On October 10, 1856, about four hundred people were camped in TasajaraValley, California. It could not have been for the prospect, since amore barren, dreary, monotonous, and uninviting landscape neverstretched before human eye; it could not have been for convenience orcontiguity, as the nearest settlement was thirty miles away; it couldnot have been for health or salubrity, as the breath of theague-haunted tules in the outlying Stockton marshes swept through thevalley; it could not have been for space or comfort, for, encamped onan unlimited plain, men and women were huddled together as closely asin an urban tenement-house, without the freedom or decency of ruralisolation; it could not have been for pleasant companionship, asdejection, mental anxiety, tears, and lamentation were the dominantexpression; it was not a hurried flight from present or impendingcalamity, for the camp had been deliberately planned, and for a weekpioneer wagons had been slowly arriving; it was not an irrevocableexodus, for some had already returned to their homes that others mighttake their places. It was simply a religious revival of one or twodenominational sects, known as a "camp-meeting."
A large central tent served for the assembling of the principalcongregation; smaller tents served for prayer-meetings and class-rooms,known to the few unbelievers as "side-shows"; while the actualdwellings of the worshipers were rudely extemporized shanties of boardsand canvas, sometimes mere corrals or inclosures open to the cloudlesssky, or more often the unhitched covered wagon which had brought themthere. The singular resemblance to a circus, already profanelysuggested, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys andhalf-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious withdisappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, andvicious without the excitement of dissipation. For the coarse povertyand brutal economy of the larger arrangements, the dreary panorama ofunlovely and unwholesome domestic details always before the eyes, werehardly exciting to the senses. The circus might have been moredangerous, but scarcely more brutalizing. The actors themselves, hardand aggressive through practical struggles, often warped and twistedwith chronic forms of smaller diseases, or malformed and crippledthrough carelessness and neglect, and restless and uneasy through somevague mental distress and inquietude that they had added to theirburdens, were scarcely amusing performers. The rheumatic Parkinsons,from Green Springs; the ophthalmic Filgees, from Alder Creek; theague-stricken Harneys, from Martinez Bend; and the feeble-limbedSteptons, from Sugar Mill, might, in their combined families, havesuggested a hospital, rather than any other social assemblage. Eventheir companionship, which had little of cheerful fellowship in it,would have been grotesque but for the pathetic instinct of some mutualvague appeal