The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by Ticknor and Fields, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
I can see the excitement which this title arouses as it is flashed across the sierras, down the valleys, and into the various reading-rooms and parlors of the Golden City of the Golden State. As the San Francisco Bulletin announces some day, that in the Atlantic Monthly, issued in Boston the day before, one of the articles is on The Queen of California, what contest, in every favored circle of the most favored of lands, who the Queen may be! Is it the blond maiden who took a string of hearts with her in a leash, when she left us one sad morning? is it the hardy, brown adventuress, who, in her bark-roofed lodge, serves us out our boiled dog daily, as we come home from our water-gullies, and sews on for us weekly the few buttons which we still find indispensable in that toil? is it some Jessie of the lion-heart, heroine of a hundred days or of a thousand? is it that witch with gray eyes, cunningly hidden,—were they puzzled last night, or were they all wisdom crowded?—as she welcomed me, and as she bade me good-bye? Good Heavens! how many Queens of California are regnant this day! and of any one of them this article might be written.
No, Señores! No, Caballeros! Throng down to the wharves to see the Golden Era or the Cornelius's Coffin, or whatever other mail-steamer may bring these words to your longing eyes. Open to the right and left as Adams's express-messenger carries the earliest copy of the Atlantic Monthly, sealed with the reddest wax, tied with the reddest tape, from the Corner Store direct to him who was once the life and light of the Corner Store, who now studies eschscholtzias through a telescope thirty-eight miles away on Monte Diablo! Rush upon the newsboy who then brings forth the bale of this Journal for the Multitude, to find that the Queen of California of whom we write is no modern queen, but that she reigned some five hundred and fifty-five years ago. Her precise contemporaries were Amadis of Gaul, the Emperor Esplandian, and the Sultan Radiaro. And she flourished , as the books say, at the time when this Sultan made his unsuccessful attack on the city of Constantinople,—all of which she saw, part of which she was.