The Pacific Railroad--Open: How to Go: What to See

IV.

AT Cheyenne, we take the cars, for aV the grand ride over the Rocky Mountain section of the track, and into Salt Lake Valley. An hour or so from Cheyenne brings us to Sherman, the highest point (8,200 feet) of the entire railroad line. But we feel, rather than see, the evidences of the fact. The air is thin and chill, even under a July or August sun ; but it is a high plain, and not mountain-tops, that the track rests upon. There are bare, smoothly rounded hills about, and scattered over these are huge boulders, or piles of boulders, like remnants of mountains ; but the mountains themselves stand far away in the dim distance ; and the train speeds free and nearly straight over an open and comparatively level country, crossing an occasional deep ravine or river-bed, cutting through a rocky fragment of the original hill-tops, but on the whole finding an easy way through the one hundred and fifty miles that counted, in the government subsidy, as the peculiarly mountainous section, and had the exceptional allowance of $48,000 a mile. A clean, reddish granite, ground fine by nature, makes the most compact and enduring of road-beds ; the ties come from thin forests in the distant hills ; and altogether we are still in a paradise for railroad contractors.

Down and on from Sherman a thousand feet and twenty-five miles, the land grows more level still, and the Laramie Plains spread a broad fifty miles around us. They are like one of the Parks below in Colorado, only the mountains do not lie around so close and commanding, and the views are less picturesque, and less rich. But a visit to the neighboring hills will repay the sportsman ; a considerable village is springing up at Laramie ; the Plains are famous in overland emigrant travel, and were long the head-quarters for government supplies and soldiers in the mountains ; and those of us who failed to look into the Parks of Colorado will do well to stop here a day or two.

Beyond, the country grows gradually barren ; and after crossing the North Platte River, we enter upon one hundred and fifty miles of desert,—a waterless, treeless, grassless, hilly plain ; the soil fine, dry, and impregnated with alkali ; the air pure, dry, and cool, — a section shudderingly remembered by slow-travelling emigrants, and memorable in the history of railroad construction for the necessity, during the progress of the work through it, of adding a water train to the trains supplying materials and food. Rightly-named Bitter Creek gathers the sluggish surface waters of the region, and carries them on to Green River, reaching which, we enter upon new and better scenes. The water increases and freshens, the verdure improves ; but the traveller is most attracted by the novel and imposing forms of architecture that Nature has left, to mark her history, upon these still open plains. Long, wide troughs, as of departed rivers ; long, level embankments, as of railroad tracks or endless fortifications ; huge hills of fantastic shapes rising abruptly from the plain, — great square mounds of rock and earth, halfformed pyramids, — it would seem as if a generation of giants had built their cities and tombs, and left their work to awe and humble their puny successors. The Black, the Pilot, and the Church Buttes are among the more celebrated of these huge monumental mountains standing on the level plain ; but the railway track passes out of sight of all except the Church Butte, which, seen under favorable lights, impresses the imagination like a grand old cathedral going to decay, quaint in its crumbling ornaments, majestic in its proportions. They seem like the more numerous and fantastic illustrations of Nature’s frolicsome art in Southern Colorado, to be remains of granite hills, which wind and water, and especially the vast columns of sand, whirling with lordly force through the air, — literally moving mountains, — have left to hint the past, and tell the story of their several achievements. Not unfitly, there as here, these buttes have won the title of “ Monuments to the Gods.”

Passing the waters that flow south to the Colorado, we come to those that run west to the Salt Lake Basin. Nature as a railroad engineer now deserts us; and science and mighty labor are summoned to make a path for the track through and down these western ranges of the Rocky Mountains. Over and down the high hills, the road at last reaches Echo Canyon, and following that to its entrance into Weber Canyon, proceeds by this into the Valley of the Salt Lake. These canyons are narrow and rugged, with high, perpendicular walls of red rock, with picturesque openings and fresh running streams, with little Mormon farms and every element of agreeable and inspiring scenery. The mountain-tops are white with snow ; the valleys are green with grass or gay with flowers ; and those greatly cherished, but long-missed companions of man, the trees, come in to freshen and familiarize the scene. Within this region the traveller towards the west finds the first tunnels of the road ; and of these five, aggregating nearly two thousand feet, occur between Green River and the Salt Lake Valley.

Our travellers across the continent, men or women, will not need urging to stop at Salt Lake City, though it lies forty miles south of Ogden, where the Pacific Railroad enters and crosses the Salt Lake Valley. The social and the natural phenomena centring there make it perhaps the most interesting feature in our journey. The courage of men who undertake the management of numberless wives will attract one sex, while the audacity of the thing will arouse the wonder, if not the worship, of the other. Here too, are problems for the statesman, questions for the philosopher, and puzzles for the scientific student. The science of Salt Lake City, social and natural, presents problems not easily solved; and one must be content to look upon the surface of things and move on. There will be, this summer, a branch railroad to the city, and sooner or later the track will proceed on south, through the lower Mormon settlements, to Arizona.

The town will delight us by its location on a high plain overlooking the broad valley of the Jordan, with Camp Douglas behind, on a higher bench of land, and the Wahsatch Mountains, with winter caps, hanging above it on the north and east; while opposite, lower mountains make a western horizon, and Salt Lake, an inland ocean, ripples and shimmers under the noonday sun, fifteen miles away. Broad streets, with irrigating brooks pouring down their gutters, good hotels, large and well-supplied stores, an abundant market, a large and well-appointed theatre,—run in the name and for the benefit of the Church, — gardens luxuriant with fruit — the peach and the strawberry most abounding—and bountiful with vegetables, hot sulphur springs in the suburbs, inviting most delicious baths, summer days, dry and pure, yet cool nights, — all will seduce the senses and minister to our joy ; and the traveller may well sing, with Bishop Heber, that “ every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.” Three or four days will suffice for all he need see or know of Utah or the Mormons. In this time he may enjoy a drive out to Salt Lake, with a bath and a sail, if they are to be had, guarding his mouth and eyes from the water, which is sharply salt, and his stomach from sea-sickness, for the wind makes short waves on this sea ; he can attend, if it is Sunday, — and he should try to pass Sunday here, — the services in the grand Church Square, where he will see the old and new Tabernacles, and the foundations of the grand Mormon cathedral, as well as an audience of several thousand Mormons, affording an interesting study of humanity ; he may walk under the high wall enclosing Brigham Young’s equally grand square opposite, with tithing-house, home for thirty wives and seventy children, family school-house, all the central business offices of church and state, stables and warehouses to match so vast an establishment, and gardens of grapes and peaches and pears and flowers and vegetables, all within the area ; and he may ponder, as he walks, the contending passions and conflicting experiences, the crushed loves and the subdued hates, the moral murders perpetrated, the physical murders planned, within this tenacre circuit of wall; he may make an excursion back to the mouth of the canyon that overlooks city and valley, numbering the front doors of the long, low adobe cottages, as the simplest means of learning how many wives each owner has, and wondering if half of those children, that swarm in every door-yard and play around every mudpuddle, have any idea who their fathers are.

The visitor will busy himself, of course, with a dozen questions and a dozen theories about Mormonism, about polygamy and Brigham Young, and when and how it is all coming to an end. Perhaps if he hears earnest Mormons talk, he will wonder in his heart whether it is possible they are right, — whether this little leaven in Utah is, as they say, bound to leaven the whole American lump, and polygamy is to become the law of the sexes, and Mormonism the religion of the future;—which is all well enough, if he keeps his wondering doubt to himself But no social, political, and religious organization so foreign to all our principles of life and growth as this of Brigham Young in Utah, exists elsewhere in America, or even in Europe ; it proceeds from and depends upon a single will ; and a verylittle knowledge of history and its philosophy, and less of our national instincts and faith in progress, will enable the observer to see that the Mormon system must give way, and be swept almost into forgetfulness by the advancing tide of American emigration and American civilization. There is nothing in our American fundamentals that is not outraged by the theories and practice of the autocracy ruling here in Utah ; and unless we are speedily going back to the civilization of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this thing will not be, cannot be. And yet, a beautiful and prosperous city of thirty thousand inhabitants, a population in the surrounding territory of one hundred thousand, making a garden here in the dry desert of this central basin of the continent, will impress the traveller wonderfully, as it ought, with the power of a religious fanaticism, directed by a lordly will and organizing a faithful, simple industry, to create wealth and to set in motion many of the elements of progress and civilization. Without the presence of the Mormons, who discovered the pathway, and have fed those who came out upon it, all this central region of our great West would be now many years behind its actual development, and the railroad, instead of being finished, would hardly have been begun.

V.

There is no end to the anomalies of nature in this great interior American basin, of which the Salt Lake Valley is alike the threshold, the gem, and a sub-specimen. But the study of them is now accompanied with so many drawbacks that the pleasure-traveller will, after leaving Salt Lake City, seek to put them all between him and the Sierras as speedily as possible. Ascending and passing out of the valley, the road skirts the northern shore of the lake, crossing Bear River, its chief tributary, and going through the Promontory Mountains, which rise from the lake, on the north. Here the two companies building the railroad, from east and west, join their tracks ; though at the present writing, each is determined on a distinct connection with Salt Lake City ; from here the stage lines start, northeast and northwest, to Montana and Idaho ; and from here, too, the Union or Eastern Pacific Company intends to stretch a branch road up to and along the Snake branch of the Columbia River, through Idaho, and down the Columbia to the sea, thus making for itself a distinct connection with the Pacific Ocean. The distance is six hundred and fifty miles ; but for half of it steamboats can run on the rivers, so that the first construction, to insure steam communication, is comparatively not large, and will hardly require more money than the profits of the company in building the main line.

Stretching out from Salt Lake through high broad valleys, or plains, barren and forbidding, the road seeks the Humboldt Valley, and follows that river for two hundred and thirty miles. This is the old emigrant route across the continent ; cheerless and dreary enough, indeed ; but far more tolerable than the old stage road, which led us south of Salt Lake, and crossed Nevada at about its centre. The river is sluggish and muddy, and fertilizes but a narrow strip of land in its path ; it lies along a trough between high volcanic table-lands on the north, and the ranges of mountains which, every fifteen or twenty miles, lead off south through Nevada, and out of whose snows it gathers its feeble waters. Where the road enters the valley, wide and watery meadows spread out in a sickly oasis ; and where it leaves the valley, the same phenomenon is repeated. For the rest, there is little to divert the traveller, nothing to inspire him but the dry, clear air, and the rounded outlines of the bare hills. Elko, where the main tributary of the Humboldt comes out of the snow-capped East Humboldt Mountains,—which are ten thousand to twelve thousand feet high, and the backbone of the great basin,—is the point of departure for the new silver mines of White Pine, the latest sensation of the sensation-loving Pacific coast. They lie one hundred and forty miles south of the railroad, in Southeastern Nevada, and if they hold out as they have begun, with a pretty sure promise of five millions the first year, they will force the first southern crossrailroad to the Colorado, and checkmate Mormonism in the south.

A little farther out we touch a bit of emigrant sentiment in Maggie Creek, so named for a pretty little Scotch girl, pet of one of the early columns of the army of civilization crossing this way years ago. Here is Catlin, a town of hopes, marking a point of departure from the west for Idaho. Near here, too, if the locomotive breaks down, the traveller may refresh himself by climbing a little knob, a few rods from the road, and finding that nature has improved an old crater by turning it into a mammoth hot sulphur bath-tub. At Argenta, he will be invited to a stage ride of ninety miles up the Reese River Valley to Austin ; but if he has ever invested in any of its mines, he will decline with a shudder, and set his face resolutely west. The glory of Austin is a trifle dimmed now ; but it has had its five or six thousand inhabitants, and was the successor of “ Washoe,” and the forerunner of White Pine, in the series of mining movements that have made Nevada, and even threaten to perpetuate her existence as a State in spite of the lack of everything else that makes and maintains states.

If we are bent on novelty, eighteen miles farther west we shall switch off our car for half a day, and borrow horses, and gallop away south among the barren hills and more barren valleys, into the Whirlwind Valley, where sulphurous waters beat and bubble beneath the surface like numerous struggling hidden pumps or steam-engines, and occasionally burst out in columns of burning water, and clouds of hot steam. Great, still pools invite to a bath, yet mayhap would overtake the bather with a scalding, crystallizing explosion, and leave him a monumental statue of his temerity, and a new wonder of Nature in the Great Basin. Frequently she revenges herself here for her lack of all the ordinary natural graces by sending up seething chemicals, in bursts that seem the faint breathings of dying volcanoes, or the early efforts of new ones.

Passing between the Trinity Mountains on the north and the West Humboldt on the south, and through a mining district of great hopes, large prospecting, and small returns, the road now leaves the Humboldt River, — which sneaks off among the hills, to die in the sands, — and crosses the Truckee Desert — forty miles of the dreariest country it has yet traversed. Here the soil is arid, and full of alkali; the scenery, wild and savage ; the only life, lizards and jackass rabbits; the only relief to the monotony of the flat landscape, brown, bare mountains ; the only pleasure before the traveller, the end of the road, which brings him within sound of the waters and the winds of the California Mountains.

Along the Truckee to Reno, we should take a day to see Virginia City and Gold Hill, fourteen miles away on a branch road. The great Comstock lode lies under these two towns ; they are built along the mountain-side, upon the crust of the great silver mine of America, with open depths beneath of from five hundred to one thousand feet, and more miles of streets below than above ; and they are the theatre of the most systematic and extensive, if not the most successful, mining operations in this country. The mines in this lode have yielded over eighty millions in gold and silver since 1860, reaching sixteen millions, or their highest year’s return, in 1867, but falling off one half in 1868, and giving signs now of being nearly worked out. It is in the hope of their improvement, at least of a more profitable working, that Congress is besought to give millions for tunnelling the mountain to the lode, from a distant point in the valley below the present excavations. But with any real faith in the future possibilities of the mine, the money for the work can be found there easier than the gift can be bored and bought through Congress. The question at issue is one of life or death to these towns. Their historical relations to silver mining, to the settlement and organization of Nevada, and to the Pacific Railroad, their unique location and the surrounding natural objects of interest, as well as the fact that they afford the best opportunity for observing the processes of quartz mining and milling, makes it worth while for even the hurried traveller to visit them.

The “ Steamboat Springs,” in the neighborhood, repeat the phenomena of Whirlwind Valley. Carson, the capital, lies pleasantly in an adjoining valley, nearer the great mountains. But the mountains themselves now invite us more strongly ; and we are soon moving swiftly among their gurgling waters and soughing pines, — purer water and grander forest than we have seen before, — with towering walls of rock and distant snow-fields, that awaken many Alpine memories. The snowsheds over the track shut out the best of the mountain scenery, and we must stop near the summit, at Donner Lake, a beautiful sheet of water, already a favorite summer resort for California, and type of a series of grand lakes along the upper Sierras, that add a rare charm to their many other attractions. A day or two here will make us familiar with the numerous beauties of this mountain range,— the grand forests, the castellated rocks, the wedded summer and winter, the dry, pure air, the mosses, the flowers and mountain fruits, — and refresh us for the descent into the hot suns and the brown valleys of California’s summer.

The railroad passage over these mountains is the greatest triumph of engineering skill and labor on the whole line. The track, going west, ascends twenty-five hundred feet in fifty miles, and descends six thousand feet in seventy-five miles. There is over a mile of tunnels on the route, and in the process of excavation a million of dollars were spent in blasting-powder alone. Majestic, frowning peaks hang over us, deep, almost fathomless gorges lie beneath us, as we follow out and around the long ridges, in the descent into California ; and, amid scenery bolder and more impressive than any we have yet passed through, we enter the lower valleys, and reach California’s capital, Sacramento.

Three lines invite us thence to San Francisco,— the river boats; a shortcut railroad to Vallejo, at the head of the bay, with a twenty-mile ferry ; and the Pacific Railroad’s extension through Stockton to Oakland,—the rural suburb and school-house of San Francisco, — with an hour of steamboat on the bay. By and by, rails will encircle the bay, and we may go into the heart of San Francisco without “breaking bulk ” or touching water. Sacramento, Stockton, and Oakland are all worth a passing glance. They are inland rural cities, like Cleveland and Columbus in Ohio, or Hartford, Springfield, and Worcester in New England, pleasantly located near the water, brisk with local trade and growing manufactures, mature in social and religious elements, rich in many beautiful homes. They rank next to San Francisco among the towns of California. Sacramento and Stockton stand respectively at the heads of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, which form, north and south, the great interior basin and agricultural region of the State, and whose waters, uniting, pour westward, and encircle San Francisco with her bay.

VI.

But it is at San Francisco that we shall linger and take in the essence of California life, and cast the future of California’s wealth. First we shall go to the Occidental, Cosmopolitan, Russ, or Lick Hotel, and live at three dollars a day, — specie, mind you, now, — as well as at the Tremont or Fifth Avenue. Perhaps we shall have a mind to try that “peculiar institution ” of the city, the “What Cheer House,” where meals and lodging are fifty cents each, with a library and museums of natural history and mineralogy thrown in. We shall certainly want to test the French restaurants, where, at sharp six and at a private table, we may have for a dollar and a half as good a dinner of four or five courses, wine included, as Parker or Delmonico would give us for a five-dollar bill.

The abundance of fruit will have amazed us, as we came down from the mountains; but still the wonder grows at the sight of the city fruitstands, — Sweet-water and Black Hamburg and Muscat grapes at from five to twelve cents a pound, and poorer qualities at half the price; strawberries the season through; peaches and pears, more fair and luscious and large than our senses were ever accustomed to; fresh figs, oranges, limes, and bananas, all cheap, and all in such abundance on the hotel tables and in the streets, as to make a fruit-famished New-Englander rub his eyes and prick his flesh, to assure himself that he is not in a fairy-land dream. Then the more solid provisions ! Here is flour at half the price it bears in the East, and vegetables of every kind, — spring, summer, and fall varieties, — all at once, in fullest perfection. Here are fresh salmon, twelve months in the year, at from ten to twenty cents a pound, and smelts at eight cents, and fresh cod, bass, shrimps, anchovies, soles, even herrings, — every luxury of the sea; and game as various, and at prices that shame our Eastern markets. The materials for living are as plentiful here as the art of their preparation is perfect; and it will not take the thrifty mind long to calculate that, so far as food is concerned, a family can be supported more cheaply in San Francisco than in New York or Boston. The rates quoted are of course specie ; but wages and profits are also in specie, and are higher, generally, than currency wages and profits in Eastern cities.

The summer, we must remember, is apt to be chillier than the winter in San Francisco ; and though the morning sun may seduce us, it will never do to venture out for the day in shoes and white stockings or without overcoats. Montgomery Street is Wall Street and Broadway united, and at all hours of the day is gay and animated —the promenade of richly-dressed women, the busy arena of " cornering ” and “cornered” men. To the right, chiefly on made land, flat and regular, lie the heavy business squares of the city ; to the left are the streets of the retail shops. Passing through these on our way to the citizens’ homes, we mount, with weary legs and bent backs, the great sand-hills which are such a blessing to street contractors, such a trial to land-owners and tax-payers, but which afford us such a grand view of the city and of its surroundings, and the wide range of interior waters that gather here from all the State, and, with delaying, lingering movement, circle the city as with a sea, and then with a slow, majestic sweep, pass through the line of rocks by the Golden Gate into the ocean. We must enjoy this prospect of city and bay from several points ; it is a revelation in itself of the future Pacific Coast Empire, certainly of San Francisco’s destiny as its metropolis.

The San Franciscans, having begun wrongly on the American straight line and square system of laying out the city, are tugging away at these hills with tireless energy, to reduce the streets to a grade that man and horse can ascend and descend without double collar-and-breeching help ; but there is work in the enterprise for many a generation to come. They would have done better to accept the situation at the first, choose Nature engineer and architect in chief, and encompass the hills with their streets and buildings, instead of undertaking to go up and then through them. Such a flank attack would have been much more successful and economical, and have given them a vastly more picturesque city.

In town, the buildings of the Mercantile and Young Men’s Christian Associations, and of the California Bank, the financial king of the coast, will attract us ; the school-houses and churches will show that New England has been active here for years; the machine shops and woollen mills will suggest that we talk lower of Lowell and Holyoke and Pittsburgh and the stores and shops and little factories of all sorts, springing into success all about our wandering path in city and suburbs, will prove to us that here are a people not only capable of going alone, but already doing so. San Francisco is only twenty years old, yet she has one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, a third of the population of the whole State, and her manufactures are valued at thirty millions a year, a sum which exceeds the value of the gold and silver products of the State, and equals that of the wheat crop. Her commerce employs from forty to fifty steamships and three thousand sailing vessels ; already the third, she will soon be the second commercial city of the nation. They talk lovingly as well as grandly of “Frisco ” out here, and they only allow New York to be ranked as a rival when they are in their most condescending moods. Boston is where Starr King came from, and that is glory enough for her, and she ought to be forever grateful to California for havinggiven him a fit field for his powers, and so renown to his birthplace.

In the clear, quiet morning, before the wind sucks in over these sand-hills through the Golden Gate, and the coarse dust blinds and stings, we will drive out to the ocean at the Cliff House. It is an hour’s ride, and the road is smooth and hard. We might well stop for an hour at Lone Mountain Cemetery, and see how San Francisco is making a fit burial-place under adverse circumstances, and how she pays tribute to the memory of Broderick, and James King of William, proud martyrs to the political and social reformation of the town and State. On the rocks before the Cliff House, — where we will take our second breakfast or lunch, — an army of huge seals creep up to sun themselves and bark, and great, gawky pelicans flap about; and getting down the under bank we lie on the hard sands, and try to realize that this is the Pacific Ocean, and that beyond are the Sandwich Islands and China and Japan. Driving back along the hard beach for miles, our horses trotting to the roll of the ocean, we attack the city from another quarter, see its proud Orphan Asylum, its old mission grounds, and appreciate how much room for growth these widerolling sand-hills afford.

The ever-present Chinese will pique our curiosity. We must look into their homes, — compact, simple, yet not over clean or sweet-smelling quarters, — into their restaurants and their theatre, if it is in operation, and into their "Josh Houses.” Their stores invite us with open doors, and tempt our pockets with all the various specialties of Chinese manufacture at reasonable prices. A few are men of stature and presence, with faces of refinement and gentle strength ; the many go sneaking about their work, — a low type of mankind, physically and mentally, imported here like merchandise, and let out to labor under a system only half removed from slavery itself. Yet they are an important element in the industry and progress of all this side of the continent. But for their labor the Pacific Railroad would have been at least two years longer in building. Twelve thousand of them have done nearly all the picking and drilling and shovelling and wheeling of the road, from Sacramento to Salt Lake. They furnish the principal labor in the factories ; they make cigars ; they dig and work over neglected gold gulches ; they are cooks ; they almost monopolize the clothes washing and ironing; in all the lighter and simpler departments of labor, where fidelity to a pattern, and not flexibility and originality of action are required, they make the best and most reliable of workers. At least seventy-five thousand of them are scattered over these Pacific States, west of Utah ; and though our American and European laborers quarrel with and abuse them; though the law gives them no rights, but that of suffering punishment; though they bring no families, and seek no citizenship ; though all their women here are not only commercial, but expressly imported as such ; though they are mean and contemptible in their vices as in their manners ; though they are despised and kicked about on every hand ; still they come and thrive, slowly better their physical and moral and mental conditions, and supply this country with what it most needs for its growth and prosperity, — cheap labor. What we shall do with them is not quite clear yet; how they are to rank, socially and politically, among us, is one of the nuts for our social-science students to crack, if they can ; but now that we have depopulated Ireland, and Germany is holding on to its own, and the old sources of our labor supply are drying up, all America needs them ; and, obeying the great natural law of demand and supply, Asia seems almost certain to pour upon and over us countless thousands of her superfluous, cheap-living, slow-changing, unassimilating but very useful laborers. And we shall welcome, and then quarrel over and with them as we have done with their Irish predecessors. Our vast grain, cotton, and fruit fields, our extending system of public works, our multiplying manufactures, all need and can employ them. But must they vote, and if so to what effect ?

The garden-yards of San Francisco homes, welcomed us lovingly, and will bid us a sweet adieu. These are a pleasant feature of all California towns. Great open conservatories, with daily artificial waterings in summer, they maintain freshness of color and vigor of bloom the whole year through. Roses of every name and variety, never dying and ever-blooming; heliotropes and fuchsias climbing over fences and houses ; all flowers that open in our New England from June to October,— make perpetual summer gayety of color and gratefulness of odor, at little outlay of means, around every house. The climate of the city is more equable than that of the country, — never so warm, never so cold ; not soft or kind to invalids, but a tonic and a preservative for the healthy, and keeping labor up to its fullest capacity for the whole twelvemonth.

Let us look into Wells, Fargo, & Co.’s Express on Montgomery Street, before we leave San Francisco, for an illustration of how much more thoroughly these new people on the Pacific coast meet the exacting wants of our civilization than either Europe or the Eastern States. Here, for ten cents (three to the government for the permission and seven for the work) your letter is taken, to be carried to any point on the broad continent. Here you can ship merchandise, small or great, to any known spot on the globe’s surface. Here you can buy gold or greenbacks ; here draw on your Eastern correspondents, and receive the cash down. Here they will contract to carry anything for you, yourself included, anywhere ; to bring you anything, send for anything, sell you anything, supply you with information on any given topic ; and generally set you up in knowledge, money, business, and character. Our Eastern express companies never began to make themselves half so useful or omnipresent.

San Francisco will impress all her visitors deeply in many ways. We see her life is very new, yet we see it is very old. Civilization is better organized here in some respects than in any other city except Paris. Some of the streets look as if transplanted from a city of Europe ; others are in the first stages of rescue from the barbaric desert. Asia, Europe, and America have here met and embraced each other. Yet America is supreme; an America in which the flavor of New England can be tasted above all other local elements; an America in which the flexibility, the adaptability, and the allpenetrating, all-subduing power of our own race are everywhere and in everything manifest.

In a concluding article we shall show the reader the interior of California, and ask him to accompany us on a run over to the Sandwich Islands, returning home by the way of Oregon, Puget’s Sound, the Columbia River, Idaho, and Montana.