exists. What compensation is left me? The knowledge that our OVERLAND MONTHLY still It has witnessed the departure to "a land beyond the skies" of many a loved contributor; its pages have told in words of sorrow the pain and grief their absence has produced: but we would continue its existence as an old, tried, and true friend, always welcome, and ever certain of a Californian greeting, and you know what that is it is the strong clasp of an earnest man, tempered with the constancy and devotion which are the attributes of a true woman. THE OVERLAND MONTHLY. Yours truly, Success to GEO. C. PERKINS. LETTER FROM HON. HORACE DAVIS. SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 21st, 1882. IRVING M. SCOTT, Esq. My Dear Sir: I am sorry I must decline your kind invitation to dinner, on Friday evening, to celebrate the revival of the OVER LAND. A previous engagement will absolutely forbid my being present. The magazine has my most hearty wishes for its success. There is ample field for a publication of this sort, which shall express the best thought of this coast, and there is every reason why it ought to succeed. It will bring out the best literary talent of this community; its columns will be a medium for the discussion of the great interests, social and national, of our people. It should rank with the Academy of Sciences and public libraries, our Mechanics' Institute and our School of Art, as among the elevating, humanizing influences of a new community; and as such, it deserves a hearty support. Regretting that I cannot be with you, I am, with a renewal of my best wishes for the OVERLAND, Yours very truly, HORACE DAVIS. DR. STILLMAN'S LETTER. MR. IRVING M. SCOTT AND WIFE. Dear Friends: Your kind invitation to me to join you in celebrating the revival of THE OVERLAND MONTHLY reached me last evening, too late to enable me to meet you this afternoon, or even to reach you with my regrets; but it is not too late to serve as a harbinger of spring to our old favorite, THE OVERLAND MONTHLY. May its luck in the future be better than that of "Roaring Camp." Yours, J. D. B. STILLMAN. PROF. HILGARD'S LETTER. HON. IRVING M. SCOTT. Dear Sir: I sincerely regret that the state of my health will not permit me to be present at the dinner in honor of the revival of the OVERLAND. I cannot, however, allow the opportunity to pass without expressing the pleasure it gives me to see that honored name about to take its place once more in the galaxy of American magazines. Having been one of a group of mourners, writes it, our literature-if we may so call it who, in 1875, met at the old editorial rooms in the hope of devising means to prevent grew from gulch to gulch, from cabin to the then impending suspension of the OVER- cabin, from camp to camp, and has made its LAND, I would have been particularly pleased impression upon our minds and manners to join its friends on the present occasion, forever. We need not deny that it is a wild when the rising tide wave of general pros- youth, deserving, in some measure, the digperity promises a brighter future. I have nified big-dog scorn of the "trooly eddicahigh hopes that under its new management ted"; but such as it is, it is our own. Its the magazine will again take its accustomed wild-oats-and what land has wild-oats tall honorable place, not only as the exponent of the best literary culture of the Pacific coast, but as filling a place not now occupied by any other periodical on the great highway between the West and Orient. Very truly yours, E. W. HILGARD. DR. GALLY'S LETTER. The following is part of a letter of regret received from Dr. J. W. Gally, of Watsonville, author of "Big Jack Small," etc.: THURSDAY, Dec. 21st, 1882. TO THE EDITOR OVERLAND. . . . . I am on a lead that brings me particularly to regret that I shall not see and meet what I never have seen or met, viz., a company of literary people assembled to enjoy the fruits of the mind with the food of the body. As an author-if, indeed, I may so call myself I have been always a solitary "prospector," climbing among the ragged foothills in search of the "float" that endless years have shifted, inch at a move, from the far-off summits of purely original thought. I have been endowed or damned (as the estimate may be) with some part of the unflagging faith of the prospector, which, while it looks at the surface soil, believes in the depths of great riches; and climbs, hopefully if often slowly and wearily, toward the height which no mortal among the dead majority or living constituencies has yet reached. . . . . Speaking of marbles reminds me of rocks, and that brings me somehow to remark that the distinctive tone, or flavor, of what may be called Californian literature was born among the rocks; in other words, evolved among the bowlders. No matter who truly as grow in California?—its wild-oats may yet The genesis of this way, in Anglo-Ameri can and New World localities, is a curious of a very rare and excellent fancy; and whatcombination of arrival, survival, and environ- ever else he is not, that is what he is. ment. The initial people of Boston, Mass., None of this is to detract from the merits of Charleston, S. C., and Richmond, Va., were Mr. Harte's romantic sketches. But those of the same era, and all from England; but sketches are imitable-he himself could imihow widely different is the way of each tate them; but neither he nor any one else. of the cities from the other! Cleveland is can imitate some parts of his "Truthful not like Chicago, though both were set- James." In his poems, Mr. Harte is the tled originally by what we call "northern mouthpiece of his environment, and unless people." St. Louis is not like New Orleans, other OVERLAND authors will aim to be the though both were at first French. None of voice of their surroundings, then there is no these cities now have or ever will have the need for an OVERLAND magazine, and, consesame ways. The earliest permanent set- quently, no need of any OVERLAND dinner, tler of an American center of population has nor of this laborious (to the reader) letter of much to answer for. His power is pre-potent. regrets. From him is the hereditary element in the environment. His mark is indelible. There is no way of wiping it out. San Francisco, California, and the whole Pacific slope south of Oregon, has the air of the Argonaut, the manner of the miner, and no power on earth will ever educate us out of it. In this matter the church is hopeless, the University helpless, and "eastern" advice unheeded. We are to fight it out on our own line. When an ancient and honorable Overlander, earlier in our little literary career, before he became famous, built us a poetic, pathetic story upon a soiled foundation, we were slow to applaud, because we somehow felt, as one of our mining ancestors said of a pathetic sermon, that "our parson was pumping for salt"; but our author says that he found the same story promptly applauded by our eastern brothers, and hence our author set us down as "lacking." Yet when he changed his tune, and sang to us about the painful disagreement in the scientific society on the Stanislaus, we not only showed an instant interest in scientific matters, but we opened our hearts to the suffering official, who, under a sickly smile, ceased to be interested in the subsequent proceedings; and when, at last, he exhorted to us about our friend Mr. William Nye and the Heathen Chinee, we shouted like the gods in the gallery. All of which goes to show that we know an original work when we see it. Time will indorse our estimate of Mr. Bret Harte. We put him up for a serio-comico-satirical poet, Yours truly, J. W. GALLY. MR. WILLIAM H. RIDEING'S LETTER. BOSTON, Dec. 26th, 1882. My dear Sir: Many thanks for your kind invitation to the dinner celebrating the "revival." It would have been a pleasure to have attended, but in modern phrase, it is "quite a little journey" from this pivotal city to the jumping-off place; and I like not the country between Ogden and Reno, though one may have supper at Humboldt. However, I hope the OVERLAND will be all over the land, and that its circulation will be limited neither by numbers nor by geographical boundaries. Yours sincerely, WILLIAM H. RIDEING. No one was more missed than Mr. Roman, the founder of the OVERLAND, whose own regrets for his unavoidable absence were most earnest. Mr. John Muir also was one whose absence was felt as a serious deprivation--the more, as the guests had expected to meet him until a telegram at the last moment reversed his previous letter of acceptance and congratulation. Regrets were also received from Dr. Horatio Stebbins, Frances Fuller Victor, C. T. Hopkins, R. E. C. Stearns, Sam Davis, T. H. Rearden, Y. H. Addis, Josephine Clifford, W. C. Morrow, Seddie E. Anderson, Henry Liddell, Evelyn Ludlum, and others. UNIVERSITY CASTFORNI THE OVERLAND MONTHLY. DEVOTED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNTRY. VOL. I. (SECOND SERIES.)-MARCH, 1883.—No. 3. OUR WEST. OUR country has but one true West, and it is with us. Other Wests there have been, notably the great valley of the Mississippi; but the color has faded out of them, and now the sunset glory rests only on the Pacific side of the continent; the evening clouds also, for the Golden Gate is not always golden. What was the West is now the great Interior, as its own inhabitants already call it. Journals published at Chicago are named "Interior," "Inter-Ocean," and the like. An Ohio poet a few years ago entitled his book "Western Windows." It was the last remnant of an expiring terminology, allowable only by poetic license. Chicago and St. Louis, Omaha and even Denver, are as much east as west: west to men on the Atlantic coast, east to those on the Pacific. Beyond us the name cannot go; we are the permanent West. The antithesis from position and distance is greatest here. The East is more curious about this farthest region than about any intervening one. Illinois with its broad prairies, Louisiana with its sugar plantations, Lake Superior with its copper mines, have become an old story. Even the cattle ranges of Texas and the buffalo plains of Wyoming are growing stale. If eastern VOL. I.-:6. travelers set out for a good round American trip, they must see the sage plains and the silver ledges of Nevada; in California, the gold mines and the orange groves, the Yosemite Fall and the Golden Gate; in Oregon, the broad Columbia; and farther north, the sky-piercing peaks of Washington, not to speak of the mighty icebergs of Alaska. Colorado, nearer at hand, has awakened a special interest; but it was that of a State of belated birth, whose mines and mountains were but copies of those on the Pacific coast. Utah is a region by itself, of alien religion and un-American characteristics. With this largest curiosity concerning us. comes also the freest criticism, a sharpness of judgment as of a foreign land. Nay, more: some Atlantic Americans, who affect English manners and feelings, seem to regard San Francisco as much more distant than London, and Californians as fairer critical game than even the Highlanders or the Corkonians. To them, the three thousand miles across their own country are much longer and more dissevering than the same distance measured over the oceanus dissociabilis. is interesting to note some points of this eastern criticism. It 1. Our scenery is criticised. Our moun tains are grand, but not so delicate in outline as the Aiguilles of Mont Blanc, and sadly deficient in glaciers. Our lakes are less beautiful than Leman and Como. The Columbia River is impressive, but not so large as the Mississippi and the Missouri. San Francisco Bay is not so perfect a gem as the Bay of Naples. Our Californian hillsides grow painfully brown in the long, dry summer, and the dust is deep on our high ways. To which California, like her sister Pacific States, modestly answers: "I did not make myself, and do not feel to blame for any little or great defects in my appearance. In the short time that has elapsed since I was made known to your world, painters and poets have found something in me to admire and commemorate; but I do not set myself up for the greatest beauty or the most majestic figure in all the continents. If you like my mountain cañons, stay in them a while, long enough to appreciate them; do not, like most of the Yosemite visitors, run in one day and out the next. Camp in my redwood forests long enough to test the wholesome breezes from the sea. Go to the sea itself, and drink in the salty air that comes purified by ten thousand miles of ocean alchemy. Think, as you look on the ever-breaking waves, of the empires and continents that lie across the expanse. If these things have no interest or charm, if they stir your pulses to no quicker or healthier rhythm, do not, O good critic, heap blame on me for furnishing no more to your jaded curiosity; depart in peace, and sate your longings with the grandeur and beauty you may find elsewhere. Some friendly steps will still turn hither. I have no fear of being left again unknown; through the centuries to come I shall have enough and to spare of true and ardent lovers." And the sister States quietly respond, "So say we all of us." 2. Our climate is criticised. Various reports long ago went abroad that here on the western side of the continent eastern cold was mitigated; that the snow did not lie, on the level, two feet deep in San Francisco, Throughout nor in Astoria and Portland. our State we can grow the Australian eucalyptus, in many places even the Norfolk Island pine. Roses bloom here in the winter, and cattle are not prisoners in the barn. In⚫ our south, tropical fruits flourish as in the eastern Florida. Many men with impaired health found this a sanitarium, even when they slept under the open sky. Such things were written by residents of more or less permanence, sent to eastern friends, printed in eastern journals. They were true records of actual facts. That top much was made of these reports was not the fault of the writers nor of the Californian climate. Especially should California not be blamed for the exaggerations of eastern tourists. Men who were bound to make a good story put an extra touch on ascertained facts. All the grapes were very delicious, all the pears of monstrous size, all the beets and the squashes phenomenal. Every month was balmy, every town salubrious. San Francisco had only wholesome sea breezes; the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys only an invigorating dry heat. Toward the south lay an immense paradise; from Santa Cruz to San Diego the sea-coast and coast hills were all one sanitarium. The foot-hills of the Sierras, and much of the year the summits themselves, were fragrant, exhilarating bowers of bliss. Now, if harm was done by such overdrawn representations, whose fault was it? Certainly, not that of the climate, not that of the people who lived here and went on minding their own business. More than one hotel register has the names of those who wrote themselves "Nordhoff's fools." Mr. Nordhoff may or may not have deserved their anathemas. Certainly, he was not the only or the chief offender in intemperate coloring. The more fools they who could not read between the lines of the tourists' eulogies; who supposed that a veritable Elysium was to be found on this withered old planet. California has done her best in climatic hospitality. She has braced up many a wavering constitution, and wrought some changes that resembled miracles. But her appliances |