Yet The Least Drop Of Spanish Blood, If It Be
Only Of Quadroon Or Octoroon, Is Sufficient To Raise Them
From
the rank of slaves, and entitle them to a suit of clothes - boots,
hat, cloak, spurs, long knife, and
All complete, though coarse
and dirty as may be, - and to call themselves Españolos, and to
hold property, if they can get any.
The fondness for dress among the women is excessive, and is often
the ruin of many of them. A present of a fine mantle, or of a
necklace or pair of ear-rings, gains the favor of the greater part
of them. Nothing is more common than to see a woman living in
a house of only two rooms, and the ground for a floor, dressed in
spangled satin shoes, silk gown, high comb, and gilt, if not gold,
ear-rings and necklace. If their husbands do not dress them well
enough, they will soon receive presents from others. They used to
spend whole days on board our vessels, examining the fine clothes
and ornaments, and frequently made purchases at a rate which
would have made a seamstress or waiting-maid in Boston open
her eyes.
Next to the love of dress, I was most struck with the fineness of
the voices and beauty of the intonations of both sexes. Every
common ruffian-looking fellow, with a slouched hat, blanket cloak,
dirty under-dress, and soiled leather leggins, appeared to me to be
speaking elegant Spanish. It was a pleasure, simply to listen to
the sound of the language, before I could attach any meaning to it.
They have a good deal of the Creole drawl, but it is varied with an
occasional extreme rapidity of utterance, in which they seem to skip
from consonant to consonant, until, lighting upon a broad, open
vowel, they rest upon that to restore the balance of sound. The
women carry this peculiarity of speaking to a much greater extreme
than the men, who have more evenness and stateliness of utterance.
A common bullock-driver, on horseback, delivering a message, seemed
to speak like an ambassador at an audience. In fact, they sometimes
appeared to me to be a people on whom a curse had fallen, and stripped
them of everything but their pride, their manners, and their voices.
Another thing that surprised me was the quantity of silver that
was in circulation. I certainly never saw so much silver at one
time in my life, as during the week that we were at Monterey.
The truth is, they have no credit system, no banks, and no way
of investing money but in cattle. They have no circulating medium
but silver and hides - which the sailors call "California bank notes."
Everything that they buy they must pay for in one or the other of
these things. The hides they bring down dried and doubled, in
clumsy ox-carts, or upon mules' backs, and the money they carry
tied up in a handkerchief; - fifty, eighty, or an hundred dollars
and half dollars.
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