"Nearly one million and a half of dollars had been paid into the custom-house, as duties on imported goods, before our revenue laws had been extended over the country; and the people complained bitterly that they were thus heavily taxed without being provided with a government for their protection, or laws which they could understand, or allowed the right to be represented in the councils of the nation.
"While anxiously waiting the action of Congress, oppressed and embarrassed by this state of affairs, and feeling the pressing necessity of applying such remedies as were in their power, and circumstances seemed to justify, they resolved to substitute laws of their own for the existing system, and to establish tribunals for their proper and faithful administration.
"In obedience, therefore, to the extraordinary exigencies of their condition, the people of the city of San Francisco elected members to form a legislature, and clothed them with full powers to pass laws.
"The communities of Sonoma and of Sacramento city followed the example.
"Thus were three legislative bodies organized; the two most distant being only one hundred and thirty miles apart.
"Other movements of the kind were threatened, and doubtless would have followed, in other sections of the territory, had they not been arrested by the formation of a State government.
"While the people of California were looking to Congress for a territorial government, it was quite evident that such an organization was daily becoming less suited to their condition, which was entirely different from that of any of the territories out of which the new States of the Union had been formed.
"Those territories had been at first slowly and sparsely peopled by a few hunters and farmers, who penetrated the wilderness, or traveled the prairies, in search of game or a new home; and, when thus gradually their population warranted it, a government was provided for them. They, however, had no foreign commerce, nor any thing beyond the ordinary pursuits of agriculture, and the various branches of business which usually accompany it, to induce immigration within their borders. Several years were required to give them sufficient population and wealth to place them in a condition to require, or enable them to support, a State government.
"Not so with California. The discovery of the vast metallic and mineral wealth in her mountains had already attracted to her, in the space of twelve months, more than one hundred thousand people. An extensive commerce had sprung up with China, the ports of Mexico on the Pacific, Chili, and Australia.
"Hundreds of vessels from the Atlantic ports of the Union, freighted with our manufactures and agricultural products, and filled with our fellow-citizens, had arrived, or were on their passage round Cape Horn; so that, in the month of June last, (1849) there were more than three hundred sea-going vessels in the port of San Francisco.