Pioneers, the men who come after you will rule only the hour in which they live. You are the masters of the approaching centuries. They come bending like slaves at your feet, and wait to know your pleasure. It is yours, if you will, to fill those centuries with the glory of California and your own high renown. All that you do in these early plastic times of the state will remain stamped upon her forever, and you sit here, masters, while the monuments of your own immortal fame are being built.
Pioneers of California, the eyes of the world are fixed upon this young state; they are fixed upon you. A great trust is committed to your hands by the events that have made you pioneers. Take care that you discharge that trust with honor to yourselves, and so that California may achieve the glorious destiny that is her due. Take care that you so conduct the youth of this state, that, centuries hereafter, your descendants may say proudly of their ancestors, “He came in with the pioneers.”—From “Notable Speeches by Notable Speakers of the Greater West,” by the kind permission of the publisher, the Harr Wagner Company, San Francisco.
[Frederick Palmer Tracy was a California pioneer, and attorney-at-law in San Francisco, and one of the founders of the Republican party in California. He was an eloquent political speaker in the early days when his party was in a hopeless minority. He was a member of the California delegation to the Chicago convention which nominated Abraham Lincoln for President of the United States, and was appointed on the Committee on Platform and Resolutions. He drafted the famous platform of that convention, which was adopted by the committee as he wrote it, with only slight changes. He was engaged in the Lincoln campaign to stump the state of New York, and died during that campaign, worn out by exposure and loss of sleep.]
THE REDWOODS
By W. H. L. Barnes
(Delivered at a midsummer “jinks” of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco.)
The possessor of a name more ancient than the crusaders will show you, in the land of his birth, ancestral trees that surround his lordly domain, and proudly exhibit some gnarled and ugly oak, which by him is associated with some distant event in his own family, or with the history of the hoary races of the brave nation of which he forms a part. Here his ancestors builded a castle before the Middle Ages, with defensive moat and parapet, with keep and dungeon, all long since fallen into ruin,—melted in the unperceived decay of ages, or bruised into it by the vigor of the battering-ram of some gallant and feudal company.
He will say to you, “All these are mine. They are part of my race, and my race is of them.” But what are all his possessions—castle, moat, dungeon, or gnarled oak—beside the ancient brotherhood of venerable trees to which we have been admitted, and whose stately silence we have been permitted to break? Our trees were old before the Roman invaded Britain; old before the Saxon followed Hengist and Horsa; old before the Vikings sailed the northern seas. For ages piled upon ages, even before letters were known, before history commenced to make its record of the doings of nations and races, these trees and their ancestors builded and renewed their leafy castles.
The groupings of the present monarchs of the forest show that these are but the descendants of still more ancient growths; were once nothing but saplings that sprung from the superabundant life of some giant trunk long since vanished, and whose grave is sentineled by his stalwart children. How shall we measure the vigor and force which they possess? How shall we comprehend by what method the stately body, ever rising in monumental force toward the skies, draws its being from the deep and busy fingers of the roots, and from them lifts the alchemized earth and water higher and still higher, until both feed and nourish the smallest leaf and spear-point of the topmost shaft,—spear-point that, in its turn, is destined in some future age to become a stalwart trunk, crowding with its growth ever upward and onward towards the stars?