PREFACE.
MORE elaborate and learned volumes than the present one have recently been devoted in large part to the his tory of Spanish and Mexican California before 1846. This book is concerned, in the main, only with American California, and with that only during the early and ex citing formative years, from 1846 to 1856. This his tory of the beginnings of a great American common wealth has seemed to the author sufficient and worthy to occupy the whole of such a volume as the present one, in view both of the interest of the events and of their value as illustrating American life and character.
The purpose has been throughout to write from the sources. For the history of the conquest in 1846 offi cial and private documents of original value have been used in so far as was possible, while, as the reader will at once see, the interregnum, the early mining life, and the history of San Francisco affairs have in general been described directly from such early newspapers as I have been able to read, the later testimony of pioneers and the views of subsequent historical writers being used here mainly to check, to complete, or to explain what the early newspapers tell us. As to the method of study employed, the social condition has been throughout of more interest to me than the individual men, and the
men themselves of more interest than their fortunes, while the purpose to study the national character has never been lost sight of in the midst of even the most minute examination of certain obscure events. Nor has a certain unity in the whole narrative been absent from inv mind as I have written. Through all the complex facts that are here set down in their somewhat confused order, I have felt running the one thread of the process whereby a new and great community first came to a true consciousness of itself. The story begins with the seem ingly accidental doings of detached but in the sequel vastly influential individuals, and ends just where the individual ceases to have any very great historical signif icance for California life, and where the community begins to be what it ought to be, viz.. all important as against individual doings and interests.
As to the originality of the various parts of this book, the later chapters are written with relatively the most complete independence of fellow-workers. In the first and second chapters, and in part in the third chapter, I have, on the other hand, to make my most important acknowledgments for help received. To Mr. Hubert Howe Bancroft I owe the very great privilege of a free use of his immense collection of original documents on the early history, especially of the conquest,— a privilege of which I took advantage during the whole of the sum mer vacation of 1884. And from both Mr. Bancroft and his able collaborators I received, during all this time, frequent and most friendly oral advice about the use of the collection itself. As Mr. Bancroft's library contains the material for his own great work, now in process of publication, on the history of the Pacific States of North America, I feel especially indebted to the generosity
which so freely placed this original material at my dis posal in advance of the publication of the results otained hy Mr. Bancroft and his collaborators themselves. Where I have referred to these original documents, I have used in my notes the abbreviation B. MS. as a gen eral name for all of them. My own freedom of judg ment I have, of course, sought to retain throughout, al though I am much indebted, for the formation of many of my opinions and arguments, to the suggestions gained through conversation and correspondence with Mr. Ban croft and his collaborators concerning some such dis puted points as the Gillespie mission of 1845—46, the English designs on California, and other matters of conquest history. But the results that I have here writ ten down are, as they stand, always my own final judgment upon all the evidence that I could obtain.
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