794 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN CALIFORNIA. 



Br CHABLES HOWAED SHINN. 



WHEN the Central Pacific Railroad crossed the high Sierras, 

 and the Crockers, Stanfords, and Huntingtons, till then 

 obscure Sacramento merchants, gained the first of their long 

 series of industrial and political victories, a country blacksmith, 

 the late Henry Vrooman, afterward State Senator and one of the 

 greatest party leaders ever known on the Pacific coast, said to 

 me : " That railroad changes forever all the conditions of human 

 existence in California. It will never again be as easy to live 

 here/' 



A thousand times since, events have shown that the gold- 

 miners' El Dorado of 1849, which had become as different from 

 the rest of the United States as South Carolina is from Massachu- 

 setts, was readjusting itself to new conditions imposed by the iron 

 links that bound it to the Atlantic slope and the valley of the 

 Mississippi. At first the change was slow and almost unnoticed. 

 Until the close of the war, prices, rates of wages, and the general 

 conditions of life in California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada 

 remained practically the same as before. Arizona was then but 

 a frontier outpost, and men like Mowry were holding mines with 

 rifle and revolver against the unconquered Apaches. The whole 

 Pacific coast, from the borders of Mexico to Puget Sound, was 

 still forming its own social customs and creating, as did the 

 South, its own literature. The decade of railroad-building was 

 also the decade of the foundation of State universities, magazines, 

 art-schools, and libraries, and, to a remarkable degree, the decade 

 of the beginnings of many private fortunes in mines, commerce, 

 and real estate. 



Early conditions of life in California were unusual in the wide 

 range of opportunities offered to men of strong tenacity of pur- 

 pose. Nearly every one could make money, and a great deal of 

 it, in the decade between 1849 and 1859, but the temptations to 

 spend were enormous. Illustrations of this are usually drawn 

 from the mines, but some of the most characteristic stories come 

 from other sources. In 1853 there were half a dozen men who 

 shot wild fowl and other game in Contra Costa for the San Fran- 

 cisco markets. They could earn fifteen or twenty dollars apiece 

 every day for nine months of the year. One of them saved his 

 money and bought land for a dollar and a quarter an acre that is 

 now covered with buildings ; but the rest are forgotten charac- 

 ters, except for a few sentences in the local chronicles respecting 

 their notable bags of game. 



