When gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848, it seemed as if most of the world rushed in to California which, until then had been a sparsely-settled outpost of Mexico, dreaming the decades away. The climate was enchantingly mild, Mediterranean warm enough for groves of olive trees and citrus to thrive, and the old missions crumbled away as if nothing had or would ever change. The old, proud Californio families with names like Verdugo, Vasquez, Pico and Vallejo kept vast cattle herds and lived in extensive but rather Spartan-plain estates. There were a few handfuls of American settlers who had come overland, or by sea; they tended to what little trade there was, and an energetic and slightly shady Swiss entrepreneur named Johann Sutter had a vast agricultural and establishment centered around a fortified holding in present-day Sacramento. It was on his property, and in the course of building a saw-mill that gold was discovered. And change came upon the enchanted land and the place called Yerba Buena turned almost overnight from a hamlet of eight hundred souls on the shore of San Francisco Bay into a ramshackle metropolis of 25,000 and more in the space of two years.
Anglosphere
Queen Elizabeth II
Today marks 60 years since she acceded to the throne. Chicagoboyz wish her all the best.
(Video via Helen Szamuely.)
Turning Point
My daughter and I are watching and very much enjoying the period splendors of Downton Abbey
Across the ocean, a message over the wireless…
As the newest Chicago Lass (hardly a boy, last I checked), I want to thank Jon for letting me join in on all the blogging. Briefly, our family moved to Dublin this past August from the United States. That was a blogworthy effort all on its own, with our lives boiled down to 54 boxes on a cargo ship and 27 luggage pieces on a plane (we had a lot of bags to watch over). Of course we also had four kids & Grandma along.
I am not Irish, although I have a name and face that “passes”. Twelve months ago, I could not have distinguished between Croke Park and Bushy Park, told you what potcheen was good for or understood what “Dia duit” meant. Twelve months ago I would have never predicted life would take our family here.
It has been an unusual experience – being an American in a city that is very Irish, very engrossed in Europe – and, dare I say it… very British at times (the truth that dare not speak its name). It is at once engulfed in the past, and yearning for the future. In this small island, the last rugged rock until Newfoundland, I have come to understand things about the United States, about Europe and the UK, and most of all, about Ireland – a land filled with magic and contradiction, with sadness, with laughter, and with fear and hope for what lies ahead. I hope to share these discoveries with you.
With warmest regards,
Your correspondent from Innisfree
To The Lifeboats
Pretty damned ironic, that the Costa Concordia disaster happened almost exactly a hundred years after the Titanic. It’s not all that often these days that a European/American flagged passenger ship becomes a catastrophic loss to their insurance company although it happens with dispiriting frequency to inter-island ferries in the Philippines and hardly any notice of it taken in Western newspapers. The contrasts and ironies just abound; fortunate that the Costa was so close to land that some passengers were able to swim to safety, and that rescue personnel were at the scene almost before the air-bubbles from the sunken half of the ship even popped to the surface.