William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

The absence of White women at San Diego and San Carlos, was the chief, if not the only, reason for the waste and failure of the first White Conquest on the Slope. If Don Rivera had allowed each of his troopers to bring an Andalusian wife to Monterey, the first people in California would have been Spanish, Catholic and civilized, instead of being mongrel, pagan, and semi-savage. If the Yankee Boys and Sydney Ducks had brought American and English wives to San Francisco, there would have been less drinking, shooting, suicide, and divorce in that delightful city of the Golden Gate. If the trapper and the miner in the Rocky Mountains, could obtain their natural mates, there would be no Jem Bakers, living in cabins with five or six squaws a piece, provoking Shoshones to attack White ranches and Cheyennes to steal White women from the emigrant trains. If America stood in her natural order as regards the sexes, there would be an end of buying and selling Indian girls, and the irruption of an Asiatic horde of female slaves would be less appalling to the moral sense.