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Around the World: Letter No.
3
California -- Continued
MORE CLIMATE
There are other kinds of climate in California -- several
kinds -- and some of them very agreeable. The climate of
San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The
thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round.
It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light
blankets Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar.
Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black
broadcloth -- if you've got it -- in August and January,
just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one
month than the other. You don't use overcoats and you don't
use fans. It is just as pleasant a climate as could be
contrived, and is the most unvarying in the whole world.
The wind blows there a good deal in the Summer months, but
then you can go over to Oakland, if you want to -- three or
four miles away -- it don't blow there. It has only snowed
twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only
remained on the ground long enough to astonish the
children, and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff
was.
During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies
are bright and cloudless and never a drop of rain falls.
But when the other four months come along, the most
righteous thing you can do will be to go and steal an
umbrella. Because you'll need it. Not just one day, but one
hundred and twenty days in unvarying succession. When you
want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theatre, you
never look up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to
rain or not -- you look at the almanac. If it is winter, it
will rain -- there is little use in bothering about that --
and if it is summer, it won't rain, and you can not help
it. You never see a lightning-rod, because it never
thunders and it never lightens. And after you have listened
for six or eight weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony
of these quiet rains, you will wish in your heart the
thunder would leap and crash and roar along those
drowsy skies once, and make everything alive -- you will
wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull
firmament asunder and light it with the red splendors of
hell for one little instant. You would give any
thing to hear the old familiar thunder again and see
the lightning strike somebody. And along in the Summer,
when you have suffered about four months of lustrous,
pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees
and beg for rain -- hail -- snow -- thunder and lightning
-- anything to break the monotony -- you'll take an
earthquake, if you can't do any better. And the chances are
that you'll get it, too.
SANDY FERTILITY
San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific
sand hills. They yield a generous vegetation. All your rare
flowers, which people in "the States" rear with such
patient care in parlor flower pots and green houses,
flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year
round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion
flowers, moss roses -- I don't know the names of a tenth
part of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are
burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are
burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only
keep their hands off and let them grow. And I have heard
that we have here that rarest and most curious of all
flowers, the beautiful Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards
call it -- or flower of the Holy Spirit -- though I never
have seen it anywhere but in Central America -- down on the
Isthmus. In its cup is the daintiest little fac-simile of a
dove, as pure and white as snow. The Spaniards have a
superstitious reverence for it. The blossom has been
conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb
has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it
bloom after it arrived, has failed.
CLIMATE RESUMED
I have spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California,
and the eternal Spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel a
hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal
Summer of Sacramento. One never sees Summer clothing or
mosquitoes in San Francisco -- but they can be found in
Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about 143
months out of twelve years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there,
always, you can easily believe -- people suffer and sweat,
and swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their
dearest energies fanning themselves. It gets pretty hot
there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it
hotter. Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth.
The thermometer stays at 120 in the shade there all the
time -- except when it relents and -- goes higher. It is a
U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the
terrific heat that they are bound to suffer without it.
There is a tradition (attributed to John Phoenix) that a
very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course
he went straight to the hottest corner of perdition, ----,
and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets.
There is no doubt about the truth of this statement --
there can be no doubt about it -- for I have seen
the place where that soldier used to board. With a French
lady by the name of O'Flannigan, and she lives there yet.
Sacramento is fiery Summer always, and you can gather
roses, and eat strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white
linen clothes, and pant and perspire at eight or nine
o'clock in the morning, and take the cars, and at noon put
on your furs and your skates and go skimming over frozen
Donner Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among
snow banks fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand
mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags ten thousand
feet above the level of the sea. There is a transition for
you! Where will you find another like it in the Western
hemisphere? And I have swept around snow-walled curves of
the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, 6000 feet above the
sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the everlasting
summer of the Sacramento Valley, with its green fields, its
feathery foliage, its silver streams, all slumbering in the
mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely
softened and spiritualized by distance -- a rich, dreamy,
exquisite glimpse of fairy land, made all the more charming
and striking that it was caught through a forbidding
gateway of ice and snow and savage crags and
precipices.
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DESOLATION
It was in this Sac Valley that a deal of the most lucrative
of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,
in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered
and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and
twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and
wide over California -- and in some such places, where only
meadows and forests are visible -- not a living creature,
not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and
not a sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath
stillness -- you will find it hard to believe that there
stood at one time a wildly, fiercely-flourishing little
city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its
newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia,
bank, hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and
speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco smoke,
profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors,
with tables heaped with glittering gold dust sufficient for
the revenues of a German principality -- streets crowded
and rife with business -- town lots worth $400 a front foot
-- labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting,
shooting, stabbing -- a bloody inquest and a man for
breakfast every morning -- every thing that goes to
make life happy and desirable -- all the appointments and
appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising
young city, -- and now nothing is left but a
lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses
have vanished, even the name of the place is
forgotten. In no other land do towns so absolutely die and
disappear, as in the old mining regions of
California.
THE CRUSADING HOST
It was a driving, vigorous restless population in those
days. It was a curious population in those days. It was the
only population of the kind that the world has ever
seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world
will ever see its like again. For, mark you, it was an
assemblage of 200,000 young men -- not simpering,
dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular,
dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and
royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a
peerless and magnificent manhood -- the very pick and
choice of the world's glorious ones. No women, no children,
no gray and stooping veterans, -- none but erect,
bright-eyed, quickmoving, strong-handed young giants -- the
strangest population, the finest population, the most
gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes
of an unpeopled land. And where are they now? Scattered to
the ends of the earth -- or prematurely aged and decrepit
-- or shot or stabbed in street affrays -- or dead of
disappointed hopes and broken hearts -- all gone, or nearly
all -- victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf --
the noblest holocaust that even wafted its sacrificial
incense heavenward. California has much to answer for in
this destruction of the flower of the world's young
chivalry.
It was a splendid population -- for all the slow, sleepy,
sluggishbrained sloths staid at home -- you never find that
sort of people among pioneers -- you can not build pioneers
out of that sort of material. It was that population that
gave to California a name for getting up astounding
enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent
dash and daring, and a princely recklessness of cost or
consequences, which she bears unto this day -- and when she
projects a new astonisher, the grave world smiles and
admires as usual, and says, "well, that is California all
over." -- Mark Twain
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