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.
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