California A Pleasure Trip From Gotham to the Golden Gate, (April, May, June, 1877)
Mrs. Frank Leslie 288 pages
Reading 19th Century books opens a gate into that world for us. What was life like? What was important to the people of the time? How did they view the “Age of Wonder” (see our Heirloom article index or the 616, 4/19, 3/19 issues). What did they think of things we take for granted today? Is there any perspective of theirs that informs our perspective today? Then there are just good stories those people have to tell.
Frank Leslie had a stable of magazines and newspapers of various types over many years. Through his magazines and newspapers he brought his readers pictures and stories of the world. When he died his wife took over and saved the company from bankruptcy. Interestingly she also changed her name to Frank Leslie. That she saved her deceased husband’s business and what she did with her fortune after she died also make good stories you may want to follow, but that’s a different story and beyond the Heirloom’s sphere.
In 1877 the Leslies and twelve members of their staff took the train ride that is the subject of this book utilizing special luxury train cards with sleeping accommodations. California… is a slice of America in 1877. To help convey that slice the book is well illustrated with sketches. The narrative describes the sights and various stops on the way. We see 19th Century life and a bit of 19th Century prejudices. Beyond that there is no reason for the book and Mrs. Leslie approaches that weakness,
“…O critics! If you will indeed attempt to bind a butterfly upon the wheel, or anatomize the vapory visions of a woman’s memory, remember that in all courtesy you should deal gently and generously with a work proclaiming itself from the outset not so much a book as a long gossipy letter to one’s friend, and an amiable attempt to convey to the rest of the world some of the delight it commemorates, and if you do not find a great deal in it, dear critic, remember that to competently judge a woman’s letter or a woman’s book, one must have learned to read between the lines and find there the pith and meaning of the whole.”
This gives you an idea of Mrs. Leslie’s prose. Here the editorial staff of the Heirloom, being almost completely male, turned out to be clearly incompetent at fully judging the book because we saw nothing “between the lines.” Nothing is said of consequence as she describes the various stops on the route. She describes buildings, construction methods and materials, sites to be seen, interesting landmarks, the people in the towns, and hangers on at the train stops. The trip took some months because the travelers stopped in larger towns and met with local luminaries. One particularly long stop, occasioning a lot of observation, was Utah because the Mormon religion, in particular polygamy, was something America was apparently interested in. There are many observations and appreciations of the scenery along the way, “The wild prairie, as opposed to the cultivated prairie, has to be experienced.” Mrs. Leslie also comments on the weather, mansions, a visit to the fine arts building in Chicago, redwood trees in California, and makes observations on life.
About Chicago she notes, “It was Sunday afternoon, and the respectable bourgeoisie and family men of Chicago were out with wives and olive-branches, in wagons of every pattern and degree, in spite of the piercing wind and blinding dust. The more aristocratic part of the population was not visible, and one wondered whether the New England element in Chicago is strong enough to render Sunday driving unpopular, or whether élite preferred staging at home to dream of the Champs Elysées.”
This trip was six years after the great Chicago fire, “relics of the fire meet one at every turn ; lots piled up with blackened brick and stone and dismal rubbish, and sometimes the picturesque shell of a ruin…”
“To sum up the impression produced by a careful study of Chicago, it is a city of magnificent beginnings, a thing of promise. Few American cities can boast so many noticeably handsome dwellings, or such massive blocks of stone along the business streets but the crudity of youth is as inextricably mingled with the promise of maturity as in a big-bone boy of eighteen, or blushing girl of thirteen, from whom one parts with resignation for a time, looking pleasurably forward to renewed intercourse a few years later.”
Then there is life aboard the train, “…our chef, of ebon color, and proportions suggesting a liberal sampling of the good things he prepares, wears the regulation snow-white apron and cap, and gives us cordial welcome and information ; showing us, among other things, that his refrigerator and larder are boxes adroitly arranged beneath the car, secured by lock and key…”
The many stops elicit comments, such as Omah: “We found it big, lazy, and apathetic ; the streets dirty and ill-paved ; the clocks without hands … the shops, whose signs mostly bore German names, deserted of customers, while principals and clerks lounged together in the doorways, listless and idle.”
About Cheyenne the conductor warned against “any night explorations, at least by the ladies of the party… the town swarmed with miners… many of them desperadoes, and all utterly reckless in the use of the bowie knife and pistol ; or, at the very least, in the practice of language quite unfit for ears polite…” Life was clearly different in those days.
Leslie’s prose is evocative prose as this quote about the train approaching the Green River shows. “While the rapidly moving train whirls us on through this region, where Nature seems to have indulged herself in mad, purposeless exercise of her vastest powers, with little heed for man’s approval or convenience. In fact, so far from calling this country a new one, it impressed us as the playground of forgotten Titans “ such lavish waste of color, of form, of power ‘ such gigantic forces brought to bear, and the results left idle, a mere waste of supernature energy…”
About Colorado she says, “Heaven-piercing crags above the dizzy abyss below, the glimpses of distant mountain peaks, and an undefined sense of might and majesty everywhere, which make the beholder feel that humanity is but a mere impertinent intrusion upon the scene – a pygmy, whom the slightest movement of nature might crush in the midst of its impertinent admiration.”
Seeing Black Hills prospectors heading out in wagon trains Leslie described two guides.
“We saw an emigrant train of several wagons starting for the Black Hills, one of the wagons being drawn by eight mules, whose driver managed them by a single rein. A scout in a full suit of fringed buckskin was lounging about - a handsome man with long, dark curls falling from beneath his seal-skin cap, who treated our open and admiring curiosity with true aboriginal indifference.” Another guide galloped by dressed in blue cloak over a purpose jacket, high cavalry boots, and sombrero, beneath which his hair flew wildly…"
They were held up by an accident when a train plowed into a herd of cattle. “Arrived at the scene of disaster, we could not wonder at the length of the detention, for a herd of cattle, attempting to try conclusions with a steam engine, had been forced to retreat, leaving six of their number on the field of battle ; and so inextricably had the poor creatures become wedged in the complicated machinery of the locomotive, that it was hard to decide where the one ended and where the other began, or which has suffered most in the encounter.”
Descriptions are vivid, “… the platform crowded with the strangest and most motley groups of people it has ever been our fortune to encounter. Men in alligator boots, and loose overcoats made of blankets and wagon rugs, with wild, unkept hair and beards, and bright, resolute eyes, almost all well-looking, but wild and strange as denizens of another world.”
Salt Lake City seemed to be of a different world than other towns on the railroad. “Everywhere was thrift, care, the evidence of hard work, and a pride in ownership ; and oddly enough, these homes of rigid, yet tasteful and dignified poverty, reminded me of nothing so much as a Shaker village… a place where nobody was rich, nobody poor, nobody idle, nobody overworked, and where a certain prim love of the beautiful everywhere gilded the necessity of the useful.” There was no dust, no mud, no litter of any kind
As the train moved west the travelers began to see more Native Americans and her descriptions grate on today’s ears. Leslie draws a distinction between the “noble savage” and the Native Americans they encountered. “There are women clothed upon with filth of every shade and texture, woven or skinny ; shawls and handkerchiefs tied over their head, and about half of them carrying upon their back a formless and silent burden, which, for filthy lucre, they would unstrap and bring forward…” “The ‘burden’ of course was the papoose. At another point Leslie describes the “’braves,’ if that will excuse the sarcasm of so calling them, were somewhat more repulsive than the women and children, being equally dirty and more dangerous; as, for instance, a sewer rat…”
Of course, it being the 19th Century there are also references to “heathen Chinese.”
Of course what the reader of this review is waiting for is the approach to the Sierra. What did Mrs. Leslie think as she traveled over the Sierra? What did she think about the eight-year-old transcontinental railroad?
“Toward night we began the passage of the Sierras with the help of an additional engine, for the grades are as steep as can be traversed, and occasionally the train seems to be plunging head first into some Avernus[volcanic crater in Italy], from which return will be impossible, and anon scaling heights fitter for a chamois [a deer-like animal] than a locomotive. If one only knew how to say them there are marvelous things to say about this Pacific R.R… ‘If Americans were not the most modest people in the world,’ they would have, before this, convinced the public that no other piece of engineering, from Hannibal’s eating [sic]* down the Alps with vinegar, or the Great Emperor’s road across the Simplon,** to the present day, is to be compared with this passage of the Sierras from Ogden to Sacramento…. We never scientifically examined either Hannibal’s or Napoleon’s achievements, but we are very willing to accept the theory both that American err in lack of self-appreciation, and that the Pacific road is the road of the world and… For ourselves, let us simply note the thrill and awe and wonder” of traversing the Sierra.
*apparently Hannibal in crossing the Alps heating large rocks and then dowsed them with vinegar to break them up. This appears to be a typo in the original.
**Napoleon’s engineered road across the Simplon Pass in the Alps
She says more about the Sierra, “The worst thing about language is, that it becomes so inadequate when anything of importance has to be portrayed…. So, without attempting the impossible, we simply say to those of our friends to whom the Alps are a bore, Appenines and Pyrenees a weariness, and the Andes a tiresome impossibility, do go and see the … the Sierras. … The journey is luxurious , and the expense no great than three months abroad… It is a world above the level of the world we know and habitually live in.”
That was it. The Sierra were crossed and the group went touring by train and carriage in California and so more than half of the book tells us of California in 1877 which was fun.
There are a lot of details. The Palace Hotel, for example, occupied a whole block of downtown San Francisco. It had a huge glass covered courtyard in the center, was seven stories tall. A walk around the hotel was ¼ mile. All the corridors added up to 2.5 miles. It occupied 2.5 acres had 12 chandeliers in the dining room. There were two miles of gas piping for lighting. The hotel had 437 bathtubs and a capacity of 1200 guests. Inside there were cages of singing birds flowering plants, sofas and chairs.
There is quite a description of San Francisco. Most buildings were two stories or less because of “shakes” (earthquakes). The climate doesn’t allow for lounging outside because of cold winds. That said, the climate was “exhilarating” apparently because of the large amount of ozone in the air. So the “brain0worker can accomplish more here in a given time any anywhere else, and wear himself out faster.” There is no support for this ozone contention although a proof she says is that Thomas Starr King died of exhaustion and old age, despite being in his thirties. King was one of California’s two statues in the U.S. Capitol building until he was replaced by Ronald Reagan. Mr. King was a now forgotten famous Californian. His sister, Angela, is for whom Lake Angela is named on Donner Summit, but we digress.
Leslie spends some time on the people. “One feature of the street scenery in his city is the large proportion of foreign physiognomy and the accents of almost every language under the sun…” All of those peoples are catered to with many different shops, theaters, etc. and especially restaurants. Here the book becomes a little tour guide of restaurants for the Frenchman, the German, etc.
It must have been a very liberal city since young ladies could visit various restaurants unaccompanied and maybe even “risk of occasionally encountering a male acquaintance. Still Leslie says that “on the whole, we would not advise the widowed mother of a family of lads and lassies to carry them to San Francisco for social training.” Some of those with fewer social graces were “shading into” the “large class of charming, unexceptional, and rigidly moral society.” Even though the days when every man “was a law into himself” there still was a “certain recklessness and willfulness… pervading every circle.”
Street dress was “gay and showy” and people promenaded on the main streets.
In the old days Leslie said “murder and debauchery of every sort ran riot, and it is surprising that out of such vile soil the fair flower and fruitage of the present city could ever have grown.”
The travelers visited, among other things, the Cliff House, the Board of brokers, a Chinese restaurant, Chinatown, an opium den then went down the peninsula and north of San Francisco where we even learn how Santa Rosa got its name.
The description of the Board of Brokers, which was like a commodity or stock trading floor, was interesting. “The scene was one of the wildest excitement, reminding the young lady of a gladiatorial arena, the sultana of a flock of hunger chickens, to whom some corn had been thrown, and myself of that fact that I was only a woman, and could never hope to join in such a soul-stirring combat – for surely combat is but a mild term to apply to the jostling, yelling, frenzied, purple-faced struggle, roused into new vigor at each call of a new stock the bidder crowding to the centre, gesticulation, pushing, ready to tear each other to pieces, or themselves fall down in a fit of apoplexy.”
One interesting spot the group visited was Woodward’ Gardens, a kind of amusement park in downtown San Francisco that cost only a quarter for entry. Mr. Woodward was “one of those happy individuals who have had the opportunity given them of leaving the world undeniably more beautiful than they found it.” He had put together a “terrestrial Paradise.” There was a museum with “every sort of curiosity.” There were shady groves of trees, lawns, flowers, swings, trapezes, merry-go-rounds, a theater for various kinds of performances, a refreshment room, a zoo with “a fine collection of wild animals,” fresh and salt water aquariums.
Then it was down to Big Trees, Yosemite, and Los Angeles before heading back to Stockton, Sacramento and the Sierra. One “last glimpse of its beauties was taken as we dashed past Donner Lake, a beautiful, still, oval sheet of water, bedded deep in dark, steep hills ‘then we plunged into a snow-shed, and slid down the steeps of memory into a profound sleep, which made recollection once more reality.”