to Californians, also delved into the earth at this historic spot, which is now, in railroad "literature," called "Rich." Like many another California clipped place-name, the new name has not the glamour of the old, which, in the words of Shirley, was "a most taking name."
In closing this Foreword, the printer desires to emphasize the fact that the typesetting and presswork of this book are entirely his own work. No one acquainted with the methods employed in a legitimate book-printing house will fail to recognize the fact that it is well nigh impossible to print a book without possession of the minute technical knowledge essential in each department. Hence the most skillful book-printer is distrustful of himself, unless supported by experienced craftsmen, and more especially by time-tried proof-readers. For many favors extended while the Letters were in press, thanks are due, and are now acknowledged, to Milton J. Ferguson, the librarian of the State Library at Sacramento, California, who was never-failing in either service or patience.
Dame Shirley, the Writer of these Letters
An Appreciation
Being a Paper prepared by Mrs. Mary Viola Tingley Lawrence to be read before a San Francisco literary society on Mrs. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (Dame Shirley)
The Shirley Letters, written in the pioneer days of 1851 and 1852, were hailed throughout the country as the first-born of California literature. Mrs. Clappe, their author, was the one woman who depicted that era of romantic life, dipping her pen into a rich personal experience, and writing with a clarity and beauty born of an alert comprehensive mind and a rare sense of refinement and character.
The Letters had been written to a loved sister in the East, but Ferdinand C. Ewer, a littérateur of San Francisco, a close friend, fell upon them by chance, and, realizing their historic value, urged that they be published in the Pioneer, of which he was editor. These Shirley Letters, thus published, brought the new West to the wondering East, and showed to those who had not made the venture, the courage, the fervor, the beauty, the great-heartedness, that made up life in the new El Dorado. Shirley's sympathetic Interpretation of their tumultuous experience cheered the Argonauts by throwing before their eyes the drama in which they were unconsciously the swash-buckling, the tragic, or the romantic actors, and helped to crystallize the growing love for the new land, which love turned fortune and adventure seekers into home-makers and empire-builders.
This quickly recognized author became the leader of the first salon the Golden West ever knew, and one of the foremost influences in California's social and intellectual life, by force of a high intelligence and a heart and soul that were a noble woman's.
Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe came to light in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1819. Her father, Moses Smith, was a man of high scholarly attainment, and by her mother, Lois Lee, she could claim an equally gifted ancestry, and a close kinship with Julia Ward Howe. As a young girl, together with several brothers and sisters, she was left parentless, but there was a comfortable estate, and a faithful guardian, the Hon. Osman Baker, a Member of Congress I believe, who saw to it that they received the very best mental and physical training. Shirley was educated at Amherst and Charlestown, Massachusetts, and at Amherst was the family home.
At that day the epistolary art was a finished accomplishment, and in childhood she evidenced a ready use of the quill pen. Later on, she maintained correspondence with brilliant minds, who challenged her to her best. At the same time she was pursuing her English studies, to which were added French, German, and Italian. She had but little time for the trivial social amenities, but her frequent missives from her relatives, the Lees and Wards of New York City and Boston, and her enjoyable visits to their gay homes, broke the strain of mental grind, and kept her in touch with the fashionable world. Her communications in the forties disclose a relation to men and women of culture, whose letters are colorful of people, places, and events, and through them we reach an intimate inside of her own self. Those faded, musty-smelling epistles, with pressed flowers, from an old attic, reveal a rich kind of distinct and charming personalities.
Shirley, small, fair, and golden-haired, was not physically strong, and her careful guardian often ordered a change of climate. Sometimes she sojourned in the South. In her migrations she might employ a carriage, or venture on a canal-boat, but usually the stage-coach carried her. It was on one of those bits of travel that she met Mr. A. H. Everett of Massachusetts, a brother of Edward Everett, a noted author, and popular throughout the country as a lecturer. He had been chargé d'affaires in the Netherlands, and minister to Spain. An intimate relationship, chiefly by correspondence, was established between this gifted girl and this brilliant gentleman. His long letters from Louisiana sometimes were written wholly in French. From Washington, D.C., he writes that the mission of United States minister to a foreign court has been offered him, but it fails to tempt him away from his life of letters. However, later on, it comes about that he accepts the mission of United States commissioner to the more alluring China, and his long letters to her from there, as they had been from other foreign lands, were most entertaining. This rare man grows to be very fond of his young and brilliant correspondent, and signs himself, "Yours faithfully and affectionately." But he was well on in years, and she looks upon him more as a father than as a suitor, and he so understands it. He commits himself enough to say how much it would be to him to have her near him as an attachée, and when she hints of her engagement to a young physician, he jealously begs to know every detail concerning the happy man.
Shirley married Dr. Fayette Clappe, and in 1849, with the spirit of romance and the fire of enthusiasm, the joyful young Argonauts set sail for California in the good ship Manilla.
They found the primitive San Francisco enthralling, but a fire swept away the new city, and tent-life was accepted as one of many picturesque experiences. Soon, however, the Doctor's shingle was again hung out.
Quickly buildings went up, and the little lady with golden curls to her waist went about, jostling the motley crowd of people, and finding concern in the active city front, in the gaudy shops, and in the open faro-banks with their exposed piles of nuggets and bags of gold-dust freshly dug from the earth.
There was the ever-beckoning to the hills of treasure, with their extravagant stories of adventure, but the professional man was anchored in the more prosy city, and buckled down to a commonplace existence. The exhilarating ozone from the ocean, the wind blowing over the vast area of sand, the red-flannel-shirted miner recklessly dumping out sacks of gold-dust with which to pay his board-bill or to buy a pair of boots, with maybe a nugget for Dr. Clappe when he eased a trivial pain—all these thrills were calls to the gold-filled Mother Earth. Finally, Dr. Clappe's ill-health drove him to the Feather River—a high altitude, fifty miles from the summit of the Sierra Nevada, and the highest point of gold-diggings. There he soon recovered, and to her joy he wrote his wife to join him. And she had varying experiences in transit to the prospective home, which was at Rich Bar—rich indeed, where a miner unearthed thirty-three pounds of gold in eight days, and others panned out fifteen hundred dollars in one wash of dirt.
The sojourn at the gold-camp in the summers and winters of 1851 and 1852, with its tremendous and varied incidents and experiences, was a compelling call to Shirley's facile pen. Here was her mine. Out of her brain, out of her soul, out of her heart of gold, out of her wealth of understanding of and love for her fellow-men, gratefully sprang those Shirley Letters that have enriched the field of letters, and, reaching beyond the grasp of worldly gain, have set her enduringly in the hearts of mankind.
Who can tell how far-reaching and inspiring were those illuminating pages, those vividly depicted scenes enacted on the crowded stages of the golden-lined bars of the famous Feather River! Bret Harte reads her graphic and pathetic account of the fallen woman and the desperate men being driven out of camp, and lo! we have the gripping tale of The Outcasts of Poker Flat; and from another of her recitals came the inspiration that set him to work on that entertaining story, The Luck of Roaring Camp. And her incidental mention of the pet frog hopping on the bar of the hotel,