The absence of police, and, to a great extent, of law, led to deeds of violence, and to duelling; but it also tended to make men polite. The civility with which cases were conducted in court, and the restraint shown by lawyers in their comments upon one another and upon the witnesses were often spoken of in California. The experience of Alcalde Field in this regard is interesting:—“I came to California with all those notions in respect to acts of violence which are instilled into New England youth; if a man were rude, I would turn away from him. But I soon found that men in California were likely to take very great liberties with a person who acted in such a manner, and that the only way to get along was to hold every man responsible, and resent every trespass upon one’s rights.”[52]
Accordingly, young Field bought a brace of pistols, had a sack-coat made with pockets appropriate to contain them, and practised the useful art of firing the pistols with his hands in his pockets. Subsequently he added a bowie-knife to his private arsenal, and he carried these weapons until the Summer of 1854. “I found,” he says, “that the knowledge that pistols were generally worn created a wholesome courtesy of manner and language.”
Even the members of the State Legislature were armed. It was a thing of every-day occurrence for a member, when he entered the House, to take off his pistols and lay them in the drawer of his desk. Such an act excited neither surprise nor comment.
At one time Mr. Field sent a challenge to a certain Judge Barbour who had grossly insulted him. Barbour accepted the challenge, but demanded that the duel should be fought with Colt’s revolvers and bowie-knives, that it should take place in a room only twenty feet square, and that the fight should continue until at least one of the principals was dead. Mr. Field’s second, horrified by these savage proposals, was for rejecting them; but Field himself insisted that they should be accepted, and the result was what he had anticipated. Judge Barbour, of his own motion, waived, first the knives, then the small room, and finally declined the meeting altogether. But the very next day, when Field had stepped out of his office, and was picking up an armful of wood for his stove, Barbour crept up behind him, and putting a pistol to his head, called upon Field to draw and defend himself. Field did not turn or move, but spoke somewhat as follows: “You infernal scoundrel, you cowardly assassin,—you come behind my back, and put your revolver to my head, and tell me to draw! You haven’t the courage to shoot,—shoot and be damned!” And Barbour slunk away.
Shooting at sight, especially in San Francisco and the larger towns, was as common as it is represented by Bret Harte. For the few years, beginning with and succeeding 1850, the newspapers were full of such events. On November 25, 1851, the “Alta California” said: “Another case of the influenza now in fashion occurred yesterday. We allude to a mere shooting-match in which only one of the near by-standers was shot down in his tracks.”
Even so late as August, 1855, the “San Francisco Call” was able to refer in a modest way to the “two or three shooting encounters per week” which enlivened its columns.[53]
Duels were common, and in most cases very serious affairs, the battle being waged with destructive weapons and at close range. As a rule, they took place in public. Thus, at a meeting between D. C. Broderick, leader of the Democratic Party in the State, and one J. Cabot Smith, seventy or eighty persons were present. Broderick was wounded, and would have been killed had not the bullet first struck and shattered his watch.
These California duels must be ascribed mainly to the Southern element, which was strong numerically, and which, moreover, exerted an influence greater than its numbers warranted. One reason, perhaps the main reason, for this predominance of the Southerners was that the aristocratic, semi-feudal system which they represented had a more dignified, more dashing aspect than the plain democratic views in which the Northern and Western men had been educated. It made the individual of more importance. Upon this point Professor Royce makes an acute remark: “The type of the Northern man who has assumed Southern fashions, and not always the best Southern fashions, has often been observed in California life. The Northern man frequently felt commonplace, simple-minded, undignified, beside his brother from the border or the plantation.... The Northern man admired his fluency, his vigor, his invective, his ostentatious courage, his absolute confidence about all matters of morals, of politics, of propriety, and the inscrutable union in his public discourse of sweet reasonableness with ferocious intolerance.”
The extreme type of Southerner, as he appeared in California, is immortalized in Colonel Starbottle. The moment when this strange planet first swam into Bret Harte’s ken seems to have been seized and recorded with accuracy by his friend, Mr. Noah Brooks. “In Sacramento he and I met Colonel Starbottle, who had, of course, another name. He wore a tall silk hat and loosely-fitting clothes, and he carried on his left arm by its crooked handle a stout walking-stick. The Colonel was a dignified and benignant figure; in politics he was everybody’s friend. A gubernatorial election was pending, and with the friends of Haight he stood at the hotel bar, and as they raised their glasses to their lips he said, ‘Here’s to the Coming Event!’ Nobody asked at that stage of the canvass what the coming event would be, and when the good Colonel stood in the same place with the friends of Gorham, he gave the same toast, ‘The Coming Event!’”
This may have been a certain Dr. Ruskin, a Southern politician, who is described by a Pioneer as wearing “a white fur plug hat, a blue coat with brass buttons, a buff-colored vest, white trousers, varnished boots, a black satin stock, and, on state occasions, a frilled shirt front. He always carried a cane with a curved handle.”[54] This, the Reader need not be reminded, is the exact costume of Colonel Starbottle,—the “low Byronic collar,” which Bret Harte mentions, being the only item omitted.