Nevertheless, the Puritan minority, reinforced by the good sense of a majority of the Pioneers, very quickly succeeded in modifying the free and easy life of San Francisco, and later of the mining regions. Gamblers of the better sort, and business men in general, welcomed and supported the churches as tending to the peace and prosperity even of the Pacific Slope. “I have known five men,” wrote the Reverend Mr. Colton, “who never contributed a dollar in the States for the support of a clergyman, subscribe here five hundred dollars each per annum, merely to encourage, as they termed it, ‘a good sort of a thing in a community.’”[81]
The steps taken in 1850 and 1851 to prohibit or restrain gambling have already been noticed. In August, 1850, the Grand Jury condemned bull-baiting and prize-fighting at any time, and theatrical and like exhibitions on Sunday. In September of the same year, the “Sacramento Transcript” said, “The bull-fights we have had in this city have been barbarous and disgusting in the extreme, and their toleration on any occasion is disgraceful.”
This sentiment prevailed, and shortly afterward bull-fights in Sacramento were forbidden by city ordinance. A year later gambling houses and theatres, both in San Francisco and Sacramento, were closed on Sunday, and we find the “Alta California” remarking on a Monday morning in May, “Yesterday all was like Sunday in the East, as quiet as the fury of the winds would allow. Two years ago under similar circumstances many hundreds of men would have forgotten the day, and the busy hum of business would have rung throughout the land.”
In the mines Sunday, at first, was almost wholly disregarded; but abstention from work on that day was soon found to be a physical necessity. Thus an English miner wrote home, “We have all of us given over working on Sundays, as we found the toil on six successive days quite hard enough.”
Men who stood by their principles in California never lost anything by that course. A merchant from Salem, Massachusetts, came up the Sacramento River with a cargo of goods in December, 1848. Early on the morning after his arrival three men with three mules appeared on the bank of the river to purchase supplies for the mines. It being Sunday, however, the man from Salem refused to do business on that day, but, after the New England fashion, accommodated his intending customers with a little good advice. This they resented in a really violent manner, and went off in a rage, swearing that they would never trade with such a Puritanical hypocrite. Yet they came back the next morning, purchased goods then, and on various later occasions, and finally made the Sabbath-keeper their banker, depositing in his safe many thousands of dollars.
Even a matter so unpopular as that of temperance reform was not neglected by the religious people. A temperance society was organized at Sacramento in June, 1850, addresses were made in the Methodist chapel, and numerous persons, including some city officials, signed a total abstinence pledge. “The subject is an old one,” the “Sacramento Transcript” naïvely remarked; “but this is a new country. Temperance is rather a new idea here, and its introduction among us seems almost like a novel movement.” In the same month and year a similar society was formed in San Francisco, and arrangements were made to celebrate the Fourth of July “on temperance principles.”
The most genuine, the most thorough-going kind of religion found in California was that of the Western Pioneers, who were mainly Methodists and Baptists of a rude, primitive sort. Nothing could be further from Bret Harte’s manner of thinking, and yet he has depicted the type with his usual insight, though perhaps not quite with his usual sympathy. Joshua Rylands, in Mr. Jack Hamlin’s Mediation (a story already mentioned), is one example of it, and Madison Wayne, in The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, is another. Of all Bret Harte’s stories this is the most tragic, a terrible fate overtaking every one of the four characters who figure in it. Madison Wayne is a Calvinistic Puritan,—a New Englander such as has not been seen in New England for a hundred years, but only in that Far West to which New England men penetrated, and in which New England ideas and beliefs, protected by the isolation of prairie and forest, survived the scientific and religious changes of two centuries.
In A Night at Hays’ we have the same character under a more morose aspect. “Always a severe Presbyterian and an uncompromising deacon, he grew more rigid, sectarian, and narrow day by day.... A grim landlord, hard creditor, close-fisted patron, and a smileless neighbor who neither gambled nor drank, old Hays, as he was called, while yet scarce fifty, had few acquaintances and fewer friends.”
In An Apostle of the Tules Bret Harte has described a camp-meeting of Calvinistic families whose gloom was heightened by malaria contracted from the Stockton marshes. “One might have smiled at the idea of the vendetta-following Ferguses praying for ‘justification by faith’; but the actual spectacle of old Simon Fergus, whose shotgun was still in his wagon, offering up that appeal with streaming eyes and agonized features, was painful beyond a doubt.”
As for Bret Harte’s own religious views, it can scarcely be said that he had any. He was indeed brought up with some strictness as an Episcopalian, his mother being of that faith; and when he returned from her funeral with his sisters, he seemed deeply moved by the beauty of the Episcopal burial service, and expressed the hope that it would be read at his own grave. His friends in this country remember that he declined to take part in certain amusements on Sunday, remarking that, though he saw no harm in them, he could not shake off the more strict notions of Sunday observance in which he had been trained as a child. Through life he had a horror of gambling, and always refused even to play cards for money. In San Francisco he used to attend the church where his friend Starr King preached, and in New York he was often present at another Unitarian church, that of the Reverend O. B. Frothingham; but this seems to have been the extent of his church-going, and of his connection, external or internal, with any form of Christianity.