ILLUSTRATED

SAN FRANCISCO
PRINTED _by_ THOMAS C. RUSSELL, _at his_ PRIVATE PRESS
1734 NINETEENTH AVENUE
1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922
BY THOMAS C. RUSSELL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_The_ Printer's Foreword _to this_ Edition

I SPEAK TO THE READER; LET THE WRITER LISTEN

Oriental Proverb (_adapted_)

CALIFORNIA, by Dr. Josiah Royce, in the handsome as well as handy
American Commonwealths series, is commonly regarded as the best short
history of California ever written, and particularly so as to the early
mining era. Dr. Royce knew his state, and a more competent writer could
hardly have been selected. Reviewing, in his history, almost everything
accessible, worthy of consideration, in connection with mining-camps,
it is noteworthy that the Doctor has much to say concerning the Shirley
Letters. Thus (p. 344),--

Fortune has preserved to us from the pen of a very intelligent
woman, who writes under an assumed name, a marvelously skillful and
undoubtedly truthful history of a mining community during a brief
period, first of cheerful prosperity, and then of decay and
disorder. The wife of a physician, and herself a well-educated New
England woman, "Dame Shirley," as she chooses to call herself, was
the right kind of witness to describe for us the social life of a
mining camp from actual experience. This she did in the form of
letters written on the spot to her own sister, and collected for
publication some two or three years later. Once for all, allowing
for the artistic defects inevitable in a disconnected series of
private letters, these "Shirley" letters form the best account of
an early mining camp that is known to me. For our real insight into
the mining life as it was, they are, of course, infinitely more
helpful to us than the perverse romanticism of a thousand such
tales as Mr. Bret Harte's, tales that, as the world knows, were not
the result of any personal experience of really primitive
conditions.

And in a foot-note on page 345 the Doctor says, in part,--

She is quite unconscious of the far-reaching moral and social
significance of much that she describes. Many of the incidents