I don’t think I’ll ever see places in California the same way after reading this marvelous book, which is a compilation of the letters William H. Brewer wrote to his family back east while he traveled all over the state as part of a surveying commission over 1860-64. He took the position shortly after his young wife and baby died, and while he never alludes to them, there is a spiritual side to his solitude in rugged wilderness areas, sleeping out under the stars, and seeing what must have been extraordinary sights. Part of the fun of the book is in looking up the place names and figuring out where he was, and another is in looking up various references to events or people of the day. It’s tremendously informative about California history, though that’s sometimes difficult to stomach, as I expand on later.

His travels over the state took him to most of its mountain ranges, its desert areas and dry central valley, to the coastline at Monterey teeming with sea life, and down into some of the many mine operations that had drawn so many settlers to the state over the previous couple of decades. He visits towns like Los Angeles then with a population of 4,000 people, ruins of the neglected missions, and the fertile gardens of crops growing in the Santa Clara Valley, now home to Silicon Valley technology companies. He writes of how extremely hot and dry a big portion of the state is, likening the name to Calor (heat) Fornax (furnace), after the Latin. In many places there was a tremendous amount of dust at the time, as he describes 8” along one road, and 2-6” along another, “fine as the liveliest plaster of Paris, impalpable clay, into which the mules sink to the fetlock, raising a cloud out of which you often cannot see.” He also writes of the soaring majesty of the ancient redwoods and sequoias, and the grandeur of places like Yosemite, King’s Canyon, and the Siskiyou mountains.

It’s hard to fathom just how tough he and his companions were. He never boasts about this, but it’s stunning to hear his accounts of their long hikes up mountains through dense chaparral, hauling his 3 foot barometer tube with his as he climbed, often being forced to drink alkaline, dirty water (“the color of weak coffee”), and sleeping without a tent in the rain or in below-freezing temperatures. He sometimes eats raw bacon or tainted, smelly beef. Sometimes they make the noxious water into tea to make it palatable, despite how disgusting this sounds: “To be sure, the water is alkaline and stinks from the droppings of many animals, but made into tea it is drinkable, and we can stand it if those who live here can.”

His hike up Santiago Peak was 15-17 miles, had an elevation gain of 4,469 ft, and was listed as an 8 hour, strenuous hike even today – much less in February, with less insulated clothing, and beating a path through thorny brush. There are times he hikes up narrow trails at “an average incline of 47 degrees” that have mules sometimes tumbling hundreds of feet, and then getting up and plodding on. He awakes in the dark to begin his long trek up Mt. Shasta with his party at 3:30am, enduring icy temperatures with howling winds (some members getting frostbitten fingers), clear symptoms of altitude sickness, and the elevation gain of over 7,000 feet to one of California’s highest peaks, carrying his precious barometer all the way. There are many, many more, including the hike up the mountain in the Sierras that now bears his name, Mt. Brewer, which he was the first to reach the summit of.

This wasn’t a time that had sunscreen, and in one passage he describes the sunburns among the men: “Remond’s nose looks like a strawberry, red and fiery. Hoffman’s is like a well-developed tomato, while Gabb’s nose is today more like the prize beet at an agricultural fair. Skins are red, faces burned, necks more scorched, but I think all will come out right in a little while.” There were squirrels so numerous at the campsite in San Juan Batista that one of his companions killed 7 with one shotgun blast, and another killed 21 in four blasts. More dangerously, tarantulas and rattlesnakes were much more common, and he often mentions having to kill one. Not one to exaggerate, he says this while near the Tulare Lake area:

“The marshy region is unhealthy and infested with mosquitoes in incredible numbers and of unparalleled ferocity. The dry plain on each side abounds in tarantulas by the thousands. These are spiders, living in holes, and of a size that must be seen to be appreciated. I shall try and catch some to send home, but I have seen them where two would cover this page, as they stand, their bodies as large as a half-grown mouse, their hairy legs of proportionate size, their fangs as large as those of a moderate sized rattlesnake. Pleasant companions!”

On one funny and scary occasion he and his buddy roll boulders (“bowlders”) that were 100-400 pounds down a steep hill, which fall at such an incredible velocity that they “whistle like cannon balls,” audible half a mile away. He then went down to get a closer look at them from the side while his companion pushed them down, seeing the massive rocks splintering and leaping high in the air as they bounded perilously close.

There are some extraordinary events that he’s present for, aside from the occasional earthquake, lunar eclipse, and comet that he makes note of. One is the great flood of 1862 that submerged Sacramento for three months and created an inland lake 20-60 miles across and 250-300 miles long, which is still said to be the worst disaster in the state’s history, killing 800,000 cattle and wiping out an estimated 25% of the homes in the entire state. He was in San Francisco at the time and visited Sacramento, and brilliantly describes the devastation. Another is when he takes a cruise into San Francisco Bay around Alcatraz in December 1862, and the captain hits a submerged rock, resulting in a shipwreck and emergency evacuation. That rock was known for a while as Paul Pry rock (after the ship in this incident), but since then has come to be known as Little Alcatraz, seeing as its just 81 yards off its northwest coast. His description of it all, with the scramble of the men and women, is fantastic.

Brewer’s writing is intelligent, factual, and often as observant or wryly humorous as anything you’d see from Mark Twain. Here’s an example at a large picnic gathering where political speeches were made. After describing the scene of people eating he says:

“Then the speeches commenced again. Men and women were seated, and the eloquent speakers told of the horrible designs of the other parties, of their infamous doctrines, of their wonderful inconsistencies, of the scoundrels who were the leaders; and they pathetically told of the cruel persecutions and slanderings their own party had received, of its patriotic leaders and pure principles, of its innocence and the immaculate purity of its office seekers.
I sat and listened for a while, and as I gazed on the scene around I felt sad that so pure a party should not have all the offices, and the scoundrels of the other parties could not all be instantly hung.”

Of the mirages he regularly sees on the hot plains, he says “Science has explained its mystery, but its beauty, its poetry, remains ever the same to me,” and that’s just it about him – he’s is a scientist touched with a poet’s spirit. When he see things, he measures them:

“And such oaks! How I wish you could see them – nearly worthless for timber, but surely the most magnificent trees one could desire to see. I measured the circumference of about thirty, near camp, that were over fifteen feet around three and a half or four feet from the ground – eighteen, nineteen, or twenty feet are not uncommon – with wide branching heads over a hundred feet across – one was seven feet in a diameter with a head a hundred and thirty feet across.”

And yet at the same time, he’s well-read, contemplative, and sees the beauty in the world around him. He mentions both Les Miserables (1862) and Bleak House (1853) among the books he’s reading at different times, and of the camp at night he writes:

“As I sleep less than the rest, and the evenings are getting longer – they go to bed at eight or eight-thirty – I sit in the tent and read until cold, then go out and sit by the fire, warm myself, gaze into its embers and reflect on distant scenes and distant friends, take a quiet smoke (for I smoke in camp), then retire. The brilliant shooting stars, so common in August, have almost ceased – but here the sky is clearer, like our clearest winter’s night, and the stars twinkle as brightly. The oaks are grouped around with their drooping branches, and the stars twinkle through them – while in the southern sky loom up the bold and grand outlines of the majestic old mountain.”

He appreciates his smallness in the grand scheme of things, and the fact that the earth has a long history. He finds massive beds of oysters and sea fossils up on the top of mountains, such as this passage about the Mount Diablo area:

“The whole country is of mountains 2,000 to 3,500 feet in elevation, made by the broken edge of the strata. We saw sections of these strata over a mile in thickness, yet full of shells through their whole thickness. I think the Tertiary rocks of this region are two or three miles thick! Who shall estimate the countless ages that must have elapsed while they were being deposited in that ancient ocean? While these myriads of animals were called into existence, generations lived and died, and at last the species became extinct. Each day reveals new marvels in our labors, teaches us new truths in the world’s history.”

Unfortunately, he’s also got a substantial dose of the cultural biases of the day, and saw Native Americans as primitive, ignorant, ugly, and cowardly people, though to his credit he does say that their aggression to settlers was all instigated because of atrocities committed against them, and that “whites were vastly more to blame than the Indians.” He points out when whites have been mutilated or tortured in retaliation, but does equal service to the genocide that was taking place all around the state, e.g. the massacre at Indian Island in Humboldt Bay in February, 1860, John C. Fremont (who the city and several other things are named after), along with Kit Carson murdering 175 Wintu, and whites also killing 100 Wintu in 1850 by tricking them into a “friendship feast” and poisoning them.

His racism knows no bounds either, as he also casually demeans Mexican and Chinese immigrants. It’s not that he spends an inordinate amount of time on these passages, but his feeling of racial superiority is regularly felt, which is of course unpleasant to encounter. While watching a performance at a Chinese theatre in San Francisco and not understanding which parts are meant to be funny or dramatic, or much else about what he’s seeing, he comments without a shred of introspection that this might be because of his own cultural ignorance and racial bias.

He also sizes up and comments on the appearance of the native women, usually but not always in a negative sense, and even when mentioning one’s beautiful ‘costume’ and moccasins and well-proportioned body, condescendingly says, “her appearance was rather pleasing – that is, she did not excite the feelings of deep disgust that the others did. But she sat down as I passed her, and commenced eating acorns, reminding me of a baboon eating nuts.” Another time he says “some of the squaws were quite pretty, but they had their faces painted in strange ways, often looking absolutely disgusting.” He knows that they styles of red and black paint mean different things among married and single women, but does not try to figure it out.

Perhaps the saddest comment is this: “It has for years been a regular business to steal Indian children and bring them down to the civilized part of the state, even to San Francisco, and sell them – not as slaves, but as servants to be kept as long as possible.” It’s heartbreaking not because he himself engaged in the practice, but because he states it so matter of factly, does not recognize it as horrific, or as a form of slavery.

It’s a work that transports us to the 19th century obviously (and in all of those ways painfully), but there are parts of it that show how things recur. Here is what Brewer says about the polarization America faced that was leading it to war, which is eerily relevant still today:

“I fear the prestige of the American name is passed away, not soon to return. We are doing and reaping as monarchists have often told us we would do – put designing, immoral, wicked, and reckless men in office until they robbed us of our glory, corrupted the masses, and broke us in pieces for their gain.”

It’s intriguing to hear him allude to events like Lincoln’s election and the Civil War which followed, as well as the mix of Union and Secessionist views he encountered along his travels. While over 600,000 soldiers died in that horrific war on the other side of the country, he was off traipsing through the mountains, deserts, and coast of California. Ironically he writes this in October, 1861, not realizing the actual death toll would be a sizable fraction of the figure he tosses out:

“We go again to Mount Diablo tomorrow. I am glad to get in camp – but the season flies – as I lie in my blankets at night and see the Pleiades rising so high in the clear sky I am reminded that winter is at hand – and what a terrible winter for our country – I tremble to think of it. I have been anxious and low spirited much of late over our unhappy troubles – the end looks dark. I would rather see the nation reduced to poverty and a million men perish than see the Union broken – but what will be the end? God only knows, and in Him we must put our trust.”

Fifteen months later, in January, 1863, he writes this upon hearing of the Emancipation Proclamation; those that criticize Lincoln for having written it as he did would do well to see that even at the time, this guy and presumably many others saw it as foundational to something bigger, which indeed it was.

“The Emancipation Proclamation was hailed with gladness by a vast majority of our loyal population. It is looked upon not only as a military necessity, but also as a grand step in civilization, as the great movement to unite the nation again by laying the foundation for the early removal of the grand bone of contention.”

There are so many other little bits here – correctly recognizing the health hazards the use of mercury (“quicksilver”) represented to miners (among other things), the Spanish Land Grant system having put enormous tracks of land in the hands of the few, and alluding to the treaty with Mexico granting California to America as having “guaranteed to the Mexican citizens all the privileges of American citizens on entering this republic.” (Ha!) He mentions the excitement over the intercontinental telegraph being completed, allowing dispatches across the country over 4,500 miles of wire, with a price of dollar of word – or $31/word in today’s currency. His description of the one month long transits to get from one coast to another via an overland passage in Central America (Panama on the way out, Nicaragua on the way back) which begin and end the book are also mind-bending.

It’s a fantastic book if you want a window into the past, and I’d highly recommend it. ( )

Brewer's wonderful account of the 4 years he and colleagues traveled around California mapping the the new state. ( )