The home-makers, in peaceful campaigns of seed-time and harvest, develop new treasures. Great interests are introduced. The gold of field, orchard, and harvest falls into the hands of the industrious farmers. These are the men whose only weapons are scythe and sickle. They are the real Fathers of the Pacific. Roving over the interior, the miners leave a land as nearly ruined as human effort can render it. In the wake of these nugget-hunters, future years bring those who make the abandoned hills lovely with scattered homes. They are now hidden by orchards, vineyards, and gardens. Peaceful flocks and herds prove that the Golden Age of California is not to be these wild days of the barbaric Forty-niner.
Maxime Valois sees the land sweeping in unrivalled beauty to the Colorado. Free to the snowy peaks of the Sacramento, the rich plains roll. He knows that there will be here yet,
"Scattered cities crowning these, Whose far white walls along them shine, With fields which promise corn and wine."
He realizes that transient California must yield to stable conditions. Some civilized society will succeed the masses as lacking in fibre as a rope of sand. Already the days of roving adventure are over. There are wanderers, gamblers, fugitives, ex-criminals, and outcasts enough within the limits of the new land. Siren and adventuress, women of nameless history and gloomy future, yet abound. They throng the shabby temporary camps or tent cities. He knows there is no self-perpetuation in the mass of men roving in the river valleys. Better men must yet rule.
A visit to San Francisco and other large places proves that the social and commercial element is supplied from the Northern, Eastern, and Middle States. Their professional men will be predominant also.
In the interior, the farmers of the West and the sagacious planters of the South control.
As May-day approaches, Valois, at San Francisco in 1853, sees a procession of growing children. There, thousands of happy young faces of school-children, appear bearing roses in innocent hands.
Philip Hardin gives him the details of the coming struggle of North and South. It is a battle for the coast from Arizona to Oregon. Lost to England, Russia, and France, lost to the Mormons by stupidity or neglect, this West is lost to the South by the defeat of slavery. Industrious farmers come, in fairly equal numbers, from the Northern and Southern agricultural States. The people of the Atlantic free States come with their commerce, capital, and institutions. The fiat of Webster, Clay, and Seward has placed the guardian angel of freedom at the gates and passes of California. The Southerner cannot transfer his human slave capital to the far West. The very winds sing freedom's song on the wooded heights of the Sierras.
Philip Hardin sighs, as he drains his glass, "Valois, our people have doomed the South to a secondary standing in the Union. This fatal blunder in the West ruins us. Benton and Fremont's precipitancy thwarted our statesmen. This gold, the votes of these new States, the future commerce, the immense resources of the West, all are cast in the balance against us. We must work for a Western republic. We must wait till we can fight for Southern rights. We will conquer these ocean States. We will have this land yet."
The legal Mephisto and his pupil are true to the Southern cause. Neither of them can measure the coming forces of Freedom. Rosalie Leese, the pioneer white child of California, born in 1838, at Yerba Buena, was the first of countless thousands of free-born American children. In the unpolluted West the breath of slavery shall never blight a single human existence. Old Captain Richardson and Jacob Leese, pioneers of the magic city of San Francisco, gaze upon the beautiful ranks of smiling school-children, in happy troops. They have no regrets, like the knights of slavery, to see their places in life filled by free-born young pilgrims of life. All hail the native sons and daughters of the Golden West!