"---the recklessness of the state blunts the keener feelings and takes the edge from this calamity."

It is with the poorer classes that this is the worst. Many of the one-story houses are entirely uninhabitable; others, where the floors are above the water are, at best, most wretched places in which to live. The new Capitol is far out in the water—the Governor’s house stands as in a lake—churches, public buildings, private buildings, everything, are wet or in the water. Not a road leading from the city is passable, business is at a dead standstill, everything looks forlorn and wretched. Many houses have partially toppled over; some have been carried from their foundations, several streets (now avenues of water) are blocked up with houses that have floated in them, dead animals lie about here and there—a dreadful picture. I don’t think the city will ever rise from the shock, I don’t see how it can. Yet it has a brighter side. No people can so stand calamity as this people. They are used to it. Everyone is familiar with the history of fortunes quickly made and as quickly lost. It seems here more than elsewhere the natural order of things. I might say, indeed, that the recklessness of the state blunts the keener feelings and takes the edge from this calamity."

end partial quote from:
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/up_and_down_california/3-1.html

Californians in general still have this quality of surviving no matter what happens today. I first noticed this "Controlled Chaos" attitude in 1952 when I moved to San Diego from Seattle when I was 4 years old. The biggest difference was that in California it didn't rain and snow all the time and it was much warmer so people walked around in shorts, there was a definite Mexican influence in food especially, and people generally acted in completely different ways than they had in Seattle. For example, in Seattle I had been trained even at 4 years of age to be very polite in how I dealt with people. My parents, being at the time part time ministers had taught me how to behave. Then two years later when we moved to Tujunga in the Los Angeles area and they were put in charge of a church in downtown Los Angeles I was prepared more to deal with 1000 or more members of our church, (even though about 300 of them died in the next 6 years and my mother gave their funerals and Memorials as the minister of our church that did this.

So, I guess what I'm saying is what an easterner would consider in the 1860s as recklessness, is just what it has always taken to survive in California ever since the Gold Rush because "Go West Young Man" meant to go west and you couldn't go any further west and still be in the U.S. in the 1800s.