To incorporate the cities of Benecia, San Diego, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sonoma, and Santa Barbara, and a general act for the incorporation of cities; concerning the State revenue, etc., and its management; creating loans temporarily, appropriations, and other fiscal acts; relating to the appointment of pilots, regulating the duties of harbor masters, declaring certain rivers, etc., navigable, creating health officers for San Francisco, creating a marine hospital, regulating quarantine at San Francisco, providing for the inspection of steamboats; subdividing the State into counties, establishing county seats and providing for the complete organization of all the counties; organizing the supreme court, providing for the early publication of the laws, organizing district courts throughout the State, establishing a municipal court in San Francisco, abolishing all laws in force in the State, except such as were passed by this Legislature, adopting the common law, regulating the interest of money, public ferries, notaries public, jails and jailers, limited partnerships, roads and highways, public elections, volunteer companies, wills, militia, liens of mechanics and others, descents and distributions, bills of exchange and promissory notes, constables, coroners, guardians, fraudulent conveyances and contracts, the rights of husband and wife, incorporation of colleges, marriages, auctioneers, government and protection of the Indians, settlement of the estates of deceased persons, proceedings against debtor by attachment; creating the office of State assayer, melter and refiner of gold, to regulate Senatorial and Assembly districts, prescribing the mode of maintaining and defending possessory actions on lands belonging to the United States; to prevent the importation of convicts; for the better regulation of the mines and the government of foreign miners, the national Washington monument, pay of chaplain, the Pacific railway, and concerning grants of land by the General Government to commissioned officers who served in the late war with Mexico.
Here we have all the machinery necessary for the full regulation of a large, commercial, agricultural, manufacturing, and mining community. The session of the Legislature must have been laborious, indeed; but the members have acquitted themselves of their arduous duties rapidly and well. One great measure adapted by the Legislature was the substitution of the common law for the uncertain civil law which existed in California when ceded to the United States. The whole legal administration will now conform to that of most of the other States of the Union. The provisions in the Constitution for the purpose of education, have been nobly carried out by an act for the incorporation of colleges.
Agriculture in California appears to be improving, and as it is getting to be as profitable as any thing else, it is attracting increased attention. Boxes of garden seeds which had cost nine dollars, have been sold for one hundred dollars, and scythes which cost three dollars, sold for forty-five dollars. The seeds which were sent around Cape Horn, were almost useless, while those which went over the Isthmus, hermetically sealed, came up first. One man near San Jose, has made fifty thousand dollars by raising potatoes. What toil in digging and washing gold would be necessary to realize that amount!
Among the recent mining incidents, the following is remarkable:—Last winter, three men accidentally struck upon a rich deposit of gold, in a gulch about twelve miles from Knight's Ferry, on the Stanislaus River, and four or five miles back from it. They worked this vein with great success, managing to keep it a secret, until an Indian, wandering through the locality, discovered the secret, and communicated it to his tribe. The next day, several hundred Indians fell to work, with the same success; but as they spent their earnings in gambling and drinking at night, they incautiously let out the secret, and it spread among the whites. The latter, without scruple, took possession of the ground, and set the Indians adrift. An alcalde was elected, the ground staked off, and allotted to the several claimants. This gulch, although rifled of its richest treasures, afforded good digging for a large number of persons, for some weeks, many carrying away, when the water failed, a thousand dollars and upwards, as the result of their labors. The three discoverers of the gulch, took away with them about forty pounds of gold to each man, all scraped up in the short space of seven weeks.
Imitation lumps of gold have been made and brought into circulation in California. The State Assayer states that above forty specimens have been brought to his notice. They are generally in size from four to five ounces to a pound in weight—quartz, and every thing else necessary to make them look right, properly intermixed.
It has been definitely settled that gold does exist in the vicinity of San José. Specimens have been taken to San Francisco.
Several artesian wells have been constructed at San Francisco, since the second great fire, and it is thought that others will soon add to the comfort and convenience of the people of that city. The want of good water for drinking purposes, has been the most serious objection to San Francisco as a place of residence; and additional incentive to exertion in the matter is furnished by the constant apprehension of destructive fires.[20]
Coal has been discovered in California, in various places, and is reported to abound in considerable quantities in the neighborhood of San Francisco. Every day developes some new wealth of this land of treasure, and we regard the discovery of the abundance of coal as in the highest degree important to the residents of California. Even amid the news of the extraordinary yield of the gold region during the present year, 1850, when a single vessel, in one trip, brings $2,000,000 worth of gold dust to the United States we can pause to notice the discovery of the more useful substances.
The Trinity River and Humboldt Harbor, in the north-western part of California, have lately become a resort for the superfluous population of the Sacramento and San Joaquin regions. The harbor is pronounced a very good one, and the discovery of abundance of gold on the branches of Trinity River, will, doubtless, contribute to the building of a large town upon its shores.