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Updated: June 27, 2025
While the pies were baking, a slow process with Dutch ovens, I sat on the wagon-tongue and played the violin by the hour. A rude imitation of the gentler sex, as we had witnessed in dance-halls in Dodge and Ogalalla, was reproduced with open shirt fronts, and amorous advances by the sterner one. The dancing ceased the moment the banquet was ready.
At any rate, the custom arose of making small models in wood or stone or metal of those scenes and objects which were carved in relief on the walls of the chapel, models of houses, granaries, of kitchens, of brickyards; models of herds and servants and soldiers; models of boats and ships; models of dance-halls with the man seated drinking wine, around him musicians, before him dancing girls; models of swords, of vessels, of implements.
Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give an essential picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely local—the cattle and sheep industries, prospecting, the Indians, poker, faro, the dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable embellishment.
The daily prayer- meetings are nothing more than assemblages of religious people from among the higher grades of society, in what were once low dance-halls.
Unknown to me were those dance-halls, public or other, open to any of those thirty thousand women who are permitted to sell themselves in Paris; I had heard of the saturnalia of all ages, of every imaginable orgy, from Babylon to Rome, from the temple of Priapus to the Parc-aux-Cerfs, and I have always seen written on the sill of that door the word, "Pleasure."
Look at May, there, with the brow of a Madonna and the tongue of a gutter-devil. And Myrtle for all the world one of Gainsborough's old English beauties stepped down from the canvas to riot out the century in Dawson's dance-halls. And Laura, there, wouldn't she make a mother? Can't you see the child in the curve of her arm against her breast!
As the sun went down a gray chill fog arose from the river and the lowlying shores and fell down over the little city like a thin wet veil, blurring and softening and reddening the light from the innumerable camp-fires, built under the dark shadows of overhanging trees, and the broad glows coming from canvas houses and tents, lighted from within, and the bright glares that poured through the doors and windows of the more brilliantly illuminated dance-halls and gambling-hells, giving to all a weird and dream-like aspect, fascinating, romantic, and beautiful.
Nevertheless, there is an excellent Marine Y.M.C.A. in Vallejo, with a large membership; but they are in the minority. We saw scores pouring out of the saloons or hanging around their immediate vicinity; scores more that evening coming in or going out of the dance-halls and dens of iniquity and vice. Many were in dreadful stages of intoxication.
Ferguson's remark that an enlarged parish house and a new settlement house might help to keep some of the young women employed in his department store out of the dance-halls interested Hodder, who conceived the idea of a dance-hall of their own.
At seven o'clock that evening I was again with Mrs. Wilson, now attired in her regulation uniform, and at half-past eight we stood in one of the popular dance-halls. Here dancing, drinking, smoking, and gambling were being indulged in by black, white, tan, and mulatto of both sexes. Barring a few exceptions, I have never seen such an array of the inferior type of nationalities.
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