Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

The next innovation was the introduction of stately catafalques for the dead to repose on, either in house or church, during the interval between their death and burial. There had been brought into the town a few old-fashioned, high-post, canopied bedsteads, and from these the first catafalques were made. Gilded, decorated with gold and silver lace, and hung with white and black draperies, they made a by no means insignificant show, which doubtless went far to reconcile people's minds to the new methods.

In 1838 there was a memorable funeral of a woman over a hundred years old. Fourteen old women watched with her body, which lay stretched on the floor, in the ancient fashion, with only a stone beneath the head. The youngest of these watchers was eighty-five. One of them, Tomasa Camera by name, was herself over a hundred years old. Tomasa was infirm of foot; so they propped her with pillows in a little cart, and drew her to the house that she might not miss of the occasion. All night long, the fourteen squatted or sat on rawhides spread on the floor, and sang and prayed and smoked: as fine a wake as was ever seen. They smoked cigarettes, which they rolled on the spot, out of corn-husks slit fine for the purpose, there being at that day in Los Angeles no paper fit for cigarettes.

Outside this body-guard of aged women knelt a circle of friends and relatives, also chanting, praying, and smoking. In this outer circle any one might come and go at pleasure; but into the inner ring of the watching none must come, and none must go out of it till the night was spent.

With the beginning of the prosperity of the City of the Angels, came the end of its primeval peace. Spanish viceroys, Mexican alcaldes and governors, United States commanders, naval and military, followed on each other's heels, with or without frays, ruling California through a succession of tumultuous years. Greedy traders from all parts of the world added their rivalries and interventions to the civil and military disputation. In the general anarchy and confusion, the peaceful and peace-loving Catholic Fathers were robbed of their lands, their converts were scattered, their industries broken up. Nowhere were these uncomfortable years more uncomfortable than in Los Angeles. Revolts, occupations, surrenders, retakings, and resurrenders kept the little town in perpetual ferment. Disorders were the order of the day and of the night, in small matters as well as in great.

The Californian fought as impetuously for his old way of dancing as for his political allegiance. There are comical traditions of the men's determination never to wear long trousers to dances; nor to permit dances to be held in houses or halls, it having been the practice always to give them in outdoor booths or bowers, with lattice-work walls of sycamore poles lashed together by thongs of rawhide.

Outside these booths the men sat on their horses looking in at the dancing, which was chiefly done by the women. An old man standing in the centre of the enclosure directed the dances. Stopping in front of the girl whom he wished to have join the set, he clapped his hands. She then rose and took her place on the floor; if she could not dance, or wished to decline, she made a low bow and resumed her seat.

To look in on all this was great sport. Sometimes, unable to resist the spell, a man would fling himself off his horse, dash into the enclosure, seize a girl by the waist, whirl around with her through one dance, then out again and into the saddle, where he sat, proudly aware of his vantage. The decorations of masculine attire at this time were such as to make riding a fine show. Around the crown of the broad-brimmed sombrero was twisted a coil of gold or silver cord; over the shoulders was flung, with ostentatious carelessness, a short cloak of velvet or brocade; the waistcoats were embroidered in gold, silver, or gay colors; so also were the knee-breeches, leggings, and stockings. Long silken garters, with ornamented tassels at the ends, were wound round and round to hold the stockings in place. Even the cumbrous wooden stirrups were carved in elaborate designs. No wonder that men accustomed to such braveries as these saw ignominy in the plain American trousers.

They seem to have been a variety of Centaur, these early Californian men. They were seldom off their horses except to eat and sleep. They mounted, with jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the shortest distances, even to cross a plaza. They paid long visits on horseback, without dismounting. Clattering up to the window or door-sill, halting, throwing one knee over the crupper, the reins lying loose, they sat at ease, far more at ease than in a house. Only at church, where the separation was inevitable, would they be parted from their horses. They turned the near neighborhood of a church on Sunday into a sort of picket-ground, or horse-trainers' yard, full of horse-posts and horses; and the scene was far more like a horse-fair than like an occasion of holy observance. There seems to have been a curious mixture of reverence and irreverence in their natures. They confessed sins and underwent penances with the simplicity of children; but when, in 1821, the Church issued an edict against that "escandalosisima" dance, the waltz, declaring that whoever dared to dance it should be excommunicated, the merry sinners waltzed on only the harder and faster, and laughed in their priests' faces. And when the advocates of decorum, good order, and indoor dancing gave their first ball in a public hall in Los Angeles, the same merry outdoor party broke every window and door in the building, and put a stop to the festivity. They persisted in taking this same summary vengeance on occasion after occasion, until, finally, any person wishing to give a ball in his own house was forced to surround the house by a cordon of police to protect it.

The City of the Angels is a prosperous city now. It has business thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone buildings, hotels, shops, banks, and is growing daily. Its outlying regions are a great circuit of gardens, orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs are fast filling up with houses of a showy though cheap architecture. But it has not yet shaken off its past. A certain indefinable, delicious aroma from the old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not only in byways and corners, but in the very centres of its newest activities.

Mexican women, their heads wrapped in black shawls, and their bright eyes peering out between the close-gathered folds, glide about everywhere; the soft Spanish speech is continually heard; long-robed priests hurry to and fro; and at each dawn ancient, jangling bells from the Church of the Lady of the Angels ring out the night and in the day. Venders of strange commodities drive in stranger vehicles up and down the streets: antiquated carts piled high with oranges, their golden opulence contrasting weirdly with the shabbiness of their surroundings and the evident poverty of their owner; close following on the gold of one of these, one has sometimes the luck to see another cart, still more antiquated and rickety, piled high with something—he cannot imagine what—terra-cotta red in grotesque shapes; it is fuel,—the same sort which Villavicencia, Quintero, and the rest probably burned, when they burned any, a hundred years ago. It is the roots and root-shoots of manzanita and other shrubs. The colors are superb,—terra-cotta reds, shading up to flesh pink, and down to dark mahogany; but the forms are grotesque beyond comparison: twists, querls, contortions, a boxful of them is an uncomfortable presence in one's room, and putting them on the fire is like cremating the vertebræ and double teeth of colossal monsters of the Pterodactyl period.