The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 | Page 9

Dame Shirley, the Writer of these Letters
An Appreciation
BEING a PAPER prepared by MRS. MARY VIOLA TINGLEY
LAWRENCE to be read before a SAN FRANCISCO literary society
on MRS. LOUISE AMELIA KNAPP SMITH CLAPPE (DAME
SHIRLEY)
The Shirley Letters, written in the pioneer days of 1851 and 1852, were
hailed throughout the country as the first-born of California literature.
Mrs. Clappe, their author, was the one woman who depicted that era of
romantic life, dipping her pen into a rich personal experience, and

writing with a clarity and beauty born of an alert comprehensive mind
and a rare sense of refinement and character.
The Letters had been written to a loved sister in the East, but Ferdinand
C. Ewer, a littérateur of San Francisco, a close friend, fell upon them
by chance, and, realizing their historic value, urged that they be
published in the Pioneer, of which he was editor. These Shirley Letters,
thus published, brought the new West to the wondering East, and
showed to those who had not made the venture, the courage, the fervor,
the beauty, the great-heartedness, that made up life in the new El
Dorado. Shirley's sympathetic Interpretation of their tumultuous
experience cheered the Argonauts by throwing before their eyes the
drama in which they were unconsciously the swash-buckling, the tragic,
or the romantic actors, and helped to crystallize the growing love for
the new land, which love turned fortune and adventure seekers into
home-makers and empire-builders.
This quickly recognized author became the leader of the first salon the
Golden West ever knew, and one of the foremost influences in
California's social and intellectual life, by force of a high intelligence
and a heart and soul that were a noble woman's.
Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe came to light in Elizabeth, New
Jersey, in 1819. Her father, Moses Smith, was a man of high scholarly
attainment, and by her mother, Lois Lee, she could claim an equally
gifted ancestry, and a close kinship with Julia Ward Howe. As a young
girl, together with several brothers and sisters, she was left parentless,
but there was a comfortable estate, and a faithful guardian, the Hon.
Osman Baker, a Member of Congress I believe, who saw to it that they
received the very best mental and physical training. Shirley was
educated at Amherst and Charlestown, Massachusetts, and at Amherst
was the family home.
At that day the epistolary art was a finished accomplishment, and in
childhood she evidenced a ready use of the quill pen. Later on, she
maintained correspondence with brilliant minds, who challenged her to
her best. At the same time she was pursuing her English studies, to
which were added French, German, and Italian. She had but little time

for the trivial social amenities, but her frequent missives from her
relatives, the Lees and Wards of New York City and Boston, and her
enjoyable visits to their gay homes, broke the strain of mental grind,
and kept her in touch with the fashionable world. Her communications
in the forties disclose a relation to men and women of culture, whose
letters are colorful of people, places, and events, and through them we
reach an intimate inside of her own self. Those faded, musty-smelling
epistles, with pressed flowers, from an old attic, reveal a rich kind of
distinct and charming personalities.
Shirley, small, fair, and golden-haired, was not physically strong, and
her careful guardian often ordered a change of climate. Sometimes she
sojourned in the South. In her migrations she might employ a carriage,
or venture on a canal-boat, but usually the stage-coach carried her. It
was on one of those bits of travel that she met Mr. A. H. Everett of
Massachusetts, a brother of Edward Everett, a noted author, and
popular throughout the country as a lecturer. He had been chargé
d'affaires in the Netherlands, and minister to Spain. An intimate
relationship, chiefly by correspondence, was established between this
gifted girl and this brilliant gentleman. His long letters from Louisiana
sometimes were written wholly in French. From Washington, D.C., he
writes that the mission of United States minister to a foreign court has
been offered him, but it fails to tempt him away from his life of letters.
However, later on, it comes about that he accepts the mission of United
States commissioner to the more alluring China, and his long letters to
her from there, as they had been from other foreign lands, were most
entertaining. This rare man grows to be very fond of his young and
brilliant correspondent, and signs himself, "Yours faithfully and
affectionately." But he was well on in years, and she looks upon him
more as a father than as a suitor, and he so understands it. He commits
himself enough to say how much it would be to him