears were alert for the sound of a shot from Telegraph Hill — the night signal of a steamer sighted. In the middle of the fifth act, it came. Without a second's hesitation, men dived for their hats and rushed out of the theater. Women rose and gathered their wraps. On the stage the actors stared at us, and then the curtain was rung down as the feminine division of the audience filed out after the men. In evening gowns and lace scarfs we made our way across Montgomery Street. Hacks and conveyances had all dashed down to the dock. The streets were filled with excited crowds gathering at newspaper offices or on their way to the wharf for first news.

At the Oriental, men had all disappeared, and women guests were gathered in the long parlor, elated and excited. As soon as the names of Buchanan and Breckinridge were shouted from the steamer's deck, couriers raced back through the streets to spread the news, and we had heard it by the time our men returned. Buck-and-Brecks spent the rest of the night celebrating. My father had voted for his old friend, General Frémont, at whose ranch in Mariposa, beyond Stockton, he had often been a guest, but true as he was to friendship and his party, I believe he had doubts of Frémont's talent for the presidency. A great soldier, he had not been brilliant as a statesman during a broken term in the Senate.

It would be too bad to give the impression that women were a mere flock of butterflies, in my youth. We were not. But since our place was in the home, we did what we could to make it attractive. Besides the pleasant duty of playing hostess, there were many tedious domestic details involved in this avocation, an extraordinary amount of sewing, for one thing. We hemmed ruffles, embroidered flounces, monogrammed household linen with thick stuffed letters, and, unless there were several servants, accomplished the family mending. Stiletto embroidery was popular, and I pierced and embroidered yards of sheer muslin for summer gowns.

But it was for no particular gift or triumph with the needle that I was asked to be judge of fancy work at the first Mechanics' Fair, in 1857. I felt important and very 'advanced' when I accepted the honor, and gravely considered the merits of lace bibs, patchwork quilts, and satin glove-cases, for medal or honorable mention.

There was great excitement over this fair. To house it, a low frame building in the form of a Maltese cross was built on Montgomery Street, where the Lick House afterward stood, the entrance midway between Post and Sutter Streets. The fair was held under the auspices of the new Mechanics' Institute, but needlework, an art gallery, and farm products were included among the exhibits. The noise of quartz mills filled the place. In Machinery Hall they pounded and ground gold and silver quartz while you watched them, the ore washed out of sluice-boxes before your eyes. Given the quartz, it was all beautifully simple and fascinated spectators watched it for hours on end.

The art gallery became a favorite evening rendezvous. After dinner we would throw on our lace or Paisley shawls and walk up from the Oriental to meet friends at the fair and watch the passing pageant from settees in the art room. Of the pictures in this first exhibition, I remember only an enormous canvas depicting the royal family of Hawaii on horseback, all of the figures, including the horses, of course, life-size. As a work of art its proportions made a profound impression, which is quite the fact and not at all an attempt at satire.

The Mechanics' Fair was repeated annually for many years in the newer Larkin Street Pavilion, and during its six weeks' season the city was filled with visitors from all over the State, and from Oregon and Nevada. Many of them made long stage-coach journeys to see the newest improvements in mine and farm machinery, as well as the latest fashions. The art gallery really looked up in later years when Virgil Williams, the friend of Robert Louis Stevenson in San Francisco, and a talented painter, interested himself in it with several other authentic artists. Toby Rosenthal's 'Constance de Beverly' was a sensation one year. He was a San Francisco boy who had achieved the Salon in Paris with his 'Elaine' — 'The dead rowed by the dumb' of Tennyson's poem. Occasionally private galleries of Nob Hill lent their treasures. There was a Bouguereau period, and we saw Millet's 'The Sower,' which was owned by the Crocker family; is still, I believe. It escaped the 1906 fire when the Crocker home was burned. There were only servants in the house, but they saved many things. The butler put 'The Sower' under his arm and walked many blocks to the home of one of his family's friends beyond the fire zone, where he left it for safe-keeping and it was returned when the excitement was over.

Our local stars were William Keith and Thomas Hill. Keith's landscapes found wider fame, and many are now owned by galleries in the Eastern States and abroad. Thomas Hill painted Yosemite from every point of vantage and was considered a great artist in that day. When Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Louise, with her husband, the Marquis of Lorne, visited San Francisco in the eighties, she spent a morning in his studio. He told me of her interest in his California landscapes and her modesty over her own talent, which was really marked. In Santa Barbara, monks of the Old Mission opened their walled garden to her and she painted its ancient beauty.

The fashionable portrait-painter of the eighteen sixties was W. S. Jewett, who 'did' many of San Francisco's beautiful women, painting them under difficulties. For he was very deaf and, if one were sitting and wished to communicate with him, it was necessary to break the pose and use pantomime.

Which reminds me of another amiable gentleman, Mr. Carolan, who grew very deaf in his old age. A friend who had known him many years before in Sacramento, where they had been neighbors, found herself, one day, sitting next to him in a Pacific Avenue car. They exchanged greetings. 'Where are you living now?' she asked. After a louder repetition of the question, he told her, 'In Scott Street near Pacific.'

'How strange that we should be neighbors again!' she exclaimed. 'I live on Pacific Avenue near Scott.' The old gentleman musingly nodded assent.

'Life is curious, isn't it?' she went on. 'It must be forty years ago that we were neighbors in Sacramento, and after so many changes, here we are neighbors again. How strange it is!'

Her old friend, bowed over the head of his gold-topped cane, kept nodding agreement. 'Yes, yes, indeed,' he answered her last remark.

There was a short pause. Presently the old gentleman looked up with a sudden access of interest. 'Where are you living now?' he asked.

Naturally there was much talk of gold, of new strikes near Grass Valley or Shasta, a new lode in this or that mine, and the ravages of hydraulic mining along the rivers; but less, really, than might be supposed. In San Francisco, men financed prospecting trips and speculated wildly in mining shares after the Stock Exchange opened, but the gold-seekers made headquarters at Sacramento. They came to San Francisco with 'dust' for the Mint or to spend a stake, but Sacramento, the terminus of the Overland Stage Line and of stage lines to the mining country, was their metropolis. An exhilarant little city it was, built up around old Sutter's Fort in a bend of the Sacramento River. There had been a devastating flood which the irrepressible pioneers turned into a sort of water carnival, floating merrily about the streets in rowboats until the waters subsided; and the cholera epidemic had been a tragic visitation. But in spite of setbacks, Sacramento flourished, and at least two of the great fortunes of California were founded there, one in a grocery store and the other in the bank established by D. O. Mills and his brother Edgar. Except for their life and activity, downtown streets were unimpressive, but in the residence district were pretty cottages and a few 'mansions.' In one of these lived the Sanger family with a sparkling, black-eyed daughter Harriet who became Mrs. George M. Pullman, of Chicago, and whose daughter was to marry the young son of a neighbor of the Sangers in Sacramento. In another mansion on July 28, 1859, Mary Anderson was born.

We were occasional visitors at the capital, and for me it was thrilling to see the Overland Stage start on its long trip to St. Joseph — never called that, but always 'St. Joe': like the sailing of an ocean liner, repeated many times, but each time with its own flourish and excitement. The six-horse coach would roll down from the stables to be drawn up before the stage office. Passengers would be packed inside, luggage at the back and on top. Perched high beside the driver would be a favored traveler, and higher still, behind the driver, Wells-Fargo's shot-gun messenger took his place. Seemingly a careless, light-hearted youth, he was picked for his courage and character to guard the treasure-box which carried papers and gold to the value of many thousands of dollars. The treasure-box would be brought out last thing from the office and stowed with the mail-bag in the 'boot' beneath the driver's feet. The stage agent would wave his hand; the driver would gather up the long reins twisted about the brake, and at a word, or touch of the whip-lash on a wheeler's flank, the horses pranced a little, then swung into their pace down the street, and so out to the road, the coach with a festive air rolling behind them.

I have sat in the coveted place beside the driver when eight horses drew us over the mountains, and their long, swinging curves down winding grades were thrilling and beautiful to watch. One lost all sense of danger, and there was always danger with the most skillful of drivers. A curve taken too widely, or a stumbling horse, and the coach toppled over, down the mountain-side. Such accidents were not rare, and hold-ups were far from uncommon occurrences. My father, who traveled much through the State, had several adventures with 'road agents.'

Usually the Wells-Fargo treasure would be all these bandits demanded. They would step out on a moonlit road with masked faces and lifted guns, to halt the stage. One would stand at the team's head covering the driver and express messenger while another covered passengers, sitting very tight inside. 'Throw out the box!' they would order. If there were no women passengers, the express messenger drew and fired, for answer, while the driver whipped up his horses, and the coach and treasure escaped in a fusillade of shots, not infrequently effective. Father was once lined up with other passengers at the side of the road and his pockets rifled. But ladies were spared. This was the chivalrous rule of highwaymen in the eighteen-fifties — a chivalry occasionally extended to men.

'I wish you boys would leave me fifty dollars,' a victim once pleaded.

'How much have you got?' the highwayman asked. 'Two hundred and fifty in gold.'

'Well, keep a hundred,' said the generous gentleman of the road. So the man counted his gold pieces and handed over one hundred and fifty dollars with grateful thanks.

The Placerville Road was the main highway over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From Sacramento to Carson and Virginia City in Nevada, it was a busy thoroughfare, and the pride of two States. For a stretch of many miles it was sprinkled daily by watering-carts replenished from tanks along the way. The surveys on which it was built had been made with difficulty and danger. Although they could not have escaped beauty, surveyors seemed to have designedly drawn the line through a panorama of enchanting vistas. The road curved among mountains to follow the edge of some cliff with a sheer drop of a thousand feet to a still lake set in the depths of forests. Donner Lake, like a fallen silver shield, far below recalled always with its name the lost Donner party snow-bound on its shore through a terrible winter of starvation and death. From snow-covered crests one looked down on green valleys over lower peaks and ranges mounting like waves, dark with pines. During the sixties, when newly discovered lodes made Virginia City an important center, the richest traffic in the world, I believe, passed over the Placerville Road. Silver from Nevada and California's gold representing many millions were transported over it to the Mint in San Francisco.

Jack and I made a trip through the mining country one summer, starting out on the Placerville Road from the stage office in Sacramento with all the flourish I had so often watched. Stage-coach traveling was full of fascination for me, and the country was magnificent, forest-covered mountains, rushing rivers, and quiet valleys with long miles of solitude; and the funny one-street mining towns where life centered in the general merchandise store by day and the hotel bar at night. We stopped over in towns when accommodations were good, but mining-camp hotels were primitive places with only the bar a perfectly well-developed detail. Meals, however, were usually excellent, and there was one touch that delighted me. While we ate at a long table in the bare dining-room, the proprietor would stand behind us waving over our heads a sort of mop made of long strips of paper on the end of a stick — to shoo the flies away. I felt like Cleopatra on her barge when it gently swayed above my head.

Angel's Camp, Red Bluff, Redding, Oroville, Nevada City, and Grass Valley were all busy towns filled with life and excitement, where beyond the inevitable 'Main Street' were scattered pretty homes.

Shasta was a thriving little metropolis two hundred miles to the north of San Francisco, where the long main street boasted some of California's first skyscrapers — brick buildings four stories high; and where shops kept scales to weigh the gold dust used for currency. The plaza was a meeting-place for miners of the country, and long pack-trains of mules were constantly arriving and departing to camps in the north, or to Yreka, another 'metropolis' far up toward the Oregon line. On the hillsides were many attractive homes, cottages with 'Hamburg embroidery' in wood, edging the eaves, and one, the Shurtleff home, that had 'come around the Horn' in sections from New York. Near it was the Daingerfield house, where the Judge's daughter married James R. Keene, afterward the 'Bear of Wall Street.' Joaquin Miller mined near Shasta, ''Twixt Redding and sweet Shasta town,' as he later phrased it in a poem. In the eighteen-sixties no one could have thought that the railroad would pass it by and leave Shasta to fade into a ghost city of the West.

Marysville was like older places. The Convent of Notre Dame, built there in the early fifties, with picturesque, galleried buildings and a walled garden overflowing with flowers, gave it a touch of the Old World. It was one of the first 'select' girls' schools in California and pupils were of all creeds. Two of those I knew were the mothers of Sibyl Sanderson and Kathleen Thompson Norris.

Sibyl Sanderson's name brings a picture of the sparkling girl I knew in her youth when she sometimes sang for her mother's friends in a voice like high, clear bells of a carillon. Her mother, Jenny Ormsby, had married Judge Sanderson, and they lived in a big white house with a cupola on Holladay's Hill at Sacramento and Laguna Streets. Sibyl was a belle in her teens, and even then shocked the family friends with her light disdain of conventions. We were still in the Victorian period when conventions were profoundly respected. Once she startled a dinner-party by announcing that she wanted to know life from its heights to its depths. Young girls were not supposed to know there were depths. She did find the heights when Paris acclaimed her and Massenet wrote his music for her. 'Thaïs' and 'Manon' were hers, and no other prima donna could sing the high notes of 'Esclarmonde.' She died while she was still young and lovely, leaving many of her costumes and stage jewels to Mary Garden, then starting her career.

Only once I heard Sibyl Sanderson sing after she found fame abroad. It was in 1903, when she came to San Francisco with the Metropolitan Grand Opera Company under Maurice Grau. The old Grand Opera House in Mission Street was en fête, and filled to the doors, for her début as Manon, and for some reason it all fell sadly flat. San Francisco was disappointed. I think it may have been that the Wagner mood, which had just descended heavily on the city, made French music, with Sibyl's exquisite art, seem trivial to an audience more or less musically unsophisticated. She had lost, too, some of the sparkle of her personality. Not long afterward she retired, a hopeless invalid, to her villa at Cannes, where she died. But this was many years after our visit to Marysville where her mother went to school.

The Marysville Convent eventually merged with Notre Dame in San José, near the Jesuit College of Santa Clara, where pupils were likewise of mixed creeds. But something of the 'genteel tradition,' that blight on American life in the eighteen-hundreds, had come around the Horn, and we soon had any number of 'select academies' of learning. Across the bay from San Francisco was 'The Alameda Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies and Gentlemen.'

From Marysville and Shasta the stage line extended northward to Oregon. During the eighteen-eighties we followed it many times in the 'coach-and-six' to Sisson's at the foot of Mount Shasta, where an old farmhouse had become an inn famed for the hunting. Two days and a night we drove though the High Sierra, much of the way along the course of the Upper Sacramento. Here it was a rushing mountain stream that dashed between cliffs or fragrant, ferny banks thick with wild azalea. The sibilant rush of its waters could be heard long before we reached it in the mountain silence. Everywhere was the wild, inspiriting beauty that still lives in Yosemite.

Pitt River was slow and deep and smooth, with dark forests on either side. A long barge ferried the stage across. Charon and the Styx always came to my mind when we reached Pitt River. It was always at dusk.

Often at night we heard the call of panthers, high and poignant like a woman's cry. At Upper Soda Springs near Sisson's, where 'Uncle Dick' Campbell had built a hotel like a boat — long and narrow with double-deck piazzas — the skin of one of these wild-cats was nailed on a wall. One spring morning, Uncle Dick had heard his little grandson scream, and rushed out to see him caught in a panther's claws, not thirty feet from the house. I saw the scars of the teeth on the small boy's throat that summer.

There still remained to stage-coach travel in the eighties the piquant hazard of an encounter with Black Bart, poet and knight of the road, a bandit of distinguished courtesy who worked always alone and in moonlight, wearing a narrow black mask across his face. He was politeness itself to passengers whose pockets he never rifled. The Wells-Fargo treasure-box was all he asked. If it was thrown out without protest, the whole affair passed off pleasantly enough for every one. Black Bart was his nom de plume, signed to poems pinned to trees along the roadside — gay verses of defiance after some successful robbery, occasionally a warning that he would pass that way again.

On moonlit nights, while the coach rolled over mountain roads of the High Sierras, the driver might turn to remark casually, 'A good night for Black Bart'; or, 'Right at that turn ahead Black Bart held the stage up last spring.' One peered into the shadows of the pines, half-hoping to see the figure of a man step out into the moonlight with uplifted gun. But I never saw Black Bart, although I have seen some of his poems, and have heard the story of his capture in San Francisco after a long, elusive career. Once too often he raided the Wells-Fargo treasure and dropped a handkerchief near the road with the broken, discarded box. On it was a laundry mark. This the Wells-Fargo detective, James Hume, traced to a San Francisco laundry, and so to its owner, a quiet, scholarly gentleman who lived in a San Francisco boarding-house. He was interested in mines, the landlady said, and often went on trips into the mountains.

Hume waited for him in his room one day and, when he returned, asked Mr. Bolton, which was the gentleman's name, if he would accompany him to a downtown office to discuss a mining deal. Mr. Bolton may have had his misgivings, but he went very readily with the stranger to discuss the deal. When they reached the entrance of the Wells-Fargo Building in Sansome Street, he stopped for an instant, but made no comment and turned in with his guide. They went to the office of one of the company's executives, and there on a table lay an axe and a broken treasure-box with its top crushed in. Mr. Bolton saw them, but gave no sign, waiting uncertainly at the door.

Hume crossed to the table and picked up a handkerchief, the one found with the box. 'Yours, I believe, Mr. Bolton,' he said.

A few seconds of silence, then Bolton made a slight gesture of surrender. 'I guess it's all up,' he answered.

'I guess it is,' the detective agreed pleasantly, and thus a notorious bandit was captured with all the quiet courtesy to which his victims were accustomed.

South of Sisson's where the first view of Castle Crags is like a sudden vision of the Alps the stage crossed Portuguese Flat and passengers invariably heard the story of the unfortunate Portuguese killed and eaten by a bear. Only his bones were found under a tree on the mesa.

'This Portuguese had been tracked home by a bear,' the driver would relate. 'She was on his heels before he could get to the house and his gun was empty. He ran and climbed that tree, and she clumb up after him. They found the branches all broken and scraped and figured she'd got him in the tree. Found his bones and his gun there at the foot of it. Yes ma'am, I knew him. Used to throw a paper out to him once a week. One day noticed them piled up at the road-side and told the folks at Slate Creek.'

It was the favorite story of Johnny Curtis, premier driver on the route, and left me always with a picture of the brief, terrible battle in a tree. Since then I've been told that bears do not climb trees after their quarry, but having treed it, wait grimly on the ground below for the inevitable, final scene. Either way the fate of the Portuguese was frightful enough.

The Sisson family had crossed the plains in a covered wagon and stopped there in Siskiyou County on the road to Oregon. Mr. Sisson was a mild little man who wore a black patch over one eye and had lost the fingers of one hand. He could tell exciting stories of Indian fights on the plains, when he would.

Many times this mild little man, who looked like a professor in some fresh-water college, had made the difficult ascent of Shasta, looming like a vast white dream-mountain above the valley. For he was an intrepid guide and hunter who knew the California mountains as few other men ever did. I was glad, when the railroad came, that they gave his name to the now thriving town of Sisson.

Covered wagons still passed on the Oregon road — immigrant wagons we called them. They overflowed with tow-headed children whose hair, bleached white by the sun, looked whiter against their sun-browned faces. Long freight trains passed constantly, eight hooded wagons linked in a single train, sometimes, the train drawn by ten or twelve mules. One driver would be seated on the first wagon and another midway the length of the mule team. They came from Sacramento laden with farm implements, household furniture, and supplies of all kinds for settlers in the north.

Three times a week the stage arrived from 'down below,' with mail and dusty passengers who dined at Sisson's and freshened up before going on their way again. The stage stations served marvelous meals; rainbow trout, venison, and a delectable assortment of wild berries — white raspberries, thimbleberries, tiny wild strawberries, and huckleberries which the Indians brought in and poured from huge, cone-shaped baskets into milk-pans aligned on the piazza. The squaws stood with the heavy filled baskets on their backs, slung from a head-strap which passed across the forehead, while their men bargained. They were of the Modoc tribe and seemed to have a congenital distaste for work. Occasionally the men fished and brought baskets of trout and McCloud River salmon to the inn, but principally they sat and smoked the pipe of peace at their camp a few miles down the road.

At that, they were just as energetic as the Washoes or any other Indians I knew in Northern California. None of them belonged to noble tribes of red men. The Washoes were of Nevada, but in the summer season they straggled up about Lake Tahoe, where, in the nineties, Old Annie had a summer wigwam near the Tallac House. Summer visitors from the old hotel would walk through the pine woods to Annie's camp and bargain for her baskets. One day callers found her seated before the wigwam mourning with tears and lamentations.

'What is it, Annie? What is the trouble?' they asked.
'My son-in-law,' she wailed.
'But what has happened to him?'
'Get hung today. Reno jail,' Annie sobbed.
'Oh, poor Annie! Your poor daughter!' sympathized the visitors. 'What did he do?'

Annie calmed herself. 'Him kill my daughter,' she said simply as one stating a mere preliminary detail of tragedy.

Finer types of the South, that we called Spanish Indians, were descended from those who came with Anza and Junípero Serra from Arizona. Some of these were among colonists of New Helvetia, that lost country of California, of brief and tragic history.

General John Sutter, founder of New Helvetia, was a Swiss who came adventuring through the Golden Gate in 1839. To reach California, he had sailed with fine determination from British Columbia to the Sandwich Islands, on a trading vessel, then back again across the Pacific on another. From the Spanish Governor at Monterey he received a grant of land on Yerba Buena peninsula (San Francisco), and one in the country where Sacramento now stands. There he built Sutter's Fort and founded New Helvetia. The old adobe fort has lately been restored on its original site in a city park of Sacramento. For colonists Sutter imported Kanakas from Hawaii, Chinese coolies, and Indians from the South, who with a number of Spaniards formed a heterogeneous population that, curiously enough, lived amicably and prospered. Farms, factories, and mills were built, and the Swiss adventurer was made Alcalde of the region which he extended far to the north — so far that General Vallejo in Sonoma suggested to his friend, the Alcalde in Monterey, that this stranger was becoming a menace. But whatever menace there was soon passed, for the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, in '48, ended Sutter's reign. Just before it, he had sent to Switzerland for his family. While they were voyaging across two oceans to the home he had built for them, James Marshall, a wheelwright at the mill, found the famous piece of gold quartz that changed California's history. News of the discovery spread until the gold rush swept like a tidal wave over New Helvetia. Colonists and laborers were caught in the rush, farms and factories were deserted. The land was gashed and torn by gold-hunters and orchards were destroyed. Sutter's family arrived to scenes of desolation. It all has the cumulative quality of Greek tragedy. Sutter's wife died at the end of her long journey. A son was killed defending his property against invaders, and misfortune followed misfortune. The Alcalde, whose governorship was gone in the new American régime, sat among the ruins of New Helvetia.

Early in the fifties my father knew the General when he came to San Francisco from his ranch to file suit against the Government for land lost in the confusion of old Mexican grants in a new State. The intrepid adventurer who had built an empire of a sort and lost it, all in ten years' time, had become a broken, bewildered old man looking helplessly at the city covering acres he once had owned.

For years the Sutter case dragged through the courts while the General lived on a pension from the State. Finally he went to Washington to petition Congress for indemnity, and he died there, forgotten and forlorn. Sutter Street in San Francisco is named for him, and Sutter County, which was part of New Helvetia.

The Sutter case, among others, brought Edwin M. Stanton to San Francisco. He came from Washington in 1857 to act as United States counsel in lawsuits over Mexican land grants, and my father's knowledge of California land surveys threw them much together. Often he dined with us; a difficult guest, since he appeared to hold that women, like children, should be seen and not heard. Taciturn and grim he was, although finely intellectual. Father admired him greatly. Mother and I thought he might have been disappointed in love. Possibly he walked in the shadow of grave and tragic events to come. He was Lincoln's War Secretary and stood at the President's bedside when he died. It was this cold, ungracious man, who, looking at the dead President through a rush of tears, said the poignantly final words, 'Now he belongs to history.'

More gracious and gallant guests were some of the Spanish caballeros, Don Pio Pico, last of the Spanish Governors, Don Pablo de la Guerra, and others at whose ranchos my father had been entertained. The De la Guerras were all delightful — an old Spanish family which had come with land grants from Spain in the eighteenth century and lived like feudal barons in the South. The original De la Guerra hacienda still stands in Santa Barbara, in the heart of the city which covers part of the old De la Guerra domain. Members of the family still live in the low adobe house built around a patio with homes for several households in it. Beauty is their inheritance and descendants of the De la Guerras are among the loveliest of California women. Of one of them Gertrude Atherton wrote that she was like a slender, beautiful flagon of old Spain, filled with California wine.

Don Pablo, who was a member of the legislature in Sacramento for several years, was courtly and handsome, as were all of the Spanish dons. General Vallejo, for whom the town of Vallejo was named, was old and impoverished when I met him, but with still flashing dark eyes and a princely courtesy with his gesture of hospitality as he sat on the piazza of his old house in Sonoma surveying broad acres that were no longer his.

Colonel and Mrs. Jack Hays were friends in these early years who came from their home in Oakland to dine with us. He had been Sheriff of San Francisco in the first Vigilantes days, and in youth was a noted Texas Ranger. With his alert, wiry little figure and piercing eyes, he looked then, in his quiet middle age, quite capable of swinging into a saddle and dashing into danger. Colonel Hays had built a home in Oakland and owned many acres in the growing town across the bay. They never ceased trying to persuade us to come there to live.

'I'll tell you, Mrs. Ransome,' said the Colonel to my mother one day, 'I'll give you a block of land in Oakland if you'll build a house on it.'

'Where?' Mother asked, laughing. 'Out in the tule marshes?'

'No, ma'am. Right in the city of Oakland. I'll give you a block on Broadway.' There were then attractive homes on this new thoroughfare, but Mother remained untempted. Years afterward, we could amuse ourselves computing the fortune blithely resigned with a block on Oakland's Broadway.

Colonel Hays's sister had married Major R. P. Hammond, of the Army, one of the young West Point officers sent out to California in the early fifties, and they had a little son, born in San Francisco, who was named for his uncle, John Hays Hammond.

It must have been at the Hays home that we met Colonel Andrew Williams, and his wife, who was the mother of Bret Harte by a former marriage. They had a charming home. The Colonel was then Mayor of Oakland, a courtly gentleman of the old school from New York, who, with the still dashing ex-Texas Ranger, Colonel Hays, formed an example of contrasts we constantly encountered in this new society, vital and refreshing. Men of many sorts met on a common ground of character, intelligence, and the zest for adventure; and in common they seemed always to have that delightful, irreverent sense of humor which was as distinctively Californian as the quiet, repressive brand is of New England.

Young Francis Bret Harte was adventuring in Northern California then. We did not meet him until years later, when he was a famous author and, with his wife and children, was our neighbor in San Rafael. But this belongs to a later chapter.

In spite of the fact that we preferred our fantastic city across the bay, Oakland was a pretty place even then, with spacious houses and gardens overflowing with flowers. In the eighteen-sixties, many beautiful homes were built in the neighborhood of Lake Merritt. I remember the Kirkham mansion, en fête for the wedding of Major Kirkham's daughter, Leila, to David Boyle Blair, an Englishman, who afterward inherited a title and made her Lady Yarde-Buller.

When, on the afternoon of the wedding, we drove into the grounds and a turn in the avenue brought us to the house set among palms, we found the veranda filled with guests.

'Why is this? Is the wedding to be out of doors?' we asked.

'Oh, no,' they answered, 'but it's so dark inside you can't see your hand before your face.'

They had all trooped out the long French windows into daylight to identify each other. However, we all trooped indoors before the wedding march sounded, to be greeted by the punctilious Major in a dim twilight. It was the first daytime entertainment given in the latest New York manner of darkened rooms, with artificial light, and really rather startling in this land of glaring sunlight which made the darkness seem very thick for all the flaming gas-jets in crystal chandeliers. What with the shrouded rooms, masses of flowers everywhere, and the heavy fragrance of orange blossoms, there was an inevitable suggestion of obsequies. But it was a happy wedding, nevertheless.