THE FIRST PAPER PUBLISHED IN CALIFORNIA
It measured only about 8x12 inches. The paper was established by Walter Colton who had had journalistic experience as editor of the Philadelphia North American. This issue was published scarcely a month after the American occupation.
Colton decided that a new school house was necessary—"to be sixty feet by thirty, two stories, with a handsome portico. The labor of the convicts, the taxes on rum, and the banks of the gamblers must put it up," he writes. "Some think my project impracticable; we shall see,"—and he gives the following account of how some gamblers were made to contribute to this enterprise:
"A nest of gamblers arrived in town yesterday, and last evening, opened a Monte at the hotel."
After stationing a file of soldiers at the outer doors, Colton entered to find no one, "save one Sonoranian, composedly smoking his cigarito. I desired the honor of an introduction to his companions. At this moment a feigned snore broke on my ear from a bed in the corner of the apartment."
"'Ha! Dutre, is that you? Come, tumble up, and aid me in stirring out the rest.' He pointed under the bed, where I discovered a multitude of feet and legs radiating as from a common center."
"'Hallo there, friends—turn out.'... Their plight and discovery threw them into a laugh at each other." He and his secretary found others "in every imaginable position—some in the beds, some under them, several in the closets, two in a hogshead, and one up a chimney. Mr. R—— from Missouri—known here as the 'prairie-wolf'—I found between two bed-ticks, half smothered with the feathers. He was the ringleader, and raises a Monte table wherever he goes, as regularly as a whale comes to the surface to blow. All shouted as he tumbled out from his ticks. Among the rest I found the Alcalde of San Francisco, a gentleman of education and refinement, who never plays himself, but who, on this occasion, had come to witness the excitement. I gathered them all, some fifty in number, into the large saloon, and told them the only speech I had to make was in the shape of a fine of twenty dollars each. The more astute began to demur on the plea of not guilty, as no cards and no money had been discovered, and as for beds, a man had as good a right to sleep under one as in it. I told them that was a matter of taste, misfortune often made strange bedfellows, and the only way to get out of the scrape was to pay up. Dr. W—— was the first to plank down.
"'Come, my good fellows,' said the doctor, 'pay up, and no grumbling: this money goes to build a school house, where I hope our children will be taught better principles than they gather from the examples of their fathers.'"
Of how the labor of the prisoners united with the money of gamblers to build the needed school, he writes:
"One of the prisoners, an Englishman, ventured a criticism of the stonework of another prisoner, which revealed the fact of his being a stonecutter himself. I immediately set him at work at his old trade. But he feigned utter ignorance of it, and spoiled several blocks in making his feint good. I then ordered him into a deep well where the water had given out, to drill and blast rocks.... Finding that the well was to be sunk some twenty feet deeper, ... he requested that he might be permitted to try his chisel again. Permission was given, and he is now shaping stones fit to be laid in the walls of a cathedral. He was taken up for disorderly conduct, and he is now at work on a school house, where the principles of good order are the first things to be taught."
Colton gives an instance of trust justified on an occasion when, pressed for funds, he created a "trusty."
"The most faithful and reliable guard that I have ever had over the prisoners is himself a prisoner. He had been a lieutenant in the Mexican army, and was sentenced, for a flagrant breach of the peace, to the public works for one year. I determined to make an experiment with this lieutenant; had him brought before me; ordered the ball and chain to be taken from his leg, and placed a double-barrelled gun, loaded and primed, in his hands.
"'Take that musket and proceed with the prisoners to the stone quarry; return them to their cells before sunset, and report to me.'
"'Your order, Señor Alcalde, shall be faithfully obeyed.'
"A constable reconnoitered and found all well. At sunset the lieutenant entered the office, and reported the prisoners in their cells, and all safe.
"'Very well, José, now make yourself safe, and that will do.' He accordingly returned to his prison, and from that day to this has been my most faithful and reliable guard."
"If there is anything on earth besides religion for which I would die," Colton declares, "it is the right of trial by jury." And he impanelled the first jury ever summoned in California. One-third were Mexicans, one-third Californians, and the other third Americans. The plaintiff spoke in English, the defendant in French, the jury, save the Americans, Spanish—"and the witnesses all the languages known to California."
"The inhabitants said it was what they liked—that there could be no bribery in it—that the opinion of twelve honest men should set the case forever at rest. And so it did, though neither party completely triumphed." He gives the credit for the satisfactory termination of this polyglot case to "the tact of Mr. Hartnell, the interpreter, and the absence of young lawyers."