A Pioneer describes “boys from six upward swaggering through the streets, begirt with scarlet sashes, cigar in mouth, uttering huge oaths, and occasionally treating men and boys at the bar.” Miners not more than ten years old were washing for gold on their own account, and obtaining five or ten dollars a week, which they spent chiefly on drinks and cigars. Bret Harte’s Youngest Prospector in Calaveras was not an uncommon child.
An instance of precocity was the attempted abduction in May, 1851, of a girl of thirteen by two boys a little older. They were all the children of Sydney parents, and the girl declared that she loved those boys, and had begged them to take her away, and she thought it very hard to be compelled to return to her home. This incident may recall to the Reader the precocious love affairs of Richelieu Sharpe, whose father thus explained his absence from supper: “‘Like ez not, he’s gone over to see that fammerly at the summit. There’s a little girl there that he’s sparkin’, about his own age.’
“‘His own age!’ said Minty indignantly, ‘why, she’s double that, if she’s a day. Well—if he ain’t the triflinest, conceitedest little limb that ever grew!’”
The son of a tavern-keeper at Sacramento, a boy only eight years old, was described as a finished gambler. Upon an occasion when he was acting as dealer, all the other players being men, one of them accused him of cheating. The consequence was a general fight: two men were shot, one fatally, and the man who killed him was hung the next day by a vigilance committee. Even Bret Harte’s “perverse romanticism” never carried him quite so far in delineation of the California child. The word “hoodlum,” meaning a youthful, semi-criminal rough, originated in San Francisco.
But there is another side to this picture of childhood on the Pacific Slope, and we obtain a glimpse of it occasionally. There was a Sunday-school procession at Sacramento in July, 1850, upon which the “Sacramento Transcript” remarked, “We have seen no sight here which called home so forcibly to our minds with all its endearments.” Three years later in San Francisco, there was a May-Day procession of a thousand children, each one carrying a flower.
Even Bret Harte’s story of the adoption of a child by the city of San Francisco[67] had a solid foundation in fact, though perhaps he was not aware of it. In July, 1851, the City Fathers charged themselves with the support and protection of an orphan girl, and on the thirteenth of that month a measure providing for her maintenance was introduced in the Board of Aldermen.
The scarcity, or rather, as we have seen, the almost total absence at first of women and children, of wives and sweethearts, led to the adoption by the Pioneers of a great number and variety of pet animals. Dogs and cats from all quarters, parrots from over-seas, canaries brought from the East, bears from the Sierras, wolves from the Plains, foxes and raccoons from the Foot-Hills,—all these were found in miners’ cabins, in gambling saloons and in restaurants. They occupied the waste places in the hearts of the Argonauts, and furnished an object, if an inadequate one, for those affections which might otherwise have withered at the root. One miner was accompanied in all his wanderings by a family consisting of a bay horse, two dogs, two sheep and two goats.
These California pets had their little day, perished, and are forgotten,—all save one. Who can forget the bear cub that Bret Harte immortalized under the name of Baby Sylvester! “He was as free from angles as one of Leda’s offspring. Your caressing hand sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace him an utter demoralization of the intellectual faculties.... He takes the only milk that comes to the settlement—brought up by Adams’ Express at seven o’clock every morning.”