VI PREFACE. 



common among the old Californians towards the State of their adoption, 

 the following address, which I delivered before the Society of California 

 Pioneers, at their nineteenth celebration of the admission of the State 

 into the Union, on the pth of September, 1869. 



I congratulate you upon meeting again at this, our nineteenth annual 

 assemblage, to commemorate the organization of our State, and the 

 formation of the nucleus of the American Empire on the Pacific, to 

 revive the recollection of the impressive scenes witnessed in the early 

 days of pioneer life, and, if possible, to give additional stimulus to our 

 affection for California, our chosen home, to which we are bound by a 

 multitude of cherished memories, by soul-stirring associations which no 

 other land could have supplied to us. The ideas called up to-day belong, 

 however, not exclusively to the anniversary of the admission of our 

 State into the Union, and its attendant incidents. In this celebration 

 we cannot overlook the facts that in this year fall the centennial anni- 

 versaries of the first white settlement of California, the discovery and 

 naming of the Bay of San Francisco, and the first appearance of white 

 men on the site of our city. And this year has witnessed an event of 

 world-wide interest and of especial importance to us the completion of 

 the Pacific Railroad forming a grand climax for the close of the first 

 century of Californian civilization, that began with one of the lowest and 

 ends with one of the highest phases of human society. We seem to 

 have leaped at one bound from the bottom to the top of the ladder of 

 progress. 



The first era of California, that of Indian dominion and savage life, 

 extends from an unknown and remote antiquity to 1769. In an epoch 

 that belongs not to history or tradition, but to geology, while the Sac- 

 ramento Basin was a great lake, while the higher parts of the Sierra 

 Nevada were covered with glaciers, and still earlier, while numerous 

 volcanoes were pouring out their lavas to form the northern portion of 

 the Sierra, men lived upon its slopes, as their bones, their mortars, their 

 pestles, their spear-heads and arrow-heads, then deposited in deep beds 

 of gravel, and of late brought to light, bear witness. We have no con- 

 clusive evidence that the Diggers found here by the first Spanish ex- 

 plorers, more than three hundred years ago, had been preceded by a dif- 



