There are two varieties of big trees in
California: the Sequoia gigantea and the Sequoia sempervirens. The great
trees of the Mariposa grove belong to the gigantea species. The
sempervirens, however, reaches the diameter of 16 feet, and some of the
greatest trees of this species are in the Bohemian Club grove. It lies
in a cleft of the mountains: and up one hillside there runs a natural
out of doors stage of remarkable acoustic properties.
In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from
business, went up to this grove and camped out for two weeks. On the
last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle in praise of
the forest with poetic words, music and effects done by the club. In
late years this has been practically a masque or an opera. It cost about
$10,000. It took the spare time of scores of men for weeks; yet these
750 business men, professional men, artists, newspaper workers,
struggled for the honor of helping out on the Jinks; and the whole thing
was done naturally and with reverence. It would not be possible anywhere
else in this country; the thing which made it possible was the art
spirit which is in the Californian. It runs in the blood.
"Who's Who in America" is long on the arts and on learning and
comparatively weak in business and the professions. Now some one who has
taken the trouble has found that more persons mentioned in "Who's Who"
by the thousand of the population were born in Massachusetts, than in
any other state; but that Massachusetts is crowded closely by
California, with the rest nowhere. The institutions of learning in
Massachusetts account for her pre-eminence; the art spirit does it for
California. The really big men nurtured on California influence are few,
perhaps; but she has sent out an amazing number of good workers in
painting, in authorship, in music and especially in acting.
"High society" in San Francisco had settled down from the rather wild
spirit of the middle period; it had come to be there a good deal as it
is elsewhere. There was much wealth; and the hills of the western
addition were growing up with fine mansions. Outside of the city, at
Burlingame, there was a fine country club centering a region of country
estates which stretched out to Menlo Park. This club had a good polo
team, which played every year with teams of Englishmen from southern
California and even with teams from Honolulu.
The foreign quarters are worth an article in themselves. Chief of these
was, of course, Chinatown, of which every one has heard who ever heard
of San Francisco. A district six blocks long and two blocks wide, housed
30,000 Chinese when the quarter was full. The dwellings were old
business blocks of the early days; but the Chinese had added to them,
had rebuilt them, had run out their own balconies and entrances, and had
given the quarter that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all
Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this;
they had burrowed to a depth of a story or two under the ground, and
through this ran passages in which the Chinese transacted their dark and
devious affairs - as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in slave girls
and the settlement of their difficulties.
In the last five years there was less of this underground life than
formerly, for the Board of Health had a cleanup some time ago; but it
was still possible to go from one end of Chinatown to the other through
secret underground passages. The tourist, who always included Chinatown
in his itinerary, saw little of the real quarter. The guides gave him a
show by actors hired for his benefit. In reality the place amounted to a
great deal in a financial way. There were clothing and cigar factories
of importance, and much of the Pacific rice, tea and silk importing was
in the hands of the merchants, who numbered several millionaires.
Mainly, however, it was a Tenderloin for the house servants of the city
- for the San Francisco Chinaman was seldom a laundryman; he was too
much in demand at fancy prices as a servant.
The Chinese lived their own lives in their own way and settled their own
quarrels with the revolvers of their highbinders. There were two
theatres in the quarter, a number of rich joss houses, three newspapers
and a Chinese telephone exchange. There is a race feeling against the
Chinese among the working people of San Francisco, and no white man,
except the very lowest outcasts, lived in the quarter.
On the slopes of Telegraph Hill dwelt the Mexicans and Spanish, in low
houses, which they had transformed by balconies into a semblance of
Spain. Above, and streaming over the hill, were the Italians. The
tenement quarter of San Francisco shone by contrast with those of
Chicago and New York, for while these people lived in old and humble
houses they had room to breathe and an eminence for light and air. Their
shanties clung to the side of the hill or hung on the very edge of the
precipice overlooking the bay, on the verge of which a wall kept their
babies from falling. The effect was picturesque, and this hill was the
delight of painters. It was all more like Italy than anything in the
Italian quarter of New York and Chicago - the very climate and
surroundings, the wine country close at hand, the bay for their lateen
boats, helped them.
Over by the ocean and surrounded by cemeteries in which there are no
more burials, there is an eminence which is topped by two peaks and
which the Spanish of the early days named after the breasts of a woman.
The unpoetic Americans had renamed it Twin Peaks.
