The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brian Wilson 244 pages (192 without the various notes)  2022

We at the Heirloom have noted before that the number of books at least mentioning Donner Summit is limited. Since we’ve done more than a hundred book reviews of books at least mentioning Donner Summit we would eventually come to an end of the library . With the California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson we move to a book in which readers of history and the Heirloom might be interested but neither Mr. Emerson nor his traveling friends mentioned Donner Summit.

The impetus for picking up this 2022 book was simply that Ralph Waldo Emerson might have gone over Donner Summit on his way to California.  Then, too, his impressions of California in 1871 might be interesting. What was California like in 1871?  What was the cross-country train travel like just two years after completion of the Transcontinental Railroad?  Might Emerson also weigh in on the railroad’s influences and the changes it made? That all would be real history, the service the Heirloom provides.

Emerson’s trip was at the suggestion of a friend who also underwrote the costs of the Pullman Palace Car in which the group traveled and which was attached to regular trains. We can imagine how different the luxury trip on the party’s own railroad car was from the trip to which ordinary travelers were consigned.

The preface is a nice introduction and foreshadows the trip with a list of luminaries Emerson met: Brigham Young, Carleton Watkins, George Pullman, John Muir, Thomas Starr King, and others.

Unfortunately Emerson either did not memorialize the trip in letters home or the letters have been lost over time. We have to rely on the letters of others in the group and other sources the author uses.

The book is not just a report on the.  It’s also a travel through the 19th Century West which is enhanced by other sources giving fuller descriptions, background, and little stories and asides.  One amusing example is a letter by John Muir “many years later” describing how he tried to convince Emerson to camp out with him in the Yosemite Big Trees grove countering the objection that “Mr. Emerson might take cold”.  “In vain I urged, that only in homes and hotels were colds caught, that nobody ever was known to take cold camping in these woods, that there was not a single cough or sneeze in all the Sierra.”

The description of the trip west is full of details of the trip: who was in the group, smoking, who slept where in the Pullman car, a menu (see the sidebar), topics of discussion, and the speed of the train (22 mph). 

The topics of discussion were fairly heady.  For example one reported conversation said “Emerson talked extensively of Goethe, Schiller, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Tom Paine, pointing out that the latter two were not his favorites because he felt their critiques of Christianity were unfair.” Another summary said, “Literary themes were on Emerson’ mind as usual, and the talked about the Elizabethan poet Fulke Greville, the biographer of Philip Sidney; about Boccaccio, who despite Thayers’ objection to the Decameron’s ‘excessive coarseness,’ Emerson defended because of his faithfulness to Italian life and manner.”

For 21st Century readers it all sounds like a foreign language. Clearly letters had much more detail in those days than emails do today.  There are even some little jokes like the guy who was supposedly eaten by an alligator in California. 

The author embellishes the details with little stories like the man who was publishing Emerson’s lectures without permission but, due to the then state of copyright laws, there was nothing Emerson could do so he edited them.

The description of the Emerson party’s trip west is enhanced by asides as background: who built the bridge, Emerson escaping a fire, the lecture circuit of the 19th Century, Pullman cars, Mr. Pullman’s background, etc.

The author also brings in more detail of 19th Century life by quoting from 19th Century publications such as tourist guides sometimes even comparing the descriptions of places like Salt Lake City in two publications so the reader gets a fuller picture.  These help with descriptions of the sights.  For example there are quotes from a couple of contemporary authors about San Francisco. The village became a metropolis.   Fires devastated the city, “and the constant presence of rowdy miners and other toughs created waves of social chaos.”  “Villainy flourished, drinking, gambling, robbery and murder held high carnival.” This all led to vigilante violence “which suppressed the worst of the outrage but at a cost of perpetrating its own.”  “Despite this, the gold flowing in made San Francisco rich.”

There are also asides about Unitarians and Transcendentalists, a retired doctor who had an anatomical museum in San Francisco, displaying the head of the famous outlaw Joaquin Murrieta.  There was a tour of Chinatown with bodyguards.

By Chapter three we get to California and Donner Summit’s Summit Station, elevation is 7042. Just at that point the train plunged into the snowsheds. “As the rest of the party emerged from their berths, the train entered a series of dark snowsheds, which necessitated lighting the lamps in the car to keep everyone from bumping into one another, as, uncharacteristically, all had risen early to take in the scenery. So lengthy were some of these sheds that a few stations were built into the middle of them.”  You can imagine the party’s disappointment and maybe, hence, understand why there was no mention in the letters.

Coming out the sheds, miles off Donner Summit, “Thayer [James Thayer, a young Boston lawyer and part of the traveling party] was enraptured by what he saw: “We passed the most wonderful scenery; one cannot describe it but he can never forget it: the air was soft and spring like and the sun struck down across the tops of the trees in the great gorges that we looking into, drenching these tree tops with light and leaving soft mist shadows below and so you would look down into a ravine of a thousand feet with a mountain on the other side coming towards you like a buttress, all covered with trees and with a gorge on each side of each.”  You can see he had good taste.

Mr. Thayer also said, “I never passed a morning of greater delight in my life than that, as we ran on down the mountains to Sacramento.”

The rest of the book is about sightseeing in California: San Francisco, the Peninsula, the North Bay and Napa (where they don’t water down the wine), the Central Valley, and Yosemite. There are a lot of details about travel: inns, good and bad food, ferries, the ice cold Tuolomne River, wagon travel (overheated axles and a sign saying “Water for Horses. None for Old Wagons.”), andfreight movement

In many places the group saw the destructive evidence gold mining: holes and tailings in abundance and great tracks of land dug over and the surface soil washed away by placer mining such that “only rocks remain.”  One interesting aside said that the Tuolomne ran muddy six days a week but because the miners took Sunday off, the river ran clear on Mondays, no mud having gotten into the river the previous day.

The group admired the scenery. Thayer, for example, enthused about the sheer size of the pines and firs, “four feet, six feet, and even eight or ten feet in diameter and rising, straight as an arrow, two hundred feet or more.”

sidebars
Ethnocentric to a fault, Emerson not only believed in the Manifest Destiny of the United State to colonize the continent but also that New Englander – the latest and highest manifestation of the ”Anglo-Saxon race” – would lead the movement.   Pg 10

A menu pg 32
As Thayer enumerated the menu, it included “soup, your choice of roast beef, roast lamb or chicken; mashed potatoes, asparagus, peas, tomatoes, canned corn, bread and butter, ice water and English ale; raspberry pie, cottage pudding, cake, nuts and raisins and coffee; oranges and bananas.”