SOCIAL CHANGES IN CALIFORNIA. 795 



Numberless were the contrasts between California life at that 

 period and life anywhere else in the country. Ordinary economic 

 conditions were for a time suspended. Gold was the chief crop 

 of the State, and gold was gold everywhere. The merchants who 

 wanted to make a " corner " in any product need only " corral " 

 all there was of that commodity in California to be safe for days 

 or weeks. Steamers went twice a month to Panama, and the 

 pony express crossed the continent ; but we had no telegraph and 

 no railroad, and immigration, after the close of the great gold- 

 rush, was comparatively small and steady. In the midst of this 

 isolation a community developed in which every man of any 

 strength or purpose soon knew and was known to every other 

 man of ability. Thus, in the old mining towns, like Placerville, 

 Grass Valley, Oroville, Shasta, and early valley towns such as 

 Stockton, Marysville, and Sacramento, and coast cities such as San 

 Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Eureka, and in the hun- 

 dreds of country neighborhoods, where ex-miners became owners 

 of herds and growers of wheat, isolation produced strong indi- 

 vidualism. 



The Calif ornian not only gave up his Eastern newspapers, but 

 his Eastern weeklies and monthlies. Cities of the same popula- 

 tion as the San Francisco of 1850-'60 seldom have half so long a 

 list of publications. Many of these were illustrated by the draw- 

 ings of artists like Keith and Nahl. Men drew and painted, 

 etched and engraved, wrote and spoke, for the busy, energetic 

 people of the lands west of the Sierra Nevada. No other audi- 

 ence was possible ; no broader field was desired. As the Virgin- 

 ians and the North Carolinians, climbing the Blue Ridge and 

 settling on the lands that slope to the Mississippi and the Ohio, 

 became Kentuckians and Tennesseans in a single generation, so 

 the pioneer men and women from every State of the Union that 

 settled on the Pacific coast became Oregonians and Californians, 

 and founded two as distinct commonwealths as there are in 

 America. 



The literary field to which I have alluded is fruitful in illus- 

 tration. California, before the walls were fairly broken down, 

 had half a dozen weeklies, none of which now remain. They 

 were circulated in every mining camp, some printing ten or twelve 

 thousand copies, and among their writers were Bret Harte, Mark 

 Twain, Noah Brooks, George Frederic Parsons, Ina D. Coolbrith, 

 and such a group of literary men and women as no American 

 city outside of Boston and New York could gather together at 

 that period. A monthly magazine was established, which in a 

 few years gained a circulation of eight thousand copies, and made 

 the reputations of a host of writers. As the sharp pressure of 

 outside competition began to be felt, all or nearly all the literary 



