At a dinner given in San Francisco a local orator thus discoursed upon the glories of California: “Look at its forest trees, varying from three hundred to one thousand feet in height, with their trunks so close together [drawing his knife and pantomiming] that you can’t stick this bowie-knife between them; and the lordly elk, with antlers from seventeen to twenty feet spread, with their heads and tails up, ambling through these grand forests. It’s a sight, gentlemen”—
“Stop,” cried a newcomer who had not yet been inoculated with the atmosphere. “My friend, if the trees are so close together, how does the elk get through the woods with his wide-branching horns?”
The Californian turned on the stranger with a look of thorough contempt and replied, “That’s the elk’s business”; and continued his unvarnished tale, no more embarrassed than the sun at noonday.
“There was a spirit of off-hand, jolly fun in those days, a sort of universal free and easy cheerfulness.... The California Pioneer that could not give and take a joke was just no Californian at all. It was this spirit that gives the memory of those days an indescribable fascination and charm.”[42]
The very names first given to places and situations show the same exuberant spirit; such, for example, as Murderer’s Alley, Dead Man’s Bar, Mad Mule Cañon, Skunk Flat, Whiskey Gulch, Port Wine Diggins, Shirt-Tail Hollow, Bloody Bend, Death Pass, Jackass Flat, and Hell’s Half Acre.
Even crime took on a bold and original form. A scapegrace in Sacramento stole a horse while the owner still held the bridle. The owner had stepped into a shop to ask a question, but kept the end of the reins in his hand, when the thief gently slipped the bridle from the horse’s head, hung it on a post, and rode off with steed and saddle.
Bizarre characters from all parts of the world, drawn as by a magnet, took ship for California in ’49 and ’50 and became wealthy, or landed in the Police Court, as fate would have it. The latter was the destination of one Murphy, an Irishman presumably, and certainly a man of imagination, who described himself as a teacher of mathematics, and acknowledged that he had been drunk for the preceding six years. He added, for the benefit of the Court, that he had been at the breaking of every pane of glass from Vera Cruz to San Francisco, that he had smoked a dozen cigars in the halls of the Montezumas, and that there were as many persons contending for his name as there were cities for the birth of Homer. The Court gave him six months.
Two residents of San Francisco, one a Frenchman, the other a Dutchman, were so enthusiastic over their new and republican surroundings that they slept every night under the Liberty Pole on the Plaza; and seldom did they fail to turn in patriotically drunk, shouting for freedom and equality. Prize-fighters, as a matter of course, were attracted to a place where sporting blood ran so high. In June, 1850, news came that Tom Hyer (of whose celebrity the Reader is doubtless aware) was shortly expected with “his lady” at Panama; and he must have arrived in due course, for in August, Tom Hyer was tried in the Police Court of San Francisco for entering several saloons on horseback, in one case performing the classic feat of riding up a flight of steps. The defence set up that this was not an uncommon method of entering saloons in San Francisco, and the Court took “judicial notice” of the fact, his honor having witnessed the same thing himself on more than one occasion. However, as Mr. Hyer was somewhat intoxicated, and as the alleged offence was committed on a Sunday, the Judge imposed a small fine.
In the same year, Mr. T. Belcher Kay, another famous prize-fighter from the East, narrowly escaped being murdered while returning from a ball before daylight one Sunday morning; and subsequently Mr. Kay was tried, but acquitted, on a charge of burglary.
In that strange collection of human beings drawn from all parts of the earth, for the most part unknown to one another, but almost all having this fundamental trait in common, namely, that they were close to nature, it was inevitable that incidents of pathos and tragedy, deeds of rascality and cruelty, and still more deeds of unselfishness and heroism, should continually occur.