It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Californian English have the old-world type. With less ingenuity than the New England Yankees, they have far more depth and solidity in their enterprise; they do not rack their brain at inventing machines to peel apples and milk cows, but they intend to tunnel through the mountains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with its waters irrigate the Californian plains. They share our British love for cash payments and good roads; they one and all set their faces against repudiation in any shape, and are strongly for what they call “rolling-up” the debt. Throughout the war they quoted paper as depreciated, not gold as risen. Indeed, there is here the same unreasoning prejudice against paper money that I met with in Nevada. After all, what can be expected of a State which still produces three-eighths of all the gold raised yearly in the world?
San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities bid fair to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands beneath the sun. New Englanders and Englishmen predominate in energy, Chinese in numbers. The French and Italians are stronger here than in any other city in the States; and the red-skinned Mexicans, who own the land, supply the market people and a small portion of the townsfolk. Australians, Polynesians, and Chilians are numerous; the Germans and Scandinavians alone are few; they prefer to go where they have already friends – to Philadelphia or Milwaukee. In this city – already a microcosm of the world – the English, British, and American are in possession – have distanced the Irish, beaten down the Chinese by force, and are destined to physically preponderate in the cross-breed, and give the tone, political and moral, to the Pacific shore. New York is Irish, Philadelphia German, Milwaukee Norwegian, Chicago Canadian, Sault de Ste Marie French; but in San Francisco – where all the foreign races are strong – none is dominant; whence the singular result that California, the most mixed in population, is also the most English of the States.
In this strange community, starting more free from the Puritan influence of New England than has hitherto done any State within the Union, it is doubtful what religion will predominate. Catholicism is “not fashionable” in America – it is the creed of the Irish, and that is enough for most Americans; so Anglicanism, its critics say, is popular as being “very proper.” Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is flourishing in California, and it seems probable that the church which gains the day in California will eventually be that of the whole Pacific.
On Montgomery Street are some of the finest buildings in all America; the “Occidental Hotel,” the “Masonic Hall,” the “Union Club,” and others. The club has only just been rebuilt after its destruction by a nitro-glycerin explosion which occurred in the express office next door. A case, of which no one knew the contents, was being lifted by two clerks, when it exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and breaking half the windows in the city. On examination it was found to be nitro-glycerin on its way to the mines.
Another accident occurred here yesterday with this same compound. A sharp report was heard on board a ship lying in the docks, and the cook was found dead, below; pieces of a flask had been driven into his heart and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was examined, and found to be common oil; but this morning, I read in the Alta a report from a chemist that traces of nitro-glycerin have been discovered by him upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands says that the ship on her way up had called at Manzanilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a merchant‘s office, emptied it of its contents, the character of which was unknown to him, and filled it with common vegetable oil.
Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerin has been the nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes they care little, but the freaks of the devilish oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in the Nevada mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself a demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and then the slightest friction will explode it – that, on the other hand, it goes off if heated. If you leave it standing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are that it undergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it explodes; and no lapse of time has on its power the smallest deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the oil will crystallize, and then its strength for harm is multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed by earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerin.
A day or two after my return from Benicia, I escaped from the city, and again went south, halting at San José, “The Garden City,” and chief town of the fertile Guadalupe district, on my way to the quicksilver mines of New Almaden, now the greatest in the world since they have beaten the Spanish mines and Idria. From San José, I drove myself to Almaden along a sun-dried valley with a fertile tawny soil, reaching the delicious mountain stream and the groves it feeds in time to join my friends at lunch in the shady hacienda. The director took me through the refining works, in which the quicksilver may be seen running in streams down gutters from the furnaces, but he was unable to go with me up the mountain to the mines from which the cinnabar comes shooting down by its weight. The superintendent engineer – a meerschaum-equipped Bavarian – and myself mounted, at the Hacienda Gate, upon our savage-looking beasts, and I found myself for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican saddle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups that I had seen used by the Utes in Denver. The riding feats of the Mexicans and the Californian boys are explained when you find that their saddle puts it out of the question that they should be thrown; but the fatigue that its size and shape cause to man and horse, when the man is a stranger to New Spain, and the horse knows that he is so, outweighs any possible advantages that it may possess. With their huge gilt spurs, attached to the stirrup, not to the boot, the double peak, and the embroidered trappings, the Mexican saddles are the perfection at once of the cumbersome and the picturesque.
Silently we half scrambled, half rode, up a break-neck path which forms a short cut to the mine, till all at once a charge of our horses at an almost perpendicular wall of rock was followed by their simultaneously commencing to kick and back toward the cliff. Springing off, we found that the girths had been slackened by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit of mountain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners and mining in French, my German not being much worse than my Bavarian‘s English.
After viewing the mines, the walls of which, composed of crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torch-glare, we worked our way through the tunnels to the topmost lode and open air.
Bidding good-by to what I could see of my German in the fog from his meerschaum, I turned to ride down by the road instead of the path. I had not gone a furlong, when, turning a corner, there burst upon me a view of the whole valley of tawny California, now richly golden in the colors of the fall. Looking from this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the Contra Costa Range before me, and Mount Hamilton towering from the plain, apart, I could discern below me the gleam of the Coyote Creek, and of the windows in the church of Santa Clara – in the distance, the mountains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo to Alameda and San Pablo, basking in unhindered sun. The wild oats dried by the heat made of the plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups of black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain foot with “chapparal.” The volcanic hills were rounded into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature overspread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the mighty fog was beginning to pour in through the Golden Gate to refresh America with dews from the Pacific.
CHAPTER XXIII.
LITTLE CHINA
“THE Indians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity County. One man and a Chinaman have been killed, and a lady crippled for life.”
That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to colored races was not less strong in California than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the Alta Californian of the day of my return to San Francisco.
A determination to explore Little China, as the celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humor of the Alta, and I at once set off in search of two of the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had some sort of introduction, and put myself under their charge for the night.
We had not been half an hour in the Chinese theater or opera house before my detectives must have repented of their offer to “show me around,” for, incomprehensible as it must have seemed to them with their New England gravity and American contempt for the Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the performance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh that I had enjoyed since I had left the plantations of Virginia.
When we entered the house, which is the size of the Strand Theater of London, it may have been ten or eleven o‘clock. The performance had begun at seven, and was likely to last till two A.M. By the “performance” was meant this particular act or scene, for the piece had been going on every evening for a month, and would be still in progress during the best part of another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama to take up the hero at an early age, and conduct him to the grave, which he reaches full of years and of honor.
The house was crammed with a grinning crowd of happy “yellow boys,” while the “China ladies” had a long gallery to themselves. No sound of applause is to be heard in a Chinese place of amusement, but the crowd grin delight at the actors, who, for their part, grin back at the crowd.
The feature of the performance which struck me at once was the hearty interest the actors took in the play, and the chaff that went on between them and the pit; it is not only from their numbers and the nature of their trades that the Chinese may be called the Irish of the Pacific: there was soul in every gesture.
On the stage, behind the actors, was a band, which played unceasingly, and so loud that the performers, who clearly had not the smallest intention of subordinating their parts to the music, had to talk in shrieks in order to be heard. The audience, too, all talked in their loudest natural tones.
As for the play, a lady made love to an old gentleman (probably the hero, as this was the second month or third act of the play), and, bawling at him fiercely, was indignantly rejected by him in a piercing shriek. Relatives, male and female, coming with many howls to the assistance of the lady, were ignominiously put to flight, in a high falsetto key, by the old fellow‘s footmen, who were in turn routed by a force of yelling spearmen, apparently the county posse. The soldiers wore paint in rings of various colors, put on so deftly, that of nose, of eyes, of mouth, no trace could be discovered; the front face resembled a target for archery. All this time, a steady, unceasing uproar was continued by four gongs and a harp, with various cymbals, pavilions, triangles, and guitars.
Scenery there was none, but boards were put up in the Elizabethan way, with hieroglyphics denoting the supposed locality; and another archaic point is, that all the female parts were played by boys. For this I have the words of the detectives; my eyes, had I not long since ceased to believe them, would have given me proof to the contrary.
The acting, as far as I could judge by the grimace, was excellent. Nowhere could be found greater spirit, or equal power of facial expression. The stage fight was full of pantomimic force; the leading soldier would make his fortune as a London pantaloon.
When the detectives could no longer contain their distaste for the performance, we changed our quarters for a restaurant – the “Hang Heong,” the wood of which was brought from China.
The street along which we had to pass was decorated rather than lit by paper lanterns hung over every door; but the “Hang Heong” was brilliantly illuminated, with a view, no doubt, to attracting the crowd as they poured out from the theater at a later hour. The ground-floor was occupied by shop and kitchen, the dining-rooms being up stairs. The counter, which is on the plan of that in the houses of the Palais Royal, was presided over, not by a smiling woman, but by grave and pig-tailed gentlemen in black, who received our order from the detective with the decorous solemnity of the head waiter in an English country inn.
The rooms up stairs were nearly full; and as the Chinese by no means follow the Americans in silent eating, the babel was tremendous. A saucer and a pair of chopsticks were given each of us, but at our request a spoon was furnished as a special favor to the “Melicans.”
Tiny cups of a sweet spirit were handed us before supper was brought up. The liquor was a kind of shrub, but white, made, I was told, from sugar-canes. For first course, we had roast duck cut in pieces, and served in an oil-filled bowl, and some sort of fish; tea was then brought in, and followed by shark‘s fin, for which I had given a special order; the result might have been gum arabic for any flavor I could find. Dog was not to be obtained, and birds’-nest soup was beyond the purse of a traveler seven thousand miles from home, and twelve thousand from his next supplies. A dish of some strange, black fungus stewed in rice, followed by preserves and cakes, concluded our supper, and were washed down by our third cups of tea.
After paying our respects and our money to the gentleman in black, who grunted a lugubrious something that answered to “good night,” we paid a visit to the Chinese “bad quarter,” which differs only in degree of badness from the “quartier Mexicain,” the bad pre-eminence being ascribed, even by the prejudiced detectives, to the Spaniards and Chilenos.
Hurrying on, we reached the Chinese gaming-houses just before they closed. Some difficulty was made about admitting us by the “yellow loafers” who hung around the gate, as the houses are prohibited by law; but as soon as the detectives, who were known, explained that they came not on business, but on pleasure, we were suffered to pass in among the silent, melancholy gamblers. Not a word was heard, beyond every now arid then a grunt from the croupier. Each man knew what he was about, and won or lost his money in the stillness of a dead-house. The game appeared to be a sort of loto; but a few minutes of it was enough, and the detectives pretended to no deep acquaintance with its principles.
The San Francisco Chinese are not all mere theater-goers, loafers, gamblers; as a body they are frugal, industrious, contented men. I soon grew to think it a pleasure to meet a Chinese-American, so clean and happy is his look: not a speck is to be seen upon the blue cloth of his long coat or baggy trowsers. His hair is combed with care; the bamboo on which he and his mate together carry their enormous load seems as though cleansed a dozen times a day.
It is said to be a peculiarity of the Chinese that they are all alike: no European can, without he has dealings with them, distinguish one Celestial from another. The same, however, may be said of the Sikhs, the Australian natives, of most colored races, in short. The points of difference which distinguish the yellow men, the red men, the black men with straight hair, the negroes, from any other race whatever, are so much more prominent than the minor distinctions between Ah Sing and Chi Long, or between Uncle Ned and Uncle Tom, that the individual are sunk and lost in the national distinctions. To the Chinese in turn all Europeans are alike; but beneath these obvious facts there lies a grain of solid truth that is worth the hunting out, and which is connected with the change-of-type question in America and Australasia. Men of similar habits of mind and body are alike among ourselves in Europe; noted instances are the close resemblance of Père Enfantin, the St. Simonian chief, to the busts of Epicurus; of Bismarck to Cardinal Ximenes. Irish laborers – men who for the most part work hard, feed little, and leave their minds entirely unplowed – are all alike; Chinamen, who all work hard, and work alike, who live alike, and who go further, and all think alike, are, by a mere law of nature, indistinguishable one from the other.
In the course of my wanderings in the Golden City, I lighted on the house of the Canton Company, one of the Chinese benevolent societies, the others being those of Hong Kong, Macao, and Amoy. They are like the New York Immigration Commission, and the London “Société Française de Bienfaisance,” combined; added to a theater and joss-house, or temple, and governed on the principles of such clubs as those of the “whites” or “greens” at Heidelberg, they are, in short, Chinese trades unions, sheltering the sick, succoring the distressed, finding work for the unemployed, receiving the immigrants from China when they land, and shipping their bones back to China, ticketed with name and address, when they die. “Hong Kong, with dead Chinamen,” is said to be a common answer from outward-bounders to a hail from the guard-ship at the Golden Gate.
Some of the Chinese are wealthy: Tung Yu & Co., Chi Sing Tong & Co., Wing Wo Lang & Co., Chy Lung & Co., stand high among the merchants of the Golden City. Honest and wealthy as these men are allowed to be, they are despised by every white Californian, from the governor of the State to the Mexican boy who cleans his shoes.
In America, as in Australia, there is a violent prejudice against John Chinaman. He pilfers, we are told; he lies, he is dirty, he smokes opium, is full of bestial vices – a pagan, and – what is far more important – yellow! All his sins are to be pardoned but the last. Californians, when in good humor, will admit that John is sober, patient, peaceable, and hard working, that his clothes at least are scrupulously clean; but he is yellow! Even the Mexicans, themselves despised, look down upon the Chinamen, just as the New York Irish affect to have no dealings with “the naygurs.” The Chinese themselves pander to the feeling. Their famous appeal to the Californian Democrats may or may not be true: “What for Democlat allee timee talkee dam Chinaman? Chinaman allee samee Democlat; no likee nigger, no likee injun.” “Infernals,” “Celestials,” and “Greasers” – or black men, yellow men, and Mexicans – it is hard to say which are most despised by the American whites in California.
The Chinaman is hated by the rough fellows for his cowardice. Had the Chinese stood to their rights against the Americans, they would long since have been driven from California. As it is, here and in Victoria they invariably give way, and never work at diggings which are occupied by whites. Yet in both countries they take out mining licenses from the State, which is bound to protect them in the possession of the rights thus gained, but which is powerless against the rioters of Ballarat, or the “Anti-Chinese mob” of El Dorado.
The Chinese in California are practically confined by public opinion, violence, or threats, to inferior kinds of work, which the “meanest” of the whites of the Pacific States refuse to perform. Politically, this is slavery. All the evils to which slavery has given rise in the cotton States are produced here by violence, in a less degree only because the Chinese are fewer than were the negroes.
In spite of a prejudice which recalls the time when the British government forbade the American colonist to employ negroes in the manufacture of hats, on the ground that white laborers could not stand the competition, the yellow men continue to flock to the “Gold Hills,” as they call San Francisco. Already they are the washermen, sweepers, and porters of three States, two Territories, and British Columbia. They are denied civil rights; their word is not taken in cases where white men are concerned; a heavy tax is set upon them on their entry to the State; a second tax when they commence to mine – still their numbers steadily increase. In 1852, Governor Bigler, in his message, recommended the prohibition of the immigration of the Chinese, but they now number one-tenth of the population.
The Irish of Asia, the Chinese have commenced to flow over on to the outer world. Who shall say where the flood will stop? Ireland, with now five millions of people, has, in twenty years, poured an equal number out into the world. What is to prevent the next fifty years seeing an emigration of a couple of hundreds of millions from the rebellion-torn provinces of Cathay?
Three Chinamen in a temperate climate will do as much arm-work as two Englishmen, and will eat or cost less. It looks as though the cheaper would starve out the dearer race, as rabbits drive out stronger but hungrier hares. This tendency is already plainly visible in our mercantile marine: the ships are manned with motley crews of Bombay lascars, Maories, Negroes, Arabs, Chinamen, Kroomen, and Malays. There are no British or American seamen now, except boys who are to be quartermasters some day, and experienced hands who are quartermasters already. But there is nothing to regret in this: Anglo-Saxons are too valuable to be used as ordinary seamen where lascars will do nearly, and Maories quite as well. Nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labor of the Eastern peoples.
The serious side of the Chinese problem – just touched on here – will force itself rudely upon our notice in Australia.