In 1854 and 1855 San Francisco had a monthly magazine that any city or state might have been proud of; this was The Pioneer, edited by the Rev. Ferdinand C. Ewer.  In 1851, a lady, the wife of a physician, went with her husband into the mines and settled at Rich Bar and Indian Bar, two neighboring camps on the north fork of the Feather River.  There were but three or four other women in that part of the country, and one of these died.  This lady wrote frequent and lengthy descriptive letters to a sister in New England, and these letters were afterward published serially in The Pioneer.  They picture life as a highly-accomplished woman knew it in the camps and among the people whom Bret Harte has immortalized.  She called herself “Dame Shirley,” and the “Shirley Letters” in The Pioneer are the most picturesque, vivid, and valuable record of life in a California mining camp that I know of.  The wonder is that they have never been collected and published in book form; for they have become a part of the history of the development of the State.

The life of a later period in San Francisco and Monterey has been faithfully depicted by another hand.  The life that was a mixture of Gringo and diluted Castilian—­a life that smacked of the presidio and the hacienda,—­that was a tale worth telling; and no one has told it so freely, so fully or so well as Gertrude Franklin Atherton.

“Dame Shirley” was Mrs. L.A.C.  Clapp.  When her husband died she went to San Francisco and became a teacher in the Union Street public school.  It was this admirable lady who made literature my first love; and to her tender mercies I confided my maiden efforts in the art of composition.  She readily forgave me then, and was the very first to offer me encouragement; and from that hour to this she has been my faithful friend and unfailing correspondent.

South Park and Rincon Hill!  Do the native sons of the golden West ever recall those names and think what dignity they once conferred upon the favored few who basked in the sunshine of their prosperity?  South Park, with its line of omnibuses running across the city to North Beach; its long, narrow oval, filled with dusty foliage and offering a very weak apology for a park; its two rows of houses with, a formal air, all looking very much alike, and all evidently feeling their importance.  There were young people’s “parties” in those days, and the height of felicity was to be invited to them.  As a height o’ertops a hollow, so Rincon Hill looked down upon South Park.  There was more elbow-room on the breezy height; not that the height was so high or so broad, but it was breezy; and there was room for the breeze to blow over gardens that spread about the detached houses their wealth of color and perfume.