DAWN AND THE DONS 98
cultivated and practiced. Indeed, these early Californians were a ceremonious people, and courtesy seemed a part of their nature. The Presidio garrison, with its highly ornamented officers added just the right touch of color to the local picture. There really wasn’t much else for these officers to do.). A mental picture of the California of 1781-1821 is not easily produced. The first and greatest difficulty is the elimination of a century of human progress—the casting out of mind of steam and electric energy, now multifariously applied; of transmission of intelligence by wire and wireless; of swift transportation by land, by sea and through the all-encircling air; of our present familiarity, through frequent and world-wide explorations, with the then hidden places of the earth; and of the multitude of human achievements, now commonplace and not easy of mental effacement, then unknown and unimagined. Without this attitude of mind, however, it will be impossible properly to understand and appreciate the pastoral days of Spanish California. Most important, the imagination must conceive a distant and little known land, where a happy and hospitable people, knowing little of the outer world—and caring less—lived upon nature’s bounteous gifts with a minimum of labor; where a handful of white people, with the emotional and sprightly characteristics of a Latin race, had subjugated and utilized forty times their number of semi-barbarous Indians, who supplied the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for their pale-faced brothers. These Spanish
