These two groups of remarkable men, the future railroad princes, and the budding bonanza kings, represent cunning, daring, energy, fortitude, and the remarkable powers of transition of the Western resident.
The future land barons are as yet merely sly, waiting schemers. They are trusting to compound interest, rotten officials, and neglected laws to get possession of ducal domains. The bankers, merchant princes, and stock operators are writing their names fast in California's strange "Libro d'oro." All is restlessness. All is a mere waiting for the turbid floods of seething human life to settle down. In the newer discoveries of Nevada, in the suspense of the war, the railroads are yet only half finished, croaked at mournfully by the befogged Solons of the press. All is transition.
It is only when the first generation of children born in California will reach maturity in the 'eighties; only when the tide of carefully planned migration from North and South, after the war, reaches the West, that life becomes regular. Only when the railways make the new State a world's thoroughfare, and the slavery stain is washed from our flag, that civilization plants the foundations of her solid temples along the Pacific.
There is no crystallization until the generation of mere adventurers begin to drop into graves on hillside and by the sea. The first gold-seekers must pass out from active affairs before the real State is honestly builded up.
No man, not even Philip Hardin, could foresee, with the undecided problems of 1860, what would be the status of California in ten years, as to law, finance, commerce, or morals.
A sudden start might take the mass of the people to a new Frazer River or another Australia. They might rush to the wilds of some frontier treasury of nature, now unknown.
Even Philip Hardin dared not dream that humble bar-keepers would blossom out into great bank presidents, that signatures, once potent only on the saloon "slate," would be smiled on by "friend Rothschild" and "brother Baring." The "lightning changes" of the burlesque social life of Western America begin to appear. It is a wild dream that the hands now toiling with the pick or carrying the miner's tin dinner-pail, would close in friendship on the aristocratic palm of H.R.H. Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales. The "chambermaid's own" romances would not dare to predict that ladies bred to the broom and tub or the useful omnipotent "fry pan," would smile on duchesses, crony with princesses, or regulate their visiting lists by the "Almanach de Gotha."
Their great magician is Gold. In power, in pleasing witchery of potent influence; insidious flattery of pleasure; in remorseless persecution of the penniless, all wonders are its work. Ariel, Mephisto, Moloch, thou, Gold! King Gold! and thy brother, Silver!
While Philip Hardin speculated from his lofty eyrie, the San Francisco hills are now covered with the unsubstantial palaces of the first successful residents. He dared not dream that the redwood boxes called mansions, in which the wealthy lived in the days of '60, would give way to the lordly castles of "Nob Hill."
These castles, whether of railroad tyrant, bonanza baron, or banking conspirator, were yet castles in the air.