36B. FARNHAM, Thomas J[efferson]. Pictorial Edition!! Life, Adventures, and Travels in California...to Which Are Added the Conquest of California, Travels in Oregon. New York: Sheldon, Blakeman & Co., 1857. iv [5]-448 [451]-466 [467]-468 pp. (complete), frontispiece, 43 text illustrations (all full-page). Thick 8vo, original brown blindstamped cloth with embossed gilt and red design with bears on upper and lower covers, spine gilt-decorated. Moderate shelf wear, corners bumped and frayed, mild to moderate foxing (mainly confined to preliminary and terminal leaves), generally a very good, tight copy in an unusual binding. Front pastedown with bookplate of Jennie A. Crocker and contemporary ink ownership stamp of N. Poland of San Francisco on front free endpaper.
          Yet another version of the oft-reprinted Pictorial Edition.       ($100-200)

Thomas Jefferson Farnham, an experienced traveler and entertaining writer, presented an important overview of Mexican California at a time of tremendous political instability and heightened covetousness by the expansionist-minded United States. Earlier, he had traveled to Oregon and to the Sandwich Islands before arriving in California in April 1841. The New England adventurer and lawyer toured the principal settlements of Upper California and wrote in the most glowing terms of its potential. Farnham saw in California a verdant land that was ripe for the plucking, a land waiting to be developed by a go-ahead, industrious people. His words on the beauty and prospects of California would have pleased the railroad boomers of the 1880s:
          “California is an incomparable wilderness. This is a wilderness of groves and lawns, broken by deep and rich ravines, separated from each other by broad and wild wastes. Along the ocean is a world of vegetable beauty; on the sides of the mountains are the mightiest trees of the earth; on the heights are the eternal snows, lighted by volcanic fires” (p. 117). Later he wrote, “It may be confidently asserted that no country in the world possesses so fine a climate coupled with so productive a soil as the sea board portion of the Californias” (p. 344).
          In contrast to California’s natural gifts, Farnham had much less enthusiasm for its residents noting that “its miserable people live unconscious of these things.” He reinforced Dana’s (q.v.) highly prejudicial stereotype of a sleepy, mañana-oriented people in a state of eternal bliss who failed to grasp the enormous opportunity of California.
          Farnham, as so many other writers of his era, diluted much of his text with a generalized, lackluster history of the Californias based on earlier, well-known accounts. However, when writing about what he actually saw, this gifted observer excelled. He presented a superb synopsis of California’s geography, climate, cattle, crops, missions, presidios, harbors, and Indians. Sifting through his acrid contempt of the Hispanics, his reading audience gained an interesting glimpse of the Californio economy, amusements, and government. He predicted that “the grape will undoubtedly be the great staple product of the Californias.” Such effusive pictures of this Eden-like land no doubt attracted future waves of settlers from the United States.
          Much of Farnham’s negative view of the Californios was tainted by poor timing. Leaving Hawaii on board the Don Quixote, he arrived in Monterey on April 18, 1840, at a time when the province was in a state of political turmoil culminating in what became known as the “Graham Affair.” He immediately met U.S. counsel Thomas Oliver Larkin and learned that over 150 Americans and Britons were “starving and thirsting in the prisons of the town, and destined to be sacrifice to Spanish malignity.” California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado, he discovered, had imprisoned Isaac Graham and his band of roughnecks, charging them with plotting to overthrow the government. Farnham intervened and claimed credit for having gained the release of many of these prisoners. This direct experience with the local government, combined with his inherent New England suspicion of things Hispanic, poisoned his view of the Californios. He condemned them in the strongest possible terms using phrases like “worthless rabble of bastards” and “a blight of idiocy.”
          Years later, when Bancroft consulted Farnham’s book in writing his History of California, the historian doubted his account of the Graham Affair and did not much care for Farnham’s opinions, especially when it came to the Californios. Bancroft in his Pioneer Register wrote, “Farnham was a lawyer of some ability, and a writer of somewhat fertile imagination. It must suffice to say that in all those parts resting on his own observation it is worthless trash, and in all that relates to the Californian people a tissue of falsehoods.” In the narrative text in his History of California, Bancroft said that Farnham had a “hatred and contempt for all that was Californian.” Bancroft did, however, make one concession by complimenting him on his writing saying that he had “an attractive way of expressing his ideas.”
          With the discovery of gold in 1848, Farnham’s work assumed even more popularity and new and expanded pictorial editions were published. Farnham died in San Francisco in 1848. He was survived by his wife, Eliza, and their three children. Eliza, a pioneer feminist, went on to become an even more famous person of letters, writing one of the most important books of the Gold Rush and 1850s, California Indoors and Out (1856).

——Gary F. Kurutz

Additional sources consulted: Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California (San Francisco: The History Company, 1886), vol. 4, pp. 25, 156-57 and vol. 3, p. 734; Biographical Files, California State Library; Robert Glass Cleland, A History of California: The American Period (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939), pp. 98-99.