EARLY DAYS IN OAKLAND.
Some of the Pioneers and Their Achievements.
A Hunting Ground for the San Franciscans Oak Forests, Blooming Fields
Squatters' Controversies The Peralta Titles Carpentier's Claim to the Water
Front Famous Duels, &c., &c.
Americanized California is not old enough to have produced any native citizen
who has attained to gray hairs, the "lean and slippered pantaloon," the sixth
age, and retired from the lists with chaplets of regard for services done to
his State or city, with troops of friends to attend his retiracy and cheer his
remnant of honored life. There are not a few veterans, hoary and beat, who may
be called the early State's "gray fathers," lingering in picturesque old age,
who can relate the whole history of California since the "conquest" as within
their still distinct remembrance. These men came to the coast when the Mexican
Government still held sway over these fair plains, its subjects living in
adobe dwellings, enjoying the bland air, content with the products of a most
generous soil yielding its fruits with the slightest solicitation, lords of a
land in whose bosom was the wealth of the Indies, unconscious of thus much of
the rich heritage that Cortez had given to Spain, incredulous of fortune,
unwearied by labor, secure in their possessions, the outside world as blank to
them as the wide Pacific which washed these peaceful shores. The thousands who
throng our streets and make city and State what they now are, a busy mart of
trade, abounding in all the arts and parts that make thrifty commerce, trade,
manufactures, agriculture, know little of the men and scenes of former days in
this beautiful place, where winter is unknown, where flowers bloom
perpetually, and the "melancholy days" never come as they come to dwellers
under stormy Eastern skies. It is fit and proper that the men who have made
history for California should inscribe their recollections upon the written
page, to be in future times rehearsed by the generations which shall see our
puissant city grown to a metropolis, hamlets become great towns, the
wilderness blooming gardens, mountains covered with palaces and mansions,
plains inhabited by opulent merchants and farmers enriched by labors which
bring luxury and comfort to the "rest of mankind," and fill the land with
plenty;
