www.montereycountyweekly.com august 3-9, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 21 The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic missionaries, a place of arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an American capital when the first House of Representatives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the state to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California. Nothing is stranger in that strange state than the rapidity with which the soil has changed hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of their ancient air. The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets, economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to begin or end. The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex. There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat almost all day long playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of the Cornhill illustrations to Mr. Blackmore’s Erema, and see all the characters astride on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, a thing unknown in all the rest of California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding—men always at the hand-gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and decorum. In dress they ran to color , and Indians Author Robert Louis Stevenson spent three-and-a-half months in Monterey in late 1879 as he was recovering from an illness, while also waiting for his future wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne—who was living in Monterey at the time—to finalize her divorce in San Francisco. And though he wasn’t here for long, he left a mark that endures. In 1880, Stevenson wrote an essay about the Monterey Peninsula, “The Old Pacific Capital,” which is broken up into two parts. The first, “The Woods and the Pacific,” was published in the Weekly in June, and describes the natural environs of the area at that time. What follows is Part 2 of the essay, “Mexicans, Americans, and Indians.” It describes the people on the Peninsula, both their cultures and politics. (You can read Part 1 at mcweekly.com.) Except for minor cuts for length, the essay has not been edited—all the words and punctuation are Stevenson’s. As a Scotsman writing in 1880 about non-white people, some of the ways he describes them can make a contemporary reader wince. Language, particularly around race, has rightly evolved with time. Yet the arc of the essay is a strident alarm about social injustice—David Jacks, a fellow Scotsman, is a noted villain—and as a great writer does, Stevenson absorbed the place like a sponge. His observations about how many Californios were cash poor, though once rich with land, are dead accurate: Californios operated largely in a barter economy, predicated on honor, that proved an easy target for cunning businessmen like Jacks. And like in Part 1 of the essay where he had prescient views about wildfires, here too Stevenson has prescient views about tourism. The year he wrote it, 1880, marked the opening of Hotel Del Monte. The Monterey Peninsula would never be the same. -David Schmalz C.W.J. Johnson’s 1880 photo is titled, “The Manuel Casarin Jimeno Adobe with Men on Horses.”
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