Autograph Letter Signed. 4pp. To his aunt, probably in NY or Philadelphia:

After 8 years as a missionary in Shanghai, Edward Syle had returned to America, unhappily to accept a new mission in Gold Rush California – to work among Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, but also to spread the Gospel among the city’s polyglot population of white fortune-seekers. He had hated “giving up the tried comforts and advantages of the well ordered East, for the unsettled circumstances and deteriorated morality of this gold-dazzled community in the region beyond the Far West…” In San Francisco, he found "an almost frenzied engrossment in business, alternating with parties and pleasures where lavish expenditure and even mad hilarity keep up the excitement, Sunday Theatres, gambling in name at the Saloons and in fact (under the name of 'Speculation') on Exchange, drinking and all the evils that follow in its train - and, just now, ruin among the Bankers…” (Referring to the  “Black Friday” failure, three weeks before, of the city’s banks – even including Wells Fargo.)

Syle and his wife and children sailed for California in early 1854 aboard the S.S.George Law (later the fabled “Gold treasure” ship that sank in an 1857 hurricane off the coast of North Carolina). He found the California weather “very pleasant” and healthy for the children, but his missionary work in white San Francisco was “trying” and “perplexing” - nothing like his rewarding labors among the “heathen” of China. While his work in San Francisco Chinatown was slowly “maturing”, life in the city was so repugnant that he settled his family across the Bay in ”peaceful” Oakland, where his family was safe and he was “allowed to say his prayers in peace…”  Once a week, he dutifully crossed the Bay in a Ferry Boat to teach an evening class to the Chinese, but, thankfully, “my Sundays are passed here in Oakland”, in a “little parish” he had just organized, which “bids fair to be a prosperous one…” At the start, the Oakland Parish of St. John’s Episcopal Church, had only 7 female (one being Mrs. Syle) and 3 male Communicants; his first baptism was of his own son. Syle was delighted, the following year, to return to China, spending most of the remainder of his life as a missionary there and in Meiji Japan.