The old mission church as I knew it four and forty years ago is still standing and still an object of pious interest. The first families of the faithful lie under its eaves in their long and peaceful sleep, happily unmindful of the great changes that have come over the spirit of all our dreams. The old adobes have returned to dust, even as the hands of those who fashioned them more than a century ago. Very modern houses have crowded upon the old church and churchyard, and they seem to have become the merest shadows of their former selves; while the roof-tree of the new church soars into space, and its wide walls—out of all proportion with the Dolores of departed days—are but emblematic of the new spirit of the age.
IX.
SOCIAL SAN FRANCISCO
OCIAL San Francisco during the early Fifties seems to have been a conglomeration of unexpected externals and surprising interiors. It was heterogeneous to the last degree. It was hail-fellow-well-met, with a reservation; it asked no questions for conscience's sake; it would not have been safe to do so. There were too many pasts in the first families and too many possible futures to permit one to cast a shadow upon the other. And after all is said, if sins may be forgiven and atoned for, why should the memory of a shady past imperil the happiness and prosperity of the future? All futures should be hopeful; they were "promise-crammed" in that healthy and hearty city by the sea.
It was impossible, not to say impolite, to inquire into your neighbors' antecedents. It was currently believed that the mines were filled with broken-down "divines," as if it were but a step from the pulpit to the pickaxe. As for one's family, it was far better off in the old home so long as the salary of a servant was seventy dollars a month, fresh eggs a dollar and a quarter a dozen, turkeys ten dollars apiece, and coal fifty dollars a ton.
In 1854 and 1855 San Francisco had a monthly magazine that any city or state might have been proud of; this was The Pioneer, edited by the Rev. Ferdinand C. Ewer. In 1851, a lady, the wife of a physician, went with her husband into the mines and settled at Rich Bar and Indian Bar, two neighboring camps on the north fork of the Feather River. There were but three or four other women in that part of the country, and one of these died. This lady wrote frequent and lengthy descriptive letters to a sister in New England, and these letters were afterward published serially in The Pioneer. They picture life as a highly-accomplished woman knew it in the camps and among the people whom Bret Harte has immortalized. She called herself "Dame Shirley," and the "Shirley Letters" in The Pioneer are the most picturesque, vivid, and valuable record of life in a California mining camp that I know of. The wonder is that they have never been collected and published in book form; for they have become a part of the history of the development of the State.
The life of a later period in San Francisco and Monterey has been faithfully depicted by another hand. The life that was a mixture of Gringo and diluted Castilian—a life that smacked of the presidio and the hacienda,—that was a tale worth telling; and no one has told it so freely, so fully or so well as Gertrude Franklin Atherton.