Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-09-27
THE PATHFINDER.
Strange Career of the .sConqueror of
California,

Few public men have ever been more
beautifully enveloped in romance than was
the Pathfinder that year, SAYS Josiah Royce
in the Atlantic. His enemies in vain en-
deavored to speak the truly effective word
against him.
Yet neither during the canvass of 1856
nor later, was it necessary thus to resort to
artificial romancing in order to adorn the
character of one whom fortune had per-
sistently made man of maryels. There
was, as an actual fact, his gold mine on the
Mariposa grant. How curious an accident
this, that the "Conqueror of California"
should by chance have purchased, before
the discovery of gold in the territory, the
only Mexican grant that covered any part
of the gold region How wondrous that
this one grant should have contained so
famous a gold mine And yet this was
not mere tale invented by friends, as
were those secrets of the great mind that
for them lay hidden behind the deep eyes;
nor was it one of the ISLANDERS of his foes.
gold mine had fallen to the hero, and,
like all his other wonderful fortunes, it
proited him nothing; so that he has now
died, as he so long lived, a poor man. 1t
was this wonderful caprice about his whole
career, this repeated and unheard of kind
illness of fortune, and yet this eternal fail
ure and abortion OF all his great enter
prises, which made his whole life like
dream to his fellows. 1t was as if char
acter of pure poetry, some Jacques or some
lesser Round Table knight, had escaped
from romance-land, and were wandering
about amongst live men on the earth. AL
ways, as the Odyssean gods show their
airy nature at the moment they vanish,
this fictitious being would bear about with
him, in the real world, signs of his insub-
stantiality. If you tried either business,
or politics, or warfare in his company, he
would at first seem so finely made and gen
uine a live creature that the artful quail
ties Of his purely ideal and manufactured
essence would escape your notice You
would fancy him to be a flesh and blood
man, and great one at that. Only, when
you had once invested in his vast enter
prises, or had intrusted your beloved cause
to his care, erelong he would begin to show
signs, as it were, of vanishing. And, by
and by, after much pulling on your part
as to the sincerity of his purposes and the
true wisdom of his schemes, you would
come to observe that, after all, things never
happened to him as to mortal men, and
that he bore every mark of being a fctiti-
Gus character, a man in play, an entity
of the footlights, purely literary Pigment.
You would then indeed find that you had
invested your money or your trust in vain
in his undertakings. They would come to
naught; while as for HMM what wise
was he to blame? Can a man help it if.
despite all, he is a fiction-a creature es-
capped from book, wandering about in a
real world when he was made for dream
land? Of course he has his character, his
fine qualities, his plans, his hopes, his
thoughts. What Jaques, what Round Ia
BILE knight, has not? Of course, then, he
could talk with you, plan with you, un-
dertake vast things with you, and could
himself accidentally come into possession
oil a gold MAE or play at conquering
provleee. But then, of course, all this
would merely be play, and you could not
hold him responsible for it. Nothing
would come of him in the end. In all his
life he would accomplish absolutely no one
significant thing. A vague and ghostly
industry, ended only by death, would
touch upon and begin a thousand things
during his career of fitting and of failing
but that would be all. He would have
here temporal mission, because his only
true place would be the world of shadows.
He would be subject to no ordinary human
estimate of his qualities in terms of their
visible fruits, because he would bear no
fruits, and his qualities would be those of
romance.