The Buildings Are Unused And
Ruinous, And The Large Gardens Show Now Only Wild Cactuses, Willows,
And A Few Olive-Trees.
A fast run brings me back in time to take
leave of the few I knew and who knew me, and to reach the steamer
before she sails.
A last look - yes, last for life - to the beach,
the hills, the low point, the distant town, as we round Point
Loma and the first beams of the light-house strike out towards
the setting sun.
Wednesday, August 24th. At anchor at San Pedro by daylight.
But instead of being roused out of the forecastle to row the
long-boat ashore and bring off a load of hides before breakfast,
we were served with breakfast in the cabin, and again took our
drive with the wild horses to the Pueblo and spent the day;
seeing nearly the same persons as before, and again getting back
by dark. We steamed again for Santa Barbara, where we only lay
an hour, and passed through its canal and round Point Conception,
stopping at San Luis Obispo to land my friend, as I may truly call
him after this long passage together, Captain Wilson, whose most
earnest invitation to stop here and visit him at his rancho I was
obliged to decline.
Friday evening, 26th August, we entered the Golden Gate, passed the
light-houses and forts, and clipper ships at anchor, and came to our
dock, with this great city, on its high hills and rising surfaces,
brilliant before us, and full of eager life.
Making San Francisco my head-quarters, I paid visits to various
parts of the State, - down the Bay to Santa Clara, with its live
oaks and sycamores, and its Jesuit College for boys; and San
José, where is the best girls' school in the State, kept by the
Sisters of Notre Dame, - a town now famous for a year's session of
"The legislature of a thousand drinks," - and thence to the rich
Almaden quicksilver mines, returning on the Contra Costa side
through the rich agricultural country, with its ranchos and the
vast grants of the Castro and Soto families, where farming and
fruit-raising are done on so large a scale. Another excursion
was up the San Joaquin to Stockton, a town of some ten thousand
inhabitants, a hundred miles from San Francisco, and crossing the
Tuolumne and Stanislaus and Merced, by the little Spanish town
of Hornitos, and Snelling's Tavern, at the ford of the Merced,
where so many fatal fights are had. Thence I went to Mariposa
County, and Colonel Fremont's mines, and made an interesting
visit to "the Colonel," as he is called all over the country,
and Mrs. Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons
of Paris and the drawing-rooms of New York and Washington, or the
roughest life of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa, - with
their fine family of spirited, clever children. After a rest there,
we went on to Clark's Camp and the Big Trees, where I measured one
tree ninety-seven feet in circumference without its bark, and the
bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode through another which
lay on the ground, a shell, with all the insides out - rode through
it mounted, and sitting at full height in the saddle; then to the
wonderful Yo Semite Valley, - itself a stupendous miracle of nature,
with its Dome, its Capitan, its walls of three thousand feet of
perpendicular height, - but a valley of streams, of waterfalls from
the torrent to the mere shimmer of a bridal veil, only enough to
reflect a rainbow, with their plunges of twenty-five hundred feet,
or their smaller falls of eight hundred, with nothing at the base
but thick mists, which form and trickle, and then run and at last
plunge into the blue Merced that flows through the centre of the
valley.
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