Address on the history of California, from the discovery year 1849, delivered before the Society of California P bration of the tenth anniversary of the admission of the into the Union. By Edmund Randolph, esq. San Fra PIONEERS: From the importunities of the active presen we turn for a brief space to the past. To-day we give our And, first, our thoughts are due to those who are not us; whom we meet not on street nor bighway, and welco door of our dwellings; upon whom shines no mcre the su the hills, the plains, the waters of California-to the pio To them, as the laurel to the soldier who falls in the battle f he has paid the price of victory, you will award the h marked by the marvellous creations which have sprung fr terprises. To them you will consecrate a success which ha est of the imaginations which led you forth, both them an ventures. Your companions died that California might you will honor them overmuch. But how died they, and w the dead of the pioneers of California? Old men amongst you will recall the rugged trapper. his soul courageous; his knowledge was of the Indian' game; his wealth and defence, a rifle and a horse; his bed. the mountains. He was slain by the treacherous savage the wigwam of a chief. The wolf and the vulture in the body of this pioneer. A companion, wounded, unarmed, ders out through some rocky canon and lives to recount fortunate in his declining years, to measure, perhaps, his and to number his cattle by the thousand. And the sea, ute; the remorseless waves, amid the terrors of shipwre latter days have closed over the manly form of the nobl sters of the deep have parted amongst them the flesh of dissevered members are floating, suspended now in the vast abysses of the ocean, or roll upon distant strands, playthings tossed by the currents in their wanderings. And here, in San Francisco, exacting commerce has disturbed the last resting place of the pioneers. Ten years and a half ago, pinched by the severities of a most inclement winter, under the leaky tent which gave no shelter, they sickened and died (and then women and children were pioneers, too) by scores, and by hundreds they sickened and died. With friendly hands, which under such disastrous circumstances could minister no relief, you yet did bury them piously in a secluded spot upon the hill-side or in the valley, and, planting a rude cross or board to mark the grave, did hope, perhaps, in a more prosperous day, to replace it with a token in enduring stone. But the hill and the valley alike disappear hourly from our sight. The city marches with tremendous strides. Extending streets and lengthening rows encroach upon the simple burial ground not wisely chosen. The dead give place to the living. And now the builder, with his mortar and his bricks, and the din of his trowel, erects a mansion or store-house for the new citizen upon the same spot where the pioneer was laid and his sorrowing friend dreamed of erecting a tombstone. Meanwhile, by virtue of a municipal order, hirelings have dug up and carted away all that remained of the pioneers, and have deposited them in some common receptacle, where now they are lying an undistinguishable heap of human bones. Pursuing still this sad review, you well remember how, with the eager tide along and up the course of rivers, and over many a stony ascent, you were swept into the heart of the difficult regions of the gold mines; how you there encountered an equal stream pouring in from the east; and, in a summer, all the bars, and flats, and gulches, throughout the length and breadth of that vast tract of hills, were flooded with human life. Into that rich harvest Death put his sickle. Toil to those who had never toiled; toil, the hardest toil, often at once beneath a torrid, blazing sun, and in an icy stream; congestion, typhus, fevers in whatever form most fatal; and the rot of scurvy; drunkenness and violence, despair, suicide, and madness; the desolate cabin; houseless starvation amid snows all these bring back again upon you in a frightful picture many a death-scene of those days. There fell the pioneers who perished from the van of those who first heaved back the bolts that barred the vaulted hills, and poured the millions of the treasures of California upon the world! Wan and emaciated from the door of the tent or cabin where you saw him expire; bloody and mangled from the gambling saloon where you saw him murdered, or the roadside where you found him lying; the corpse you bore to the woods and buried him beneath the trees. But you cannot tell to-day which pine sings the requiem of the pioneer. And some have fallen in battle beneath our country's flag. And longings still unsatisfied led some to renew their adventurous career upon foreign soils. Combating for strangers whose quarrels they espoused, they fell amid the jungles of the tropics and fatted that rank soil there with right precious blood; or, upon the sands of an accursed waste, were bound and slaughtered by inhuman men who lured them with promises and repaid their coming with a most cruel assassination. In the filthy purlieus of a Mexican village swine fed upon all that murder left of honored gentlemen, until the very Indian, with a touch of pity, heaped up the sand upon the festering dead, and gave slight sepulture to our lost pioneers. Though from the first some there were who found in California all they sought; and as they lived so died, surrounded by their children and their newly made friends, and were buried in churchyards with holy rites; and although those more lately stricken repose in well-fenced grounds, guarded by society they planted, and whose ripening power they have witnessed, and are gathered to a sacred stillness, where we too may hope that we shall be received when full soon we sink to our eternal rest. Alas! far diff burial of full many a pioneer. In deeds of loftiest daring of individual man, encounte shocks, too often has parted the spirit of the pioneer, and 1 to nature and the elements. Thus wilds are conquered, an realms are won. Upon his life and death let them reflect who would den full measure of the rights of freemen. For us we behold the river or the rock, the mountain' whatever spot from which his eyes took their last look of lies, one gentle light shining athwart the gathering dark gaze. Guided by that light we will revisit the distant hot neer. In imagination we will there revive the faded rec trepid boy who, in years long past, disappeared in the wild and for a lifetime has been accounted dead. We will rene the grief of the aged father and mother. To the fresh sor wife we pledge the sympathy and love of brothers. To the of our friends we stretch forth our hands in benedictions c ancient friends we too are friends, until with our praises, an of his life, we make to live again in his old peaceful hon wildly. What though, to mournful questioning, we cannot They have a monument-behold the State; and their ins on our hearts. Thus, as is meet, we honor our dead pioneers with sever lections, grateful fancies, and tears not unmanly. With an ourselves to our country. Of populous Christian countries Upper California is amor whole history is embraced within the lifetime of men now 1 one yea s have passed since man of European origin first within the limits of what is now our State, with purpose of tion. Hence all the inhabitants of California have been bu Cortez, about the year 1537, fitted out several small ves huantepec, sailed north and to the head of the Gulf of C that his vessels were provided with everything requisite in the newly discovered region, and transported four hun three hundred negro slaves, which he had assembled for th he imagined by that coast and sea to discover another New and rocks and sterile mountains, a parched and thorny w conqueror of Mexico. He was glad to escape with his li the line which marks our southern boundary. Here we markable event which happened in the same year that Co fruitless attempt. Four persons, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de antes, and a negro named Estevancio, arrived at Culiacan, fornia, from the peninsula of Florida. They were the so hundred Spaniards who landed with Pamfilo Narvaez on for the conquest of that country, in the year 1527. The years among the savages, and had finally found their way The same Nunez was afterwards appointed to conduct the de la Plata, and the first conquests of Paraguay, says our Jesuit Father Miguel Venegas. The viceroy Mendoza, soon after the failure of Cortez expedition, by sea and land, in the same direction, but ac and again in 1542, the same viceroy sent out Juan Rodrig geous Portuguese, with two ships to survey the outwar California. In the latitude of 32 degrees he made a cape himself, I suppose, Cape Engaño, (Deceit ;) in 33 degrees, that of Galera, in 36 degrees, and opposite the last he met with two large islands, where they informed him that at some distance there was a nation who wore clothes. In 37 degrees and a half he had sight of some hills covered with trees, which he called San Martin, as he did also the cape running into the sea at the end of these eminences. Beyond this to 40 degrees the coast lies NE. and SW., and about the 40th degree he saw two mountains covered with snow, and between them a large cape, which, in honor of the viceroy, he called Mendocina. The headland, therefore, according to Venegas, was christened three hundred and eighteen years ago. Cabrillo continued his voyage to the north in midwinter, and reached the 44th degree of latitude on the 10th of March, 1543. From this point he was compelled by want of provisions and the bad condition of his ships to return, and on the 14th of April he entered the harbor of Natividad, from which he had sailed. In 1578, at midsummer, Sir Francis Drake landed upon this coast, only a few miles northward from this Bay of San Francisco, at a bay which still bears his name. Sir Walter Raleigh had not yet sailed on his first voyage to Virginia. It will be interesting to know how things looked in this country at that After telling us how the natives mistook them for gods, and worshipped them, and offered sacrifices to them, much against their will, and how he took possession of the country in the name of Queen Elizabeth, the narrative goes on: "Our necessaire business being ended, our General with his companie travailed up into the countrey to their villiages, where we found heardes of deere by 1,000 in a companie, being most large and fat of bodie. We found the whole countrey to be a warren of a strange kinde of connies, their bodies in bigness as be the Barbarie connies, their heads as the heads of ours, the feet of a Want, (mole,) and the taile of a rat, being of great length; under her chinne on either side a bagge, into the which she gathered her meate, when she hath filled her bellie abroad. The people do eat their bodies and make great accompt of their skinnes, for their king's coat was made out of them. Our General called this countrey Nova Albion, and that for two causes: the one in respect of the white bankes and cliffes which lie toward the sea; and the other because it might have some affinitie with our countrey in name, which sometime was so called. "There is no part of earth here to be taken up, wherein there is not a reasonable quantitie of gold or silver." Every one will at once recognize the burrowing squirrel that still survives to plague the farmer, and who it will be seen is a very ancient inhabitant of the fields he molests; and no one but will dwell upon the words in which he speaks of the gold and silver abounding in this country. Were they but a happy guess in a gold-mad age, a miracle of sagacity, or a veritable prophecy? Before he sailed away, "our General set up a monument of our being there, as also of her Majestie's right and title to the same, viz: a plate nailed upon a faire great poste, whereupon was engraven her Majestie's name, the day and yeare of our arrival there, with the free giving up of the province and people into her Majestre's hands, together with her highness' picture and arms, in a piece of fivepence of current English money under the plate, whereunder was also written the name of our General." These mementoes of his visit and the first recorded landing of the white man There were other expeditions to Lower California and the western coast, after |