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Across The Continent 1877–78
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2011
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In 1877 a thirty-one year old Wesleyan minister was returning, after twelve months at home in England, to the missionary work in China which he had begun in 1868. This time he decided to sail to New York, travel across the continent to San Francisco, and conclude his journey thence by sea. He was the Reverend Thomas Gunn Selby, son of a Nottingham lace manufacturer, and he recorded some of his impressions of the overland route in the journal entries reproduced below. Despite the inevitable brevity of some of his comments, the journal may be of interest to our readers for its first-hand and often graphic account of travel conditions, its reference to places familiar in another light to more recent visitors, the aspects of American religious activities on which it touches, and for many other details that emerge pleasantly ond spontaneously from his writing. This was Mark Twain's America, but not quite as Twain saw it. To Mr. Selby's account I have added only such notes as may clarify for the modem reader some ot his aliusions, but no attempt has been made to identify all the people he met.
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- Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1964
References
1. Thomas Gunn Selby, b. New Radford, Nottingham, 1846; d. Bromley, Kent, 1910. Ed. in private schools in Nottingham and Derby; Wesleyan College, Richmond. Ordained 1867. Sent as missionary to China 1868–1881; also travelled in India, Palestine and Egypt, and three times round the world. Subsequently held ministries in Liverpool, Greenock, Hull and Peckham Rye. Ardent temperance worker and energetic member of the Anti-Opium Society. Politically a Radical and believer in passive resistance. Pubns. include Chinamen at Home, As the Chinese See Us and a life of Christ in Chinese.Google Scholar
2. Mr. Selby had embarked in the ‘Algeria’ on 1st December, calling at Queenstown on the following day. The New York that he saw may be conveniently reconstructed from the illustrations and descriptions in Lamb, Mrs. , Martha J.; History of the City of New York, New York and Chicago, A. S. Barnes & Co., 2 vols., 1877 and 1880. The work was reissued in 1896 in 3 vols. with an additional chapter (LI) by Mrs. Burton Harrison tracing changes in the city since 1880. Many of the following notes draw on these sources and on Wilson, James Grant (ed.): The Memorial History of the City of New-York, New-York History Co., 1892–1893, 4 vols.Google Scholar
3. Pope Pius IX died 7th February 1878. He was of especial significance to Americans, having as recently as 1875 made Archbishop McCloskey the first American Cardinal.Google Scholar
4. Plevna, a small Bulgarian town, had been held by the Turks since July despite the vigorous Russian attacks. The Turks eventually capitulated on 10th December.Google Scholar
5. Mrs. Lamb comments with pride: “With the establishment of the district telegraph system and the introduction of the telephone into general use, New York seems prepared to overcome every inconvenience”. Small wonder that the visitor was taken to see this particular spectacle.Google Scholar
6. Alexander T. Stewart Mrs. Lamb describes as “the great merchant whose colossal fortune was acquired by making trade a study and a science.” He emigrated from Belfast in 1823 aged twenty and began in New York as a schoolteacher. “He soon opened a small store, and at the end of half a century died the richest merchant in the world. His fifty millions balanced the fifty millions of William B. Astor” but Mrs. Lamb is quick to add that much of the Astor money was inherited.Google Scholar
7. The Y.M.C.A., Mrs. Lamb records, “occupies a handsome architectural structure erected in the style of the French Renaissance in Twenty-third Street, corner of Fourth Avenue, in 1869, at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars. The reading-room has some four hundred papers and magazines, and the library twelve thousand wellchosen volumes. It has also a gymnasium, bowling alley, baths, class-rooms, parlors, musical privileges, and a concert hall.”Google Scholar
8. Wilson links the establishment of this in 1857 with the financial depression then prevailing: “As the sufferings of the community deepened, religious impulses became powerful: the Fulton Street prayer-meeting in the North Dutch church began its useful career; crowds filled the lecture room, and a general religious interest spread over the city.”Google Scholar
9. St. Patrick's Cathedral was described by Mrs. Lamb as “the most magnificient ecclesiastical building in the New World”. Projected in 1850, the cathedral had its cornerstone laid in 1858 and although dedicated in 1879 it was still unfinished. Mrs. Lamb quotes two million five hundred thousand dollars as its estimated cost. Mrs. Burton Harrison, in her supplementary chapter, remarks that “the graceful towers have been added to St. Patrick's Cathedral since 1880” so the building Mr. Selby saw was obviously very far from completion. The nave was opened only in that year.Google Scholar
10. Mr. Selby may be alluding to City Hall Park, as the entry for 13th December implies that his hotel was in that area, the fact that he took “a long turn” and the direction of his next walk both suggest that he may have meant Central Park, which had been acquired for the city in 1856. In the depression of 1857 (see note 8) work had been provided for large numbers of unemployed in the development of the area.Google Scholar
11. More properly, Blackwell's Island in the East River, named after the son-in-law of the Captain James Manning involved in the surrender of New York to the Dutch in 1673. Purchased by the city in 1828, it had been developed by the Commissioners of Public Charities and Corrections to house institutions such as a penitentiary, an almshouse, a lunatic asylum and several hospitals. By the late 1870s some nine thousand inmates were accommodated here, and Mr. Selby's interest was no doubt aroused by the magnitude of this charitable scheme. The name was changed in 1921 to Welfare Island. The Queensboro Bridge which now crosses it was not built until 1909.Google Scholar
12. The crossing must have been made, as Whitman made it, by ferry; Brooklyn Bridge, though already under construction, was not completed until 1883.Google Scholar
13. Henry Ward Beecher, 1813–1887, had been minister of the Plymouth Church of Brooklyn since 1847. The church had been rebuilt, after a fire in 1849, in semi-circular form to suit his somewhat histrionic manner, and his congregation averaged about 2,500 weekly. Brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, he was a forceful writer and a leader of anti-slavery thought. When Mr. Selby heard him, Beecher had comparatively recently weathered the storm of scandal associated with his name since 1870 when Theodore Tilton had accused him of improper relations with Mrs. Tilton; a council of Congregational churches in 1876 having declared his innocence. (A public trial had lasted six months and the jury, after nine days' deliberation, had failed to agree on a verdict). “His denunciation of the idea of everlasting punishment”, which Mr. Selby goes on to mention, and his acceptance of the evolutionary theory led him, in 1882, to withdraw from the Association of Congregational Ministers lest his views might embarrass them.Google Scholar
14. Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, is on the site of a battle between British and American forces in 1776. Henry Ward Beecher was buried here in 1887. Mr. Selby's following comment anticipates Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford on “the American way of death.”Google Scholar
15. The heroine of Henry Adams' novel Esther (1884), visiting Niagara at the same time of year as Mr. Selby, was to find herself similarly affected and even wonders (in Chap, ix) “how after listening here, any preacher couid have the confidence to preach again.”Google Scholar
16. Presumably William Logan Harris (1817–1887), bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, professor of chemistry and natural science at Ohio Wesleyan, and subsequently a prominent officer of the Missionary Society, in which connection Mr. Selby had probably heard of him.Google Scholar
17. Possibly Charles Henry Parkhurst (1842–1933), Presbyterian clergyman subsequently famous as an opponent of Tammany and President of the Society for Prevention of Crime.Google Scholar
18. Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–1899), noted evangelist who carried out several campaigns in collaboration with Ira D. Sonkey, in the U.K. as well as in the U.S. In 1858 he had organized the North Market Sabbath School in Chicago, which met over one of the city markets. He persuaded the local merchant John V. Farwell to become its president; when, in 1866, Moody built in Chicago the first Y.M.C.A. building in the U.S. Farwell gave the land for it and it was accordingly named after him.Google Scholar
19. More accurately, Philip Phillips (1834–1895) whose evangelical activities had earned him the name of “the singing pilgrim”. He gave more than 4,000 of these song services during his lifetime, and published a number of volumes of hymns and sacred music. In 1875 he had carried out a singing tour in the Sandwich Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Palestine, Egypt, India and Europe.Google Scholar
20. The Tabernacle, begun in 1863, had been sufficiently near completion to be able to accommodate the General Conference of the Church in October 1867, though the gallery was not added until 1870. The current pamphlet issued by the Temple Square Bureau of Information states that “A pin dropped near the pulpit can be heard distinctly in the opposite end of the auditorium, some 200 feet away”, but claims a seating capacity of only 8,000 (“although many more have been accommodated on occasion”.)Google Scholar
21. Begun in 1853, the Temple took forty years to build and was completed in April, 1893.Google Scholar
22. “Amelia's Palace” was the name popularly given to the house built by Young for Harriet Amelia Folsom whom he had married in 1863; she had refused to share the homes of his other wives and insisted on separate quarters. It was also known as the Guards House.Google Scholar
23. Young had died as recently as 29th August 1877.Google Scholar
24. I am indebted to my colleague, Dr. M.A. Jones, for the following note and also for note 29 below: “The immigration of Chinese labourers into California began shortly after the gold rush of 1848 and assumed sizeable proportions in the 1860s when the Civil War and the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad stimulated the demand for unskilled labour. By the late 1870's perhaps 350,000 Chinese had entered the U.S., most of them settling in the Pacific and Rocky Mountain states. It was of course at Ogden that, in 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad extending from the East had joined up with the Union Pacific from the West, and this may in part explain the prevalence of the Chinese noted there by Mr. Selby.”Google Scholar
25. Presumably a facetious allusion to the popularity of Roughing It (1872) in the West. The journey Twain describes in that book coincides at several points with Mr. Selby's; the differences between their reactions need no elaboration.Google Scholar
26. Assuming that the stage followed roads that still survive it would have gone fourteen miles south-east from Milton and then turned north up what is now State Route 4 through Altaville and Angels Camp to Murphys, a total of thirty five miles from Milton. Copper had been discovered in 1860 at the intersection of the Milton road with Route 4; the grandiose name given to the town that developed here – Copperopolis – is indicative of the expectations of its founders and at first these seemed well justified. During the Civil War, with copper at 55c. a pound, the population soared to over ten thousand and by 1866 six mines were operating. Then the price slumped to 19c., the flush times were over, and Mr. Selby must have seen something like the pathetic little nearghost town that survives today. Certainly he does not seem to have known the scale on which “they had been prospecting” nor to have realised that the railway on which he had travelled from Stockton to Milton had originally been planned to continue on to Copperopolis.Google Scholar
27. In present day terms, he must have driven some fifteen miles further up Route 4 to Calaveras Big Tree State Park.Google Scholar
28. Presumably a slip of the pen for “Tilton” (see note 13). There seems no point and nothing “mischievous” in linking Beecher with Samuel Jones Tilden (1814–1886), Governor of New York.Google Scholar
29. “Ill—feeling toward the Chinese expressed itself from the start. It resulted in their ejection from mining towns and produced sporadic outbursts of violence. The hard times and labour troubles of 1877 caused fresh outbursts of anti-Chinese feeling in San Francisco where Dennis Kearney, the Irish-born labour leader and organizer of the Workingmen's Party of California, led an agitation for Chinese Exclusion. Hostility to the Chinese, whipped up by Kearney in a series of sand-lot demonstrations attended by unemployed workingmen, erupted in the riots of July 1877. Several laundries in San Francisco were wrecked and a number of Chinese were killed. It is to meetings and incidents of this nature that Mr. Selby refers. After further outbreaks of violence against the Chinese in 1880, Congress finally acceded to Pacific coast pressure for restriction by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. See Coolidge, Mary R.: Chinese Immigration (New York, 1909); S.W. Kung, Chinese in American Life (Seattle, Washington, 1962); and especially Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana, Ill. 1939)”(M.A.J.)Google Scholar