Masonry palaces will find foundations far out beyond where the old CYANE now lies. Her grinning ports hold Uncle Sam's hushed thunder-bolts. It is the downfall of the old REGIME.
Shed, tent, house, barrack, hut, dug-out, ship's cabin—everything which will cover a head from the salt night fog is in service. The Mexican adobe house disappears. Pretentious hotels and storehouses are quickly run up in wood. The mails are taking orders to the East for completed houses to come "around the Horn." Sheet-iron buildings are brought from England. A cut stone granite bank arrives in blocks from far-off China.
Vessels with flour from Chile, goods from Australia, and supplies from New York and Boston bring machinery and tools. Flour, saw, and grist mills are provided. Every luxury is already on the way from Liverpool, Bordeaux, Havre, Hamburg, Genoa, and Glasgow. These vessels bring swarms of natives of every clime. They hasten to a land where all are on an equal footing of open adventure, a land where gold is under every foot.
Without class, aristocracy, history, or social past, California's "golden days" are of the future.
Strange that in thirty years' residence of the sly Muscovites at Fort Ross, in the long, idle leisure of the employees of the Hudson Bay station at Yerba Buena Cove from 1836 to 1846, even with the astute Swiss Captain Sutter at New Helvetia, all capacities of the fruitful land have been so strangely ignored.
The slumber of two hundred and fifty years is over. Frenchman, Russian, Englishman, what opiate's drowsy charms dulled your eager eyes so long here? Thousands of miles of virgin lands, countless millions of treasures, royal forests and hills yet to grow under harvest of olive and vine—all this the mole-like eyes of the olden days have never seen.
Even the Mormons acted with the supine ignorance of the foreigners. They scorned to pick this jewel up. Judicious Brigham Young from the Great Salt Lake finally sends emissaries to spy and report. Like the wind his swift messengers go east to divert strong battalions of the Mormon converts from Europe, under trusted leaders, to San Francisco. Can he extend his self-built empire to the Pacific Slope? Brigham may be a new Mahomet, a newer Napoleon, for he has the genius of both.
Alas! when the Mormon bands arrive, Sam Brannard, their leader, abandons the new creed of "Mormon" for the newer creed of "Mammon." He becomes a mercantile giant. The disciples scatter as gold-seekers. California is lost to the Mormons. Even so! Fate, providence, destiny, or some cold evolution of necessary order, draws up the blue curtains of the West. It pins them to our country's flag with a new, glittering star, "California."
With eager interest Valois joins Philip Hardin. There is a social fever in the air. His friends are all statesmen in this chrysalis of territorial development. They are old hands at political intrigue. They would modestly be senators, governors, and rulers. They would cheerfully serve a grateful State.
A band of sturdy cavaliers, they ride out, down the bay shores. They cross the Santa Clara and Salinas valleys toward Monterey.