33G Beyond the Sierras. 



Young Lick, tliua licked, hiul gone forth swearing that before he died he 

 would build a mill in which a single hopper should be worth more than the 

 whole esliiblishinent of his cussed old hypothetical father-in-law. So, after 

 fifty years, when the old miller was long dead, he maile this mahogany-rose- 

 wootl hopper at San Jos6, thus doing the thing he had sworn to do when he 

 was kicked out of the Pennsylvania grist-mill. Such was the real Lick. 

 The biographers will, by and by, veneer and mythologize his character, but 

 they can never make him other than he was. Nevertheless, this quaint old 

 genius of the Santa Clara valley could ai)preciate the glory of the heavens,^ 

 and could contribute to mankind an apparatus for the starry apocalypse of 

 the hereafter. I trust that all millionaires will do likewise, and that the 

 caprice and inconsistency of human life will in its last act always enudate 

 the philanthropy and generous impulses of old Jimmy Lick. 



The Melican man in San Francisco always goes to see his brother John. 

 Chinatown is a marvel. It is an oriental city set on the breast of a larger 

 American city — a spot of the profoundest conservatism on the surface of the 

 most vehement radicalism of the human race. The Celestials in this urbs in 

 urbe number fully 50,000. They come, and go, and trade, and get gain, 

 and sing out their attenuated metallic speech, until the stranger in their 

 midst may well imagine, if, indeed, he is not forced to believe, hin-iself to be 

 in China. Nor is the place far away from the heart of the metropolis. 

 Chinatown is no ragged edge, no mere depraved out8kirt,of San Francisco, 

 but right here in the midst of the occidental Babylon. 



A walk of only three or four squares from Market street, and here you 

 are in Asia. I believe that the two populations around the rim ol the Chi- 

 nese quarter do not mix and mingle except for purposes cf trade. China- 

 town IS your splotch of oil on the watery surface of Americanism; it Hoats, 

 but mixes not. I am not sure but what the figure might be expanded until 

 it embraces the idea of a scum. 



John is an unsolved problem. He is a sort of " x " in the incomplete cubic 

 equation of universal progress. Solve him who can. The Californians are 

 at loggerheads about his place and value. I found that all inland industries 

 are largely dependent upon him for their practical ])romotion. The grape- 

 growers about Fresno declare him to be a sine qua mm of their success. The 

 superintendent of the Land and Water Company at San Fernando tokl me 

 that, of all his men, only the Chinese laborer could be relied on for steady and 

 profitiible work. The fruit men and farmers hold the Siime opinion. They 

 laugh at the stupidly imitative character of their Chinese tree trimnurs and 

 plowmen; but, at the same time, they pronounce him invaluable to their 

 enterprises. In the cities, however, these sentiments are utterly reversed. 

 Here the tune is sung in a high and piping key of bitter antagonism. The 

 fact is that the city folk hate the Chinese with a cordial and unequivocal 

 hatred which I could not quite understiuid. They despise them. They 

 think of them in the same category with rats and other vermin. 



I perceived that a part of this malignity was trftceable to politics. The 



