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Show ,, , 1 A REMEMBRANCE. J The McClatchey's of the Sacremento Bee have 1 erected a beautiful new building for their journal j and have issued a stately semi-memorial edition in honor of their father, James McClatchey, who (j founded the Bee forty-six years ago. A good ' many old time Californians supplied articles for this edition and to glance over its pages all "the old burial places of memory give up their dead." ; James McClathey's life supplies an inspiration for iall young Americans who have a life work before them, a name to create, a character to establish. He was born in County Antrim, Ireland in 1824. Ho reached America when eighteen years of age, ! he got to know Horace Greely well and by his j advice joined the rush for California. Stranded ' at Panama he and a fow others chartered a tub of j a schooner and began to work their way north- I ward and thirty-four days later, being short of 1 1 , food and water, came to land one hundred miles north of Cape St. Lucas. There most of the voyagers voy-agers went ashore and started for California on foot. They suffered everything but death, but i finally reached San Diego. When rested a little ." McClatchey tried mining with little success, then finally drifted to Sacramento. He worked on varl- j i ous journals there until 1857 when he founded the , y Bee. The sufferings he was subjected to in youth . made him believe that the lands of the earth like the water and the sunlight were God's gifts to all the world's people; hence from the beginning he j fought all monopolies, especially in land, and he was the inspiration of Henry George, the one who instilled in his mind the "single tax" doctrine. Irish-born, but intensely American, and withal, so fearless and independent that the arrogance $ of the power which ruled California in the late I fifties kept his soul on fire, he, when the probabil ity of the Civil War became a certainty, made his journal become every day a trumpet call for the Union. The war over he insisted that the hydraulic mining which was filling all the rivers with debris and threatening the destruction of San Francisco harbor should cease, and he fought until he ) triumphed. He was the father of the anti-fence law of California and so fought on and on against abuses and wrongs until 1883 when he died. He gave a little of his life to James McClatchey, the most of it to his fellow-men and followed the right as God gave him to see the right to the end. Over the entrance of the new Bee building are embossed em-bossed these words: "And the sons builded a house to their father's name." And so the house is the visible monument to the strong man who wore out his life there, but ho has a better monument in the record of the work he performed for his adopted state and nation na-tion and for the world's poor. But those were strenuous old days, during the last of the fifties and the early sixties, when the gathered anger of years began to exhaust itself; when Broderick and Ferguson were killed; when , Baker was assailed with stale eggs, when the 1 champions of the cause that the gods had decreed fl' should be destroyed were first made mad, and there was at best but an armed truce between the north-men and the south-men on the west coast. It is a wonder of the earth that the war was not precipitated there. Had it been, it would have been prosecuted with a bitterness and fierceness fierce-ness unparalleled. In those days James McClatchey Mc-Clatchey did his best work and because of his work in part at least, California is the loveliest of states and her people have forgotten all the animosities an-imosities of the long ago. |