t development in the Comstock lode.
Most persons in San Francisco are votaries of chance.
Luck is their god.
Credulous as an Indian, reckless as a Mexican, the lower order of San Franciscans puts his trust in men unknown and builds his hope on things unseen.
Thousands of persons in this city, otherwise passing for sane, believe in this development, and are sinking all that they have saved by years of thrift in the several Comstock mines.
The Comstock lode lies on Mount Davidson, in Nevada; though the mines are chiefly owned by San Franciscans.
Some of these mines, such as the Ophir and the Mexican, have been worked for twenty years. The silver veins are long; four or five miles in length; but as no one has yet traced them out, their value is an unknown figure.
From the stores of Virginia, built around the openings of these mines, the silver veins run up a gulch to Gold Hill, where they strike on beds of still more precious ore. Owned by rival companies, the mines are wrough
have not learned to stake their wives, like Utes and Bannocks, on the chances of a throw.
White females are still too rare and precious on this coast; some cynics say too rare and precious for their own well-being, not to mention the well-being of the Commonwealth.
Nature puts the sexes on the earth in pairs, and man destroys that balance at the cost of his moral death.
In California there are five White men to two White women; in Oregon there are four White men to three White women; in Nevada there are three White men to one White woman; in Washington there are two White men to each White woman.
Under social arrangements so abnormal, a White woman is treated everywhere on the Pacific slopes, not as a man's equal and companion, justly and kindly like a human being, but as a strange and costly creature, which by virtue of its rarity is freed from the restraints and penalties of ordinary law. A man must be sharply pressed by famine ere he eats his bird of paradise.
As with the
Chapter 19: Red Mormonism.
From Winnemucca, an Indian camp in Nevada, to Brigham, a prosperous Mormon town in Salt Lake
Valley, we race and wriggle through a mountain district, not more striking in physical aspect than in human interest.
Rolling on the level of Ben Nevis, with a score of snowy peaks in front and flank, we climb through woods of stunted pine, ascending by the Pallisades to Pequop, at the height of Mont d'or, from which we slide by way of Humboldt Wells and the American Desert direct to Brigham in the land of Zion.
Ten years ago, this line of country, four hundred miles by road, belonged to independent tribes of Utes and Shoshones, whose pagan ancestors had hunted buffalo, made peace and war, and carried on vendetta, from the frozen sierras to the neighbourhood of Snake River and Shoshone Falls.
To-day these tribes have not a single acre of their ancient hunting grounds.
Many of these Indians are Red Mormons.
Every Indian tribe, among whose tents the Mor
th, but in the North and West.
Have you Republicans no fear of going too far in trying to crush the whole White population of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina under the heels of a small majority of Negroes and Mulattoes?
Yes, frankly; we have gone too far. It was an error; but we seemed to have no choice.
We gave the Negroes votes in order to secure the policy of emancipation.
If all fear of a return to slavery were gone, we should be willing to allow each State to judge how far the franchise ought to go, and where it ought to stop.
A common rule is good for common cases; but a man must be a fool, as well as a fanatic, who insists on applying one rule to every case.
Logic is one thing, the public weal another.
We allow the people of Nevada, Oregon, and California to refuse political rights to Asiatics.
Is not that Asiatic Question your next affair?
Yes: greater than the last.
The Yellow Question is more menacing to republican institutions than the Black.
o, Indian Creek, and Halleck, they are settling down in hut and ranch.
We find them in Copper Canon and along the Palisades; we hear of them in the White Pine Country, in Mountain District, at Tuscarora, Cornu-opeia, and Eureka.
They go anywhere, do anything.
One of the race comes up to me at Elko with a bit of paper in his hand, on which is written Lee Wang, antelope ranch, White Pine country.
Lee Wang cannot speak a word of English, yet he is going up alone into the mining districts of Nevada, to serve an unknown master, who may treat him as a dog. Chinese can live where other men, even Utes and Shohones, die. It is enough for them to scrape abandoned mines and glean exhausted fields.
A grain of silver pays them for the toil; a stalk of maize rewards them for the search.
They eat dead game, which Indians will not touch.
As waiters, woodmen, navvies, miners, laundresses, they drive off every labourer, whether male or female, whether White or Black.
At Elko all the races on
lake.
They pour in threads, in cataracts, in streams; one stream turning into Polynesia, a second stream running to Australia, and a third stream racing towards the Golden Gate.
Who can assure us that these streams will ever stop?
By preference these Mongols make for California; first, because the voyage is cheap and easy; second, because the climate suits them; third, because the pay is higher and the market wider than they find elsewhere.
From California they go to Oregon by sea, to Nevada, Idaho, and Montana by land.
In Utah they have found few markets, the Mormons being as sober and laborious as themselves.
Yet even in Salt Lake City they have found a lodgment.
They arrive in shoals, and every year those shoals expand in size.
At first they entered in twos and threes, then by tens and twenties, in a while by hundreds and thousands.
Now they are coming by tens of thousands.
The entry of these Asiatic hordes into America has been so silent, and their presence in the l
co free.
We have a contract with the first class only; but we have our obligations towards the second class also, since we are bound to carry them back in case of death.
Tell us how you begin your labour.
Where do you find the people to come over?
The Five Companies send their agents up and down the provinces, both near the sea. and far in land, to tell poor people, who are pinched for rice and tea, of the great markets which are opening for their labour in California, Oregon, and Nevada.
Of course they talk big. Melican talk big; Chinaman talk bigger than Melican.
These agents say the hills are made of silver, and the rivers run with gold.
They offer help, giving passes to such persons as care to move.
They find all means of transport; here by road, there by river; doing things so well --having plenty of rich men to help — that they bring a man to the coast in carts and boats for less money than he could get along on foot.
For five dollars they pick him up in his vill
ose a hundred thousand dollars than submit to your dictation.
We can send to Switzerland for watchmakers.
We are in no hurry.
While capital reposes, labour starves.
We can wait.
I am the same Mr. Ralston who made this same speech to the bricklayers and plasterers on the Palace Hotel.
I once discharged a clerk.
I am in earnest.
However, I will be generous, and I make this proposition: if you can get me American girls and boys who will do as much work and do it as well as the Chinese, I will give them the preference and the same pay. You may now apologize and retire.
Dropping this tone of pleasantry, the writer adds, with pain, if not with shame:
The result is the Chinese are to be employed; a few at first, and more in time; so that the seeds are sown for the destruction of a profitable industry.
Another weapon of defence is taken from the hand of free labour.
Here, as elsewhere in California, Oregon, and Nevada, the rice-eater is pushing the beef-eater to the wall.
Living on the coast, away from white capital and white employment, they are said to make a homely livelihood for their wives and families by catching and drying fish.
A colony of Asiatics, who seek neither work nor favour from the white capitalist, but go out boldly into nature, taking their chances in the primary and heroic, rather than the secondary and parasitical, struggle for existence, raises our curiosity.
Unlike the Mexican labourers, whom they are driving out of California and Nevada, here are people who can live without the Whites!
A trail leads off from Monterey to this Asiatic village, going by way of Fray Junipero's Cross and Don Rivera's Castle; but this trail is a mere Indian line, not made for horses, still less for wheels.
We have to trudge on foot.
A walk of two miles from the old Mexican jetty brings us to a pile of rocks, on turning which we are in China-close to a huddle of log-sheds and drying-poles — the place snarling with dogs, and reeking with the
migrant the right of citizenship on any terms.
Under the new conditions created by the influx of these Asiatics, San Francisco has ceased to be a free port in the sense in which New York is a free port.
New York is open: San Francisco is not open.
If he lands in New York a Mongol may be naturalized in a year; but if he lands in San Francisco a Mongol cannot be naturalized in twenty years. This conflict of principles leads to much confusion in practice.
No one in Oregon, California, and Nevada, can be sure of what is legal or illegal.
A Court, administering the local law, rules one thing; a second Court, administering the general law, rules another thing.
They clash alike in maxims, methods, and results.
A case occurred some weeks ago. In the belief that a certain vessel coming from Hong-Kong was laden with paupers, convicts, and rebels, transported from the country by sagacious mandarins, the authorities of San Francisco tried to send these undesirable settlers back to China
